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NOV-BR95.DOC -- 19950920 -- Two people's notes on a trip to BrainShare'95
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	Feel free to add or edit this document and then email
	it back to faq@jelyon.com




Date: Fri, 17 Mar 1995 02:33:14 EST
From: "Thomas E. Costigan Jr." <costigat@CSERVE1.CCMAIL.COMPUSERVE.COM>
Subject: Attention BrainShare '95 Attendees

Reminder: On Wednesday evening at 9pm at the Shilo Inn (206 South
West Temple across from the Red Lion, the hotel with the gaudy
red neon lights on the outside, you *cannot* miss it) we are
having an informal get-together of NSIG members.  If you have not
already confirmed that you plan to attend, please drop me a
message.

I have it on good authority that "the man" himself, "Joe D." will
be attending the conference and hopefully will attend the
Wednesday evening get-together.

If this is your first time to attend, here is some advice:

1) Dress casual during the day.  Bring something warm (it snowed
last year).  Suits and dresses are only permitted at night if you
have a non-conference meeting with a client, Novell person, etc.
Anyone caught violating this dress code will be forced to load
OS/2 Warp on a Lan Manager server with AppleTalk connectivity.

2) Bring an extra piece of luggage like a canvas bag or something
to haul back all the "stuff" that is given away.

3) On Monday, "Vendor Hospitality Night" go to the Borland room
FIRST (assuming they are there).  I'm not kidding; wait on the
line with me (we can get each other a beer from somebody's else's
hospitality suite while we wait).

4) Be prepared for an intense and very worthwhile week; pay
attention: something "big" will almost certainly happen (they
announced the WordPerfect merger at the conference last year).
Therefore, get some rest now and forget about that "last minute"
project you are working one (you will want to change it after you
come back from the conference anyway).

------------------------------

Summary of Day 0 of the Novell "BrainShare '95" conference.

Greetings from Salt Lake City, Utah, site of the eleventh annual
Novell technical developments conference known as "BrainShare
'95."  Today is "Day 0" or registration day, if you will, of the
conference which begins in officially tomorrow and continues
until Friday, 25 March 1995.

The conference is being held at the University of Utah with
evening special events at downtown hotels.  It is organized into
daily "general sessions" to which all participants attend to hear
a "keynote address" by a Novell or network industry illuminary
followed each day by five specialized "breakout" sessions that
allow attendees to choose from about 270 different topics that
cover subjects of interest to each participant.

I traveled out yesterday from the Washington, DC, area along with
my work colleague Norman Spirt.  After a delayed departure and a
rather bumpy download into the airport (Norman is still green),
we arrived rather late to do any significant damage.

Generally speaking, Norman is concentrating on network
management, services, security and problem analysis & resolution
issues while I am concentrating on workstation/client software
implementation, application software selection / configuration /
support and customized software development and management
issues.  This more or less parallels our job responsibilities
with PAHO but I will be doing some cross-over into network
management and security issues in order to obtain maximum
coverage of topics that are of interest to the Organization.

This morning (shocking news: Norman shaved his mustache; must
have been the bumpy landing) we checked-in for the conference and
picked up our conference materials.  The breakout session I had
registered for entitled "NetWare Programming in Visual BASIC" and
the session Norman had registered for "Enterprise Issues and
Answers: Putting It All Together" have both been deleted from the
conference.  Aside from these two, all of the other breakout
sessions that we registered for are available.

All participants have been given login names and e-mail addresses
on a special "BrainShare Network" that will use Novell's
"GroupWise" product.  You can reach me at:
	thomas920@brainshare.novell.com
and Norman at:
	norman927@brainshare.novell.com

They have setup several locations around the campus from which we
will be able to access the network so drop us a note if you wish.
This is the first year they have tried setting up a conference
LAN so we shall see how this "thing" works.

This evening there is a "BrainShare 'YES' Partners Showcase and
Reception" beginning at 6pm local time.

Tomorrow's keynote addresses will be given by Mr. Robert
Frankenburg, the President of Novell and by Mr. Tom Evslin, Vice
President of Network System Software-Business Multimedia Services
for a little company known as AT&T.  The keynote speaker for
Tuesday is a nice young man named Drew Major, Chief Scientist and
Senior System Architect of Novell ("el papa de NetWare" as we say
at PAHO).

The Wednesday speaker will be Mr. Marc Andreessen, Vice President
for Technology of Netscape Communications Corporation (Mr.
Andreessen was a principal member of the team that created the
Internet World-Wide-Web browser software known as "Mosaic" at the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the
Univ. of Illinois in Champaign).  On Thursday we will hear from
Mr. Don Tapscott, the CEO of New Paradigm Learning Corporation
who will speak about how the information superhighway is
transforming the way businesses and organizations operate.  On
Friday, Drew will be back along with a gaggle of other Novell
executives who will do a "Q & A" session.

On Monday I will be attending sessions entitled:

	NetWare Clients: Overview and Strategy
	Optimizing Clients for NetWare: Windows & Hardware
	Novell Collaberative Computing Environment
	Migrating to NetWare 4.1 for Increased Connections
	VLM 1.2 -- Tuning and Configuration

As I have previously written about, I have been having problems
with DOS sessions under Windows "hanging" when exiting from them
back to Windows while using the "official" VLM 1.2 release of
Novell's client software (December 1994); this problem was not
experienced with the "pre-release" version of 1.2 (October 1994)
nor any of the other previous releases.  I am hoping, therefore,
to get some assistance from Novell as a result of the first and
last session listed above.

