Honeycutt says that a major criterion when evaluating any product is whether or not it integrates well with NDS, and what the tradeoff would be. We're involved with select customer programs for companies like Novell and Microsoft, and we have some contracts with other vendors. Local resellers designated by the vendors are able to help us from a technical angle, explaining what the products do and how they work. We've just begun to assess the Novell Application Launcher for the next quarter. It looks promising, and is a step in the right direction of putting more intelligence into the network than in the workstation.
Users get the same application groups no matter where they go, regardless of their desktops.
NAL's ability to automate software installation is also highly regarded. Manual installation can't continue much longer into the future, due to employee and systems increases. We're looking for ways to manage users more centrally. With NDS, we've seen a product that seems to work very well, and appears reliable and stable. Novell's strategy is to port NDS to multiple platforms, which is smart.