Novell has positioned IntranetWare as its new flagship product and sketched out a road map that the company hopes will transform its business from a LAN services provider to an intranet player.
Novell's road map for its IntranetWare package -- which includes NetWare 4.11, an IPX/IP gateway, FTP (File Transfer Protocol) services, NetWare Web Server 2.5 and Netscape Communications' Navigator Web browser -- calls for an upgrade next second quarter and a version aimed at small businesses, called Kayak, due in November.
IntranetWare, Version 2, will include virtual private networking and remote-access support.
Next US summer the OS bundle will add the Java Virtual Machine for running Java applets on NetWare, replication to lessen server loads through mirroring, proxy caching and native IP support.
Kayak, which enters beta testing next week, will be a version of IntranetWare limited to 100 users. It will feature a utility called Easy Administration Tool, which will let people other than NetWare administrators perform functions such as adding users to a network. Other Kayak features will include modem pooling and possibly messaging.
Attendees at a NetWare Users International conference, in Atlanta, were divided on how successful Novell would be in an intranet market dominated by companies that include Microsoft and Unix vendors. "CNEs (Certified Novell Engineers) are not doing infrastructure stuff," including intranets, says Charles Dowis, an information systems official at SunTrust Service, a bank in Atlanta.
"It's the Unix people who are doing infrastructure," Dowis says.
But another user says his organisation would likely use NetWare as an intranet and Internet platform. "I want to keep my network as simple as possible," says Phillip Tollison, an information resource consultant with the Administrative Law Judge Division, in Columbia, South Carolina.
Novell is pricing IntranetWare and NetWare 4.11 identically, and it is cutting the suggested retail price of a 10-user version of NetWare by US$400, to US$2095.
Novell may not release stand-alone versions of NetWare in the future but will continue to enhance it, according to William Donahoo, Novell's senior director of product marketing.