On Monday evening, there will be "Sponsor Hospitality Night" that
will allow several dozen companies that make products that
compliment NetWare to show us their products.  Also on Monday
night, Norman and I are having dinner with Mr. Joe Doupnik, the
famous "Joe D." of the Novell Special Interest Group list on the
Internet.  I am very much looking forward to meeting Joe after
reading all his materials and therefore benefiting from his
wisdom these last several years during which I have subscribed to
the list.

To contact me directly via this e-mail account:
	costigat@cserve1.ccmail.compuserve.com

------------------------------

Summary of Day 1 of the Novell "BrainShare '95" conference.

The eleventh annual Novell technical developments conference
began today at the University of Utah campus in Salt Lake City,
Utah.  The conference hosts this year are Ms. Christine G.
Hughes, Senior Vice President for Corporate Marketing and Mr.
Gary H. Mueller, Vice President for Developer Relations (both of
these individuals are hosting their first "BrainShare" conference
and both worked for Xerox Corporation before recently joining
Novell).  Without stating attendance figures yet, they mentioned
that the new "BrainShare" network has over 5,000 accounts.  They
also mentioned that there will be a "BrainShare" conference in
Australia this year (19-21 July 1995) in addition to Europe and
Japan as in past years.  Mr. Hughes stated that he had just
joined Novell with the specific task of solidifying developer
relations and he therefore was soliciting input from the
developer community.

The hosts then introduced Novell CEO and President Mr. Bob
Frankenburg.  He began his presentation by reviewing what had
happened in 1994.  He called it a "back to basics year for
Novell" that saw the roll-out of NetWare 4.1 as the "boss NOS"
and he stated that NW 4.1 now counts for 30 percent of sales.  He
stated that the release of Perfect Office to "raved reviews" was
outselling Microsoft's "MS Office" and Lotus Development's
"SmartSuite" combined.  He cited that Novell's "GroupWise"
messaging software was now performing 15 percent of this category
of software sales, up from four percent a year ago.  He stated
that Novell met its 1994 shipment goal for UNIXWare 2.0 by
shipping to developers on 29 December 1994.

He continued by stating that Novell was working to improve
product quality and provide premium support (7 days by 24 hours)
to large clients who demanded this level of service.  He said
that Novell would have "no more stealth marketing" of its
products, that is, marketing would emphasize the capabilities of
NetWare and it related products instead of hiding them.

He continued by talking about Novell's strategy to have "NetWare
everywhere" that would build on the present strengths of 2.5
million servers, 50 million end-users and 50,000 CNE's
world-wide.  He stated that today Novell was announcing NetWare
Distributed Print Services and that NetWare running on an Apple
PowerPC was to be demonstrated at the conference networking
laboratory.  With AT&T and regional phone operating companies,
Novell was "taking NetWare public" to make NetWare the choice of
business to business connectivity within the "trusted global
information structure" that was coming about.

For mobile computing, he stated that Novell desired to remove the
hassles involved with connecting back to one's home LAN by
exploring technologies in wireless connectivity.  He talked about
NEST (NetWare Embedded System Technology) that will allow NetWare
to talk to any microprocessor device that has at least 50 KB of
RAM.  Thus typical office devices like facsimile machines and
photo copies, personal data assistants, vending machines and
cable TV boxes can be hooked into NetWare.  Thus, with the cable
TV box, NetWare can become the operating system for a two-way,
interactive cable system.  He added that AT&T's services would
compliment NEST by providing long distance connectivity and that
a "global directory" based upon Novell's NDS would be the means
by which all the devices on the network could be easily located.
He added that all 24 of the largest PBX manufacturers will
support NetWare in some form.

He then went on to discuss Novell's strategy for the next several
years.  He saw NetWare as the means for "upsizers" and UNIXWare
as the means for "downsizers" to eventually "meet in the middle"
as Novell develops the SuperNOS combination of NetWare and
UNIXWare that will share a common code base.  He mentioned
Novell's Tuxedo transaction processing service as a means of
providing the enhanced transaction processing demands that will
be required to support global commerce using NetWare / UNIXWare.

He said that Novell has to make NetWare easier to install, manage
and use.  He talked about two fairly new "buzzword" products that
Novell is working on: "Corsair" and "Ferret" which are intended
to fulfill the goal of a more easy to use NetWare.  The "Corsair"
product will be a NetWare information publishing and reading tool
while "Ferret" is a browser utility that will enable users to
maneuver between NetWare and the Internet.

He also stated that Novell wanted to maintain the "freedom of
choice" among network applications and clients and the Novell was
committed to providing excellent client software for Windows,
Windows 95 and Macintosh.  He also stated that Novell's
"PerfectOffice" and "GroupWise" products will lead the
application charge with the latter product demonstrating Novell's
commitment to combining data types like e-mail and voice-mail
into a single-source repository of information.

He began the conclusion of his address by stating that
participation in the network business "makes you humble" and
requires the need to develop "great partnerships" to solve the
needs of customers.  He stated emphatically what Novell will not
do: vertical market applications, desktop OS, global network
service provider or database developer.  He stated that he wanted
to see one billion NetWare users by the year 2000 and he said
that NetWare can make it possible, applications can make it
practical and partnerships can make it a reality.

