Pressing its foot firmly on the Windows NT gas pedal while Microsoft Corp’s Active Directory is still in the shop, Novell Inc’s cutting the price of its NDS for NT directory software by 25% to $260 for a five-user license through the end of April. NDS for NT, which began shipping last month, enables users to manage access to any of the hundreds of applications integrated with NT’s security and domains services. Microsoft’s own Active Security and Directory technology isn’t available until Windows NT 5.0 ships; a second beta cut of which is expected in April. NT 5.0 will include the existing Domains security access manager as well as Active Directory technology. Novell says it makes little difference to NDS for NT which works at a lower level. NDS for NT is said to eliminate the need to buy separate dedicated servers for authentication at remote sites on a corporate wide area network and replicates permissions across directories, a function prohibited in Microsoft’s directory scheme. It relieves organizations of the cost of manually granting user permissions for accessing the same application or services over and over and generally reduces total cost of ownership. NDS for NT does not, however, support LDAP or the NDS APIs. Until a new rev of the software ships sometime in the second half of the year users who need NDS APIs must buy a separate server running NetWare and hook it up to their NT network. Oracle and Netscape SuiteSpot for example support NDS but not the NT Directory APIs. Novell, which is targeting Microsoft Exchange users says NT developers who want to do LDAP or NDS work and need a local data store on a NT server currently need just a single NDS server somewhere on the network. It says it decided to hang off on the NDS and LDAP version of NDS for NT until later in the year – it had been expected this quarter – in order to get all of the company’s NDS offerings in sync there’s a danger it could have ended up with multiple implementations, it says. It’s also put resources into adding two new features to NDS for NT that didn’t figure in the original beat. The product now includes a security indtruder detection lock-out mechanism that shuts out users that retry access once a password has failed a few timed and an Exchange mailbox management tool. Novell says there were 10,000 downloads of the NDS for NT beta from its web site in the first month.
