Some 70% of all Windows shipments will be the new network enabled Workgroup version according to David Smith, Microsoft’s UK Systems marketing manager. Speaking at the official launch of Windows for Workgroups, Smith said that over the next couple of years the much talked-about Windows NT would win only about 20% of sales with regular Windows picking up the remainder. This relegation of stand-alone Windows to a niche looks plausible given the pricing strategy that the company has come up with existing Windows 3.1 users can pick up the upgrade pack for ?70 and the company claims that 30 personal computer manufacturers are offering to pre-install it. As one wag remarked at the press launch ‘there’s nothing like giving it away to achieve market share.’ Users starting from scratch, without Windows, can get the entire package for a rather more hefty recommended price ?150, but Smith says that he expects the package to turn up on the street for less than ?100. The dispute over whether Microsoft is licensed to use Novell Inc’s NetWare client software continues, but yes, Windows for Workgroups will ship with NetWare communications built in.

Temerity

In fact the inevitable Microsoft briefing document has the temerity to describe the product as the best client operating system for NetWare – which irks Novell technical marketing manager Graham Allen, who points out that Novell didn’t even get a beta copy of the software to test. At the desktop, Novell itself has signally failed to capitalise on its purchase of Digital Research – there is little, if anything new in DR DOS to make it alluring for the network user and the company’s expressed strategy of integrating its NetWare Lite peer-to-peer network operating system into the DR DOS desktop remains just that: a strategy. Allen last week denied the popular story that NetWare Lite will be incorporated into the client end of NetWare 4.0 due out early next year. Instead, all he could say is that the merging of DR DOS and NetWare Lite would take place some time in 1993 and that a substantive strategy would emerge from the desktop strategy group during the first quarter of next year. By contrast, Microsoft says that MS-DOS 6, due out in the first quarter of next year will have a Windows for Workgroups (and by extension LAN Manager) client built in so that they will be able to access information held on Windows for Workgroup machines. Even now MS-DOS users can fork out ?55 and get the client end software. MS-DOS users cannot themselves publish information on the network, but they can grab it off Windows servers, and once this is a standard part of MS-DOS this could cause a dent in the fortunes of both LANtastic and NetWare Lite, despite Microsoft’s assertion that this is not a LANtastic killer. Overall Microsoft’s marketing strategy looks intelligent – it has even changed the way that LAN Manager 2.2 is sold in order that the two products can feed off each other. Hitherto LAN Manager has been sold conventionally on a licence-per-user basis, but now that is being scrapped in favour of a ?1,600 per-server charge. Then all the network manager has to do is buy new clients as required. There are no prizes for guessing which client Microsoft recommends. The software ships with scheduling and mail software. Electronic mail is provided through a cut-down version of Microsoft Mail. It’s not actually that cut down – most features are left intact other than the Message Transfer Agent and, less understandably, the spelling checker. Taking the Message Transfer Agent out means that mail can be sent only to other users in the same workgroup.

By Chris Rose

For enterprise-wide and dial-in communications, the company offers a mail extender package for ?345 which turns one of the Windows for Workgroups machines into a gateway. However this package is not ready to ship yet. The same gateway also extends the reach of the Scheduler distributed diary. Among the companies that immediately trooped in behind Microsoft was Banyan Systems Inc, which announced that Vines 4.11 and 5.0 clients will be able to

interwork seamlessly with Workgroups for Windows by the end of the year. A heap of companies have also come in with third party add-ons. Shiva Corp, for example has come out with NetModem/E for Windows for Workgroups, a dedicated hardware device that plugs into the local net and a phone line to give users access to all the Windows for Workgroups facilities. In fact, it uses the same hardware as its existing NetModem/E, but with software designed to communicate via standard NetBEUI packets. One of the most immediately useful applications has been launched by Nuko Information Systems Inc, which has what it says is the first fax/modem sharing software for the new operating system. Message Port/WfW enables users to share fax/data modems attached to any of the machines on the network. The software first recognises all the attached modems, then initialises each one and assigns user security rights. The Miltpitas, California company says that the software provides a true WYSIWYG environment for sending facsimile messages. Users can send facsimile messages instantly or set up the message for later delivery just as easily as picking a document for printing. Incoming faxes are automatically routed to a designated facsimile administrator or directly to a network printer. Priced at $200 per network licence, Message Port/WfW, ships from November 15 and can support up to two modems per user workstation on the network. For Unix buffs, New York-based NetManage Inc started shipping Workgroup Chameleon, again an extension to its existing product which now provides a pretty comprehensive set of TCP/IP facilities for Windows for Workgroups. The package includes Telnet terminal emulations, File Transfer Protocol file transfer and Netmail – a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol-based application. As for personal computer manufacturers, along with a host of small clone manufacturers, AST Research Inc, Compaq Computer Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, Zenith Data Systems, NCR Corp and Apricot Computers Ltd are offering various degrees of support: the last, for example, has decided to offer Windows for Workgroups as a standard free offering on its machines which, after all, include networking chips on their motherboards. For a system that is designed for small workgroups, Microsoft says that it has gone to great lengths to make its technology scalable: we fully expect there to be installations with thousands of Windows for Workgroups on their network – the reason being that all the workgroups will eventually be interconnected.

Scalability

The need for scalability has led the company to come up with a number of innovative features, such as using distributed name servers, to keep track of machines with sharable resources, rather than letting servers repeatedly broadcast their availability over the network. The concept is not new, but leads to complexities that Microsoft reckons it has cracked. In particular the company is proud of the way in which the name server is chosen. Any Windows for Workgroups machine can be the master name server (Browse Master, in Windows parlance) and when a new machine is logged, it initially tries to tell the current Master Browser of its arrival. If the Master is not running then another machine is automatically elected to take over – which machine gets the job is determined by which machine has the most up-to-date list of names already built. All that remains to be seen is how data processing managers respond to the idea of their users swapping files and information willy-nilly. The company acknowledges that even within Microsoft itself the data processing professionals needed convincing that this was a Good Thing.