During the Q&A session that followed, he stated that he believed
the future of Novell in the networking industry was very bright;
Novell has added 100 thousand servers and experienced a 19
percent increase in users over last year's figures.

Regarding a question on technical support, he cited Novell's
premium support program for large customers as a means of meeting
their needs and that the days of 800 "free support forever" are
gone because the cost of these services are born by new users of
the product and it has just become too expensive to proceed in
this manner.

Regarding the future of NetWare 3.x, he said that Novell would
continue to correct bugs and make basic improvements but the
"future of new functionality is in NetWare 4" because
"improvements of the NDS" will be the core to improving NetWare.

Regarding Windows '95, when someone stated that the release of
Windows '95 will be "the biggest business process this year" he
responded "for sure this year?" Regarding Novell's strategy, he
stated that Novell "will have great clients, one of which is
Windows '95" and that the Novell implementation of NetWare
connectivity for Windows '95 will offer better performance and
functionality to fully exploit the capabilities of NetWare for
Windows '95 (or '96 or whenever).

Regarding Novell and the Internet, he stated that while he did
not want to steal any of the thunder of the next speaker but that
AT&T connect services for NetWare will provide both internetwork
and network to Internet connection services from a single
provider.  Novell's "Corsair" and "Ferret" products would also
improve NetWare users' ability to access Internet services.

Regarding "great clients" another question regarded the poor OS/2
client for NetWare.  He stated that it was better and getting
better and that Novell was committed to fully exposing the
capabilities of NetWare, particularly NDS, to all clients.

Regarding a question on how to assure that applications would be
more network-aware, he stated that Novell needs to evangelize the
commitment to the network, to provide better SDK kits to make
applications "network intimate."

Regarding UNIXWare, he stated that this product is not an
intermediate product on the way to SuperNOS and that tomorrow (21
March 1995) the complete version of UNIXWare 2.0 would be
shipping and the Novell would be increasing the publicity for
this product.

Regarding cable TV, he said that Novell was exploring specific
partnerships so that NetWare would be the technology used by
people wishing to provide interactive systems.

Regarding Novell's "Corsair" versus the Ray Noorda company
product, he said that Noorda's startup company was putting
together a desktop OS "with Corsair capabilities" and that Novell
will cooperate with anyone to improve access to NetWare.

He concluded the Q&A session by stating that anyone with
questions could reach him at:

	bfrank@novell.com

The second keynote address of the day was given by Mr. Tom
Evslin, Vice President for Network System Software -- Business
Multimedia Services at AT&T.  He said that he left Microsoft in
December and "walked around to the other side of the RJ-11 jack"
to join AT&T with responsibility for network application
development.  He spoke about AT&T's "NetWare Connect" service
that allows NetWare users to use AT&T sservices as the means of
internetworking.

He cited the alliance between AT&T and Novell as evidence of a
natural convergence between companies that provide communications
and computer products.  The basic idea of the alliance is to
provide mutual customers with a means of combining such things as
internetwork connections (both IP and SPX), remote connectivity,
Internet access and e-mail / voice-mail into a single service and
to facilitate the process of application development needed to
match these services by providing a "common directory service" to
the process.  He used the analogy of "the cloud" that would allow
users and developers to just worry about connecting to "the
cloud" and it would perform the work of providing the connection
with adequate security, thus allowing developers and users to
concentrate on features and content.  He concluded by saying
"nobody builds an application that does not work with NetWare"
and the AT&T NetWare Connect service is certainly not an
exception.


Here are some "tidbits" from the breakout sessions I attended.

The Novell 16 bit client will be the VLM technology for the next
5 to 7 years; the 32 bit client, under development and known also
as NIOS, is slated to be released within 30 to 60 days *after*
the release of Windows '95, unless this product is significantly
delayed.  Most of the new functionality work in the client
software is being done for the 32 bit client in that this
technology allows Novell to overcome many of the memory and
related limitations of the 16 bit client.  Novell hopes to
maintain a single 32 bit client code base with only small
differenes between the Windows '95 and other (e.g. DOS, OS/2) 32
bit versions.  The 32 bit client will allow developers to also
exploit the improved performance of this client software
(including down to the NIC connection for which a 32 bit driver
will be available).  The minimum workstation requirement for the
32 bit client will be a '386 with 8 MB of RAM, 4 KB of
conventional memory and 500 KB of free extended memory; a 32 bit
NIC is not required but will be exploited if available.
Decompression and encryption procedures in the client software
will not be included in the first release but is planned for
later.  In summary, the presenters said that Novell under
Frankenburg had changed its focus to elevate client software to a
new level of importance in the company.

One thing I did not know is that I assumed that the NetWare
connectivity in Windows '95 (or whenever) was engineered by
Novell; not so: it is reverse engineered by Microsoft.  Hence, to
fully exploit the NetWare connectivity of Windows '95, you will
need this Novell 32 bit client, which as reported earlier will be
out a month or so after Windows '95.  The participants in the
session stated that this was a bad idea and that it might be
better to get the 32 bit client out before Windows '95 so that
experience could be gained by it and so that it could be used in
the initial configuration attempts with Windows '95.  The Novell
presenters doubted that 32 bit would be released before Windows
'95 unless it was significantly delayed again.

