Windows 2000 Server Versus Novell NetWare 5.1

To start with I am bias to Microsoft’s Windows 2000 Servers running Active Directory Services. This is only because I work with it from day to day everyday and I really do not get enough interaction with Novell. However, I did not say that I like Microsoft better I just tend to lean more towards their side because I know it better and my boss wants us to sell their (Microsoft) product. So please forgive any un-bias opinions that I may write in this report.

Novell claims that NetWare is a better network operating system than Windows 2000 Server with Active Directory, and of course Microsoft would come back with a reply that sounds something like this that NetWare 5.1 is a minor upgrade to NetWare 5.0 and still lacks many of the features and capabilities included in the Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system. Well after all

Partition boundary is apart of a Windows 2000 domain. Active Directory can easily span many sites and WAN links therefore enabling direct access to and efficient searching of objects across site boundaries. Replication is optimized automatically between sites and over slow network links. Global Catalogs are updated simultaneously with other replication cycles to ensure that they are continually kept up to date and a catalog enforces object- and attribute-level security.

NDS provides no formal way to request change history information and it requires customized synchronization agents to fully synchronize the domain. That to me seems to be a little bit of a burden but it also does seem to pull the weight off of the servers. As for the NDS Catalog the architecture forces tradeoffs between speed and data consistency with objects in underlying partitions there is no real sense of neatness as I would call it. With the falling shares of Novell there is limited support from independent software vendors. Novell’s GroupWise is not fully NDS-aware, this I read in a group forum at goggle so the facts supporting this were not apparent to me as I read the news group article but if I had enough time. I would need to setup a lab to truly support the article that I had read.

There are a few categories that mainly would be the focus between choosing between the two Operating Systems.

Global Data Availability is a must with any network and here are the specifications between Microsoft Active Directory and Novell Directory Services.

This portion about the way NDS provides an Application Development Environment is going to sound completely bias, and the main reason to this is due to the facts at hand and the only thing that I found on this section for Novell was from a my news group at Dejanews.com. NDS provides a Limited developer mind share within the Directory and the one feature that I enjoy from Active Directory, Novell Directory Services does not provide which is be

Some topics in this essay:
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