“Many commentators believed that Novell was living under a death
sentence waiting to be slowly destroyed by the remorseless advance
of Windows 2000. …Active Directory – to be delivered with Windows
2000 – …would provide NDS with direct competition and possibly
grind it into history.
However several things happened to deflect this scenario;
Windows 2000 was late and its first version of Active Directory
does not include the same level of capability as NDS. Linux
happened damaging the momentum of Windows 2000 and finally a number
of large companies, particularly Telcos simply could not
wait for Microsoft or anyone else and began deploying NDS
extensively. Novell is now releasing eDirectory, an extension
of NDS, which will further challenge Microsoft’s Active Directory.
EDirectory takes NDS a step further, providing the same NDS
capability but spanning corporate and public networks.”