I attended a session on Novell's strategy with "GroupWare" and
you will begin to hear the Novell "buzzword" ECLIPSE to describe
Novell's attempt to combine together a number of technologies
into a single product line for messaging, voice mail, calendar &
scheduling.

Regarding fine-tuning and optimization of VLM's, etc., make sure
to get a copy of the March 1995 Novell "Applications Notes" for
the article on "Support Issues for NetWare DOS Requester (VLM)
1.20" especially paged 30 to 32 regarding the files needed to
make sure you are using the latest.  Also, the April issue
contains an article on Windows configuration issues.  One thing I
learned is that with the 1.2 version of "vlm.exe" you can use the
"LOADHIGH" command on it (before you could not).  You can also
run the command "VLM /d" to see where the various VLM components
are being loaded into memory.


Norman Spirt adds the following observations:

Sessions attended:

     Keynote - Bob Frankenberg, Novell CEO and Tom Evslin, AT&T
1) Accessing Network resources using NDS     2) Implementing
NetWare 4 in a large Enterprise (Novell)     3) Managing NetWare
3 with NetSync     4) Optimizing the NetWare 4.1 Environment
5) In-Depth Server Performance Tuning

     Tom is summarizing the keynote speeches, so I will leave
those alone this week.  I will mention the "buzz" word of the
conference, however, which is "Pervasive Computing," which
basically means the ability for users to access "everything from
everywhere" (see Tom's summary).

     As far as the breakout sessions for today, the three which
provided the most significant information for our purposes
(impending move to 4.1) were sessions 2, 3, and 4.  Implementing
NetWare 4 in a Large Enterprise (which turned out to be Novell)
was taught by Tom Ivie and Todd Powell, who actually headed the
team to build Novell's production 4.1 environment.  They provided
tips and tricks for upgrading from 3.x, designing and building
the directory, WAN implications on the overall design,
partitioning and replication of the directory database, time
synchronization, naming standards and utilities to aid in the
transition (specifically a user upgrade utility they wrote which
they will make available on the Internet).  While Novell is
considerably larger than PASB, there are many similarities and
the lessons learned from their own upgrade are invaluable.

     Managing NetWare 3 with NetSync was particularly interesting
in that NetSync is a tool which allows for much better
compatibility between operating systems (3.x and 4.1).  This is
important because it will allow PASB to gradually incorporate our
3.11 servers into the 4.1 environment, allowing for a much
smoother upgrade then would have been possible before the release
of 4.1 (NetSync is bundled with the 4.1 OS).  The main lesson
learned here is to back up the bindery with the 3.x bindfix
utility before starting the upgrade, in case there are
complications.

     Optimizing the 4.1 Environment was a general 4.1 performance
tuning seminar (there are more specific breakout sessions) which
touched on all aspects of 4.1 performance tuning.  File server
optimization in the various subsystems (memory, file system, Disk
I/O, LAN I/O and CPU) was covered in some depth, and Network
optimization (fine tuning topology, use of routing advances,
reduce overhead and balance security) was addressed as well.
Workstation optimization (memory management, disk caching,
MSWindows and VLM technology) was also touched on, although Tom
will certainly cover the workstation issues in his coursework.

     All-in-all, a very intense and worthwhile first day.  I even
exchanged some Internet mail with Mr. Benzi [PAHO person back in
Washington] on the demo LAN using Groupwise and PerfectOffice.
Send Internet mail to this address:
	NORMAN927@brainshare.novell.com
to get to me during the day.

------------------------------

Summary of Day 2 of the Novell "BrainShare '95" conference.

The second day of "BrainShare '95" began with a short presentation by
Mr. Richard W. King, Executive Vice President and General Manager of
the NetWare Systems Group of Novell.  Richard began his presentation
by stating that as a ten-year veteran of Novell, he had observed a
tremendous change in the capabilities of hardware and software.  He
stated that Novell 4.1 represented a "new dimension of computing" with
its capability of distributed operations and ability to serve as a
network repository of services with the NDS as the key element.

The basic gist of his speech, as I see it, was to encourage the
"NetWare faithful" in attendance to adopt NetWare 4.1 sooner rather
than later.  I have been frankly surprised, via various show-of-hands
at sessions here and there, that so few people are actually using
NetWare 4.1 so far (at PAHO, we are not, in a production basis
anyway): hence, Mr. King's presentation.  Well, he went on to
emphasize the importance of such features in NetWare 4.1 as NWAdmin,
the ability to add one's own objects, schema elements, and DLL code
that will allow even small LAN's to take advantage of NetWare 4.1 and
NDS.  He said that 4.1 and NDS represented a "rock solid" release
which provided an "environment and fabric" which will provide users
with the network platform they need for many years to come.

Mr. King then introduced Mr. Drew Major, Chief Scientist and Senior
System Architect of Novell (and a member of the original "SuperSet"
team of programmers that developed NetWare over a dozen years ago or
more; boy how time does fly!).  To be perfectly blunt and honest, this
was not one of Drew's more informative or inspirational speeches.  He
reemphasized some of the points made the previous day by Bob
Frankenburg along the "pervasive computing" theme: NetWare as
providing the "role in the middle to connect things" and that NetWare
"must continue to follow the model of open network support."

He outlined three areas in which NetWare operates 1) client software;
2) infrastructure; 3) back-end application services.  He said that he
would talk on the first two topics today and save his comments on the
third item for his talk on Friday.

He went on for some time on how NetWare fits into the networking
picture by outling three different types of network / NetWare
applications: 1) those that merely have some of their services (e.g.
print) redirected by NetWare; 2) those which have some form of
"NetWare aware" features and 3) the "distributed application" (which
he differentiated from the "client / server application" that take
fuller advantage of the NetWare environment.

He then went on to describe the importance of "transaction monitoring"
and went into a fairly lengthy period of time during which he
described the importance of Novell's "Tuxedo" technology.

He then went on to describe NetWare near-future goals: to provide
better API's for NCP services, to make improvement to the NDS and to
fully embrace the OpenDoc standard that Novell and other major
companies (not including Microsoft, naturally) are promoting.

He concluded by stating that in the three years since the final
development and release of NetWare 4, there have been big improvements
in access, infrastructure services, etc. and that Novell is now in the
premiere position to drive the networking industry with the help of
people like those who were attending the conference (or reading this
e-mail message, for the matter).

The first "breakout" session I attended covered the topic of
"Developing a Trusted Workstation for NetWare Security Architecture"
at which the presenter, Mr. Doug Hale, described Novell's efforts to
gain "C2" security compliance for NetWare 4.1.  He described a
"security hole" in the client authentication process of a workstation
(that I am not going to redescribe here; sorry) that would be
addressed as part of Novell's "C2" certification process.  This
"security hole" is the result of the lack of basic security components
in DOS which, by design, make DOS lacking as a "trusted computer base"
operating system.

The requirements for a secure distributed network policy cover four
areas: 1) M - Mandatory access control; 2) A - Audit; 3) I -
Identification and authentication; 4) D - Discretionary access
control.  He described how the server can provide "AID" security to
meet the "C2" requirements but not the "M" component which could only
be provided through various schemes in the workstation.  To summarize,
the "C2" certification will require at least a "warm reboot" of the
workstation to authenticate the access of a new user to the network
because of the lack of security / authentication in DOS.

If you wish to obtain a copy of the "Orange" and "Red" books which
define and interpret how to make computer systems secure, contact:

	INFOSEC Awareness Division
	Attn: X711/1AOC
	Ft. Meade, MD 20755-6000
	Contact: Barbara Keller (410) 766-8729

The next session I attended was "Implementing An Integrated Messaging
System" under NetWare, presented by Gary Saddington of Novell's
Consulting Services Division.  He began his presentation by pointing
out that there are two aspects of technology involved here:
application software and transport software and that sometimes you can
or cannot separate one for the other.  He pointed out that NetWare 4.1
was a message-enabled OS by including MHS Services (a transport
service) as part of the OS directly that application programs could
use.  With Global MHS, an add-on that he said would soon be available,
applications could exchange messages with other applications via a
gateway.

He went on to reemphasize that "messaging does not equal e-mail" and
he discussed the pros and cons of MS Mail (which can be supported on a
NetWare 4.1 network via the MHS transport mechanism) versus Novell's
"GroupWise" product that, besides being fully supported by NetWare
4.1, also provides integrated messaging services for calendaring,
scheduling and (in the near future with something called "Collabra
Share") group discussions.  The other advantage of "GroupWise" over
other products is as he pointed out the use of NWAdmin as a single
point of configuration and administration in a NetWare 4.1 environment
for both the network and e-mail directory.  For the "near future," he
said that NetWare 4.1's messaging services would provide an even
tighter convergence between MHS and "GroupWise" to provide
collaborative information services (e.g., like Lotus "Notes") and
better scheduling, workflow management and information replication
services that will be fully integrated with NetWare.

The next session I attended was entitled "Business Process
Reengineering: Automating Business Workflow with GroupWare".  The
presenter, Mr. Carl Hansen, provided a theoretical but practical
overview to approaching the task of business process reengineering (BPR).
The most important point I gained from his presentation is that BPR is
not simply an "information technology driven" project but instead must
consider and involve all aspects of the "business landscape practices
and methods." He naturally demonstrated and promoted Novell's new
"Eclipse" technologies that combine together today's "GroupWise" product
with other software that was gained by Novell in the WordPerfect merger
and other acquisitions (SoftSolutions) of last year, including:
electronic forms, workflow management, document management, electronic
mail, scheduling and calendaring, shared information databases, mobile
& remote computing and wireless computing into a "Universal In-Box" of
information store.  He, like other Novell presenters, emphasized the
single-point of management and administration for this technology under
the framework of NetWare 4.1.  He concluded his presentation by demoing
the capabilities of the "Forms Design" tool and showed the myriad of
functions and capabilities of this product, including the ability to
read and write data from outside databases like FoxPro.  Hence, this
product could be used to develop customized forms routing,
correspondence management system and workflow applications (like a
"help desk" program) that would fully exploit the features of the
network, all from the confines of friendly confines of the basic suite
of applications programs all of which are under the single point of
administration provided by NetWare 4.1.

I then attended a session on "OpenDoc" for MS Windows and OLE
Interoperability" presented by Mr. Chris Andres, Software Engineering
Consultant for Novell.  This session was a bit too futuristic for me
but the basic idea here is that Novell, Lotus, Borland, IBM and others
(not Microsoft) have gotten together to form a group called CI Labs
which it promoting the "OpenDoc" standard as a means of combining
different forms of information (including not just text but voice and
video) into a single document format.  The idea here is to "specialize
the components" and emphasize the document as information, not the
application, to achieve a seamless means of accessing information.

The final session of the day was also futuristic in nature: "The
Future of Novell File Services" presented by Phillip Karren, Manager
of Software Engineering of Novell.  He talked about the Novell
Advanced File Services (NAFS) that will be required to handle the
increasing number and sizes of files that NetWare will have to
process.  The basic goals of NAFS are to provide improved file
management for NetWare 4.1 and the future "SuperNOS" (combination of
UNIXWare and NetWare) that, as described in the previous session I
attended on "OpenDoc" had the intention of making the component
document (information) the center piece of the application, not the
application itself. When he concluded his presentation, the first
questioner stated that this was all very impressive, "but when?" to
which he replied "I can't tell you."  In follow-up discussion, we can
expect to see elements of this file management technology in the near
future releases of NetWare 4.x, that is, before the "SuperNOS" nexus
takes place.

In the evening, I attended the alumni dinner for those who have
attended five or more times (this is my seventh conference).  I just
happened to walk into the hotel where the dinner was being held with
Drew Major and had a chance to chat with him and Joe Doupnik
(Professor and NetWare all-around guru from Utah State University)
before we ate.  Drew said that he felt really good and positive about
NetWare 4.1 and wished its present quality had been included in the
original release of NetWare 4 (which would have delayed its initial
release).  He also stated that he had been in "more control" during
his talk today and promised a more free-wheeling approach for his
Friday talk.

Tomorrow (Wednesday, 22 March 1995) the keynote address will be given
by Mr. Marc Andreessen, VP of Netscape Communications.  I will be
attending two breakout sessions on network security, a session on
multimedia on the LAN, a "tutorial session" on Windows sockets
(whatever they are) and a session on leveraging the NDS for a
corporate environment.

I had the opportunity to check out my account on the conference LAN
using "GroupWise" and I had several message waiting for me from the
outside.  Others have related that they are getting bounced mail when
trying to send to     thomas920@brainshare.novell.com
but you can always try again.  The setup has a very nice feature
called "Windows Login" that allows you to log into NetWare from
Windows that is already running to therefore run the "GroupWise"
application environment.  A Novell person said he believed this
utility would be made publically available via NetWire and related
services in the next month or so.

I'm sure you will all be broken hearted to know that the weather is
terrible, no snow, but a cold and steady rain during the afternoon
made the umbrellas they gave us very useful.

------------------------------

Summary of Day 3 of the Novell "BrainShare '95" conference.

The general session of the conference began with a short presentation
by Mary Burnside, Chief Operating Officer of Novell, who presented an
award to the 50,000th CNE and the 3,000th CNI.  Steve Markmann, the
Vice President and General Manager for Information Access and
Management Group of Novell then came out to introduce the keynote
speaker.  He used an active Netscape browser to connect to Netscape's
home page on the Web and looked up the biography of Marc Andreessen,
the Vice President for Technology.  Marc is only 23 years old but as
many of you may know was a key member of the team at the Univ. of
Illinois that worked on the "Mosaic" research project that has
provided us with the graphical means of browsing the World Wide Web.
Steve Markmann mentioned that today, despite the fact that Netscape
was founded by Marc and Dr. James Clark only last year, 65 percent of
Web browser traffic on the Internet uses the Netscape product and the
Novell's LAN Workplace 5.0 will bundle in the Netscape browser.

Steve then formally introduced Marc who began his address entitled "The
New Generation of Internet Software." He stated that the basic
objective of Netscape is to make the Internet open for both public and
private users; the company had grown from three to 144 employees since
it was founded and had developed strategic alliances with many
important companies including Novell, MCI, MasterCard, Delphi and Bank
of America to name a few.  He announced "Netscape Japan" as an
alliance between his company and about a dozen major Japanese firms
which will provide the Netscape browser technology in the Japanese
market.

He described Netscape as providing a "new class of client / server
software for the Internet" that will provide a new class of services
such as electronic publishing, retrieval of information, etc., through
a transparent and consistent access using the simplicity of the
hypermedia technique.  He emphasized here and in other parts of this
talk that the Netscape technology was equally applicable to both
private (i.e., access within the confines of one's organization's own
LAN or WAN) and public (i.e., access using a dialup connection or by
using the Internet to allow outside-of-organziation access) network.
The Netscape software and concept can be scaled from the individual
right up to the workgroup, organization and public for the development
of collaborative work, electronic publishing, communications and even
as the front-end access point to a relational database.  The Netscape
client software therefore provides a common, single-interface (to
learn) base of capabilities on the front-end side that can be tied to
a myriad of back-end services.

He emphasized that Netscape is based upon open standards,
interoperability that will help to grow the marketplace for
interactive data services.

Regarding security, he said that Netscape (and others) approach the
problem from the point of view that all network connections are
insecure and that adequate safeguards need to be added to provide the
level of integrity needed to make the use of the network a viable
commercial venture.  He said that Netscape would provide encryption,
multiple layers of access control in both directions in a "painless as
well as tamperproof" means that will allow "private actions to take
place across public networks." He said that this would be implemented
using Netscape's "SSL" protocol that will allow "security to be
dropped into an application without changing performance" and he added
that Novell, Microsoft and other companies were also committed to
supporting this particular method.  He continued that by using tools
provided by Netscape, security could be added at a lower level to
allow for e-mail security and authentication that would allow for
financial transactions to take place across the Internet.

He continued by describing how Netscape's "core server software" will
make it easier for people to build application on top of back-end
database services.  He promised new and better API's to provide such
things as the ability for developers to swap out or extend upon components
of Netscape's core programs at the desire of the developer, seamless
document indexing and searching and "agents" (triggers of events) that
will allow the program to take action based upon certain changes in
the data.  He said that this would allow for the development of such
things as "Secure News Services" with validated replication and
various levels of read-only, limited-write and full-write access to
the data store.  He also promised links to other programs and database
servers that (returning to the theme of security) would provide
fire-wall protection and the "caching of data" that would allow
multiple users to access the same information that entered an
organization through a single point, thus saving on access time and cost.

Finally, he discussed how Netscape is working on Internet application
geared toward public applications like product sales storefronts,"
information distribution and affinity group / electronic community
applications that can be built on top of relational database systems.
He asked us to watch for announcements for Marketplace MCI that would
be coming out soon to offer business customers access to the Internet
built on top of Netscape products.

In conclusion, he said that Netscape was committed to help with the
task of building and deploying applications that are information and
document centric to bring people together on the Internet.

During the Q&A session, he was asked about the Clipper issue to which
he responded that if systems used encryption more widely, the whole
security threat would be minimized and thus the need for government
intervention in the process would be reduced.

He took several comments and questions from people who had been having
problems with various aspects of Netscape and he seemed both generally
surprised yet concerned that these problems existed.  In response to
the question of whether Netscape will be able to run on top of
NetWare, he replied "soon" and that this meant "in Netscape '95."

The first breakout session I attended was entitled "Multimedia on the
LAN" presented by Alan Mark, Corporate Integration Manager of Novell.
This presentation was both entertaining and informative as to the
challenges of deploying multimedia applications on the LAN.  The basic
gist here is that the storage requirements and bandwidth to support
multimedia on the LAN require certain sacrifices that in most cases
are acceptable.  For example, audio at 11 KHz mono versus 44 KHz
stereo (the later being CD-quality sound) is generally acceptable for
your typical multimedia computer presentation.  Using 12 frames per
second instead of 15 saves both storage and bandwidth at a
non-perceptible loss in quality of the picture.  He demonstrated that
the human mind can more easily make up for short coming in the visual
quality of a presentation than in the audio content and he showed how
Novell's "NetWare Video" could adjust the flow of data over the
network to exploit this human characteristic.

The next session I attended was entitled "Understanding How NetWare
Satisfies Business Security Requirements" presented by Rich Lee,
Senior Research Engineer of Novell.  This session was very much a
complement and partially a duplication of the security session I had
attended yesterday and again spoke of how Novell is seeking a "C2"
security rating for Novell NetWare 4.1 (which goes beyond what PAHO
needs from a LAN system).  In summary, Mr. Lee stated that users want
a single point of secure network logon that provides simple yet
effective protection from an "attack" from the outside.  Novell and
system administrators must make security simple enough to use and he
pointed out that security also covered such concepts as redundant
services and backups.  He made the obvious point that the importance
of security is related to the potential damage that can be caused by a
"pervasive impact" that will always seek the weakest link.

The next session I attended was "Novell Windows Sockets Tutorial" by
Mark Shapiro, Senior Software Engineer of Novell.  This session was
geared to those doing development work for WinSock applications, not
those supporting them, so most of this session was beyond my level of
interest.  He stated that WinSock 2.0 would be available soon and
suggested that interested parties check with FTP site

	ftp.stardust.com or Web site http://www.stardust.com

The next session was "Securing NetWare Against Viruses" by Morgan B.
Adair, Technical Support Research Engineer of Novell.  Some important
points learned or relearned from this session are that your typical
computer virus cannot infect the Novell file system because the
underlying structure is not a DOS system.  However, viruses can be
spread across the LAN via executable files and that the practice of
loging in as supervisor or supervisor-equivalent increases the risk
of rapid spread because this class of user has files rights that your
"normal" user does not have that will allow NetWare system files to
become infected, hence hastening the spread of a virus.  Another point
made was that if a workstation is suspected to have been infected, DO
NOT log out: shut off the machine and when you reboot DO NOT log in,
especially as a supervisor-equivalent user.

The final session I attended today was "Leveraging NDS for the
Corporate Network Through Scheme Extensions" by JD Marymee, System
Engineer of Novell (he said he's heard all the jokes about his name
already).  He described the schema as the "blueprint of the NDS" that
can now be easily modified using customized C/C++ libraries, GroupWise
applications extensions or ALM's used by Appware.  Modifying the
schema can allow organizations like PAHO to store a lot of its basic
organizational data right with the basic building-block of the
network, which can be in turn linked to external databases.  For
example, the FFMS (the financial management program that PAHO uses in
its field offices) or applications in HQ that do such things as travel
authorization could read the extended schema of the NDS for PAHO
employee information instead of having to maintain a separate database
which many times is not adequately updated or current.  Thus the point
of this presentation is that a properly planned and extended schema of
the NetWare 4.1 NDS extends the concept of using NetWare as a
centrally maintained and dynamically updated data store that can be
made available using predefined security arrangements to other
applications.


Mr. Norman Spirt has adds the following thoughts and observations:

      BrainShare '95 - Day 3 Sessions attended:
Keynote - Marc Andreessen, VP Technology Netscape Com. Corp.
1) Using DS Standard for NetWare 4.1 Migration   2) NDS Tools   3)
Implementing NetWare on a Fault-Tolerant HW/SW Base   4) Effectively
Managing SAP/RIP Traffic   5) Strategies for Troubleshooting NDS

The sessions today went much more smoothly than the prior two days.
I was able to get into all the sessions I wanted to.  Apparently,
there are over 6000 attendees this year (in 1992 there were about
2000).  All the sessions were filled with valuable information
(leading to what we here at BrainShare call "Braindrain").

DS Standard (Preferred Systems Inc.) is an interesting NDS tool
which "discovers" bindery information and lays it out in an NDS
format.  You can then manage/audit/model this information (off-line),
and when you are ready, "configure" a real NDS tree with this
information, selectively if you choose.  It is available to major
accounts, Novell offices and hopefully CNE's free of charge.  Version
2.0 is the current beta code.

NDS Tools was a well presented (Gary Hein, Carl Seaver), informative
session that basically broke down the steps necessary to identify,
troubleshoot, and solve NDS problems and the tools available to
facilitate this process.  One of the underlying themes was to use
DSrepair as a LAST resort (even though the latest version has many new
features beyond just repairing the NDS database.

A step-by-step methodolgy was presented to; 1) Identify the problem;
2) Gather information; 3) Document and organize the information;
4) Research findings; 5) Develop a strategy; 6) Resolve the problem.

The DStrace utility, servman.nlm and the NCS toolkit CD were presented
as good tools of the trade.  Effectively managing SAP/RIP traffic was
another extremely informative and well presented session (Paul Turner)
which described in some detail what SAP/RIP is, how they work and how
their options can be set.

The new NLSP (NetWare Link Services Protocol) was detailed as a new and
better solution, and was also described in some detail (both in terms
of Bindery and NDS environments).  Various routing configurations were
examined and some utilities (inetcfg and ipxcon) were discussed.  The
presentation finished with a brief examination (using Lanalyzer for
Windows) of the various packet structures.

Strategies for troubleshooting NDS was an interesting session
which discussed (in some detail) partitions, replicas and using
(contrary to the NDS tools session) DSrepair to analyze and fix
problems.

Keynote tomorrow by Don Tapscott, CEO of New Paradigm Learning
Corporation.

------------------------------

Summary of Day 4 of the Novell "BrainShare '95" conference.

On the fourth day of "BrainShare '95" the keynote speaker was Don Tapscott,
CEO of New Paradigm Learning Corporation and author of the book "Paradigm
Shift: The New Promise of Information Technology." He told us that a
"paradigm" is a set of assumptions that is so strong the you hardly know it
is there.  As time and history change, events cause a shift in the basic
assumptions that make up a paradigm.  He cited how the new geopolitical
situation over the last five years, months and even weeks has brought about
significant changes and a volatile situation that creates both threats and
opportunities.  For example, the fall of communism and moves toward peace
in the Middle East and Ireland are contrasted by problems in places most of
us have never heard of before like Bosnia and Chechnia.  Change is also
evident in the business world; he cited that 40 percent of the Fortune 500
companies from 15 years ago do not exist any longer in the same form.

He stated that we are moving into a "knowledge based economy" with such
things as the Internet which he said, according to the latest figures, is
at 50 million members and growing at 20 percent per month.  He talked about
"virtual aliens" who are highly educated people who are fully employed in
the U.S. economy on a remote basis and earn significantly less than those
who actually live in the U.S.

He said that we are going through a change in the "command and control
hierarchy" into one that is based on a more open flow of information among
members of society and the survivors are those who can adjust to this
shift.

He talked about the three components of the information age: Content,
Computing and Carriage.  He showed how interactive multimedia services that
run on these three components successfully "allow individuals to be treated
as an individual" instead of merely a data element and this was leading to
the decline of the "role of the middleman" on all levels.  For example, he
cited how Hertz rental car can greet and serve people by name via their
information system and place like Wal-Mart do not need warehouses because
their information system can track sales and demand on a daily basis,
allowing them to ship directly to stores.

He said the technology of computers had certainly changed from the
host-based to the microprocessor based and that anyone buying a mainframe
these days "was certainly out of their mind" because the new technology has
provided the "power to empower" the whole of the people instead of the few.

While he said that he does not have any direct affinities with any
companies other than his own, he did cite Novell and its partners as
fitting the new paradigm by promoting changes toward an open architecture.
He stated that there are problems with the new technology "but this is not
a reason to delay, but to address the problems and move on."  He concluded
by staring that "leadership is your opportunity" and that it can come "from
any level" to move an organization into the new paradigm.

The first breakout session I attended was "NDS and X.500 -- How Close Are
They" presented by Ed Reed, Software Engineering Consultant of Novell.  He
stated that Novell's move toward the NDS structure of NetWare 4.x came from
the 1988 X.500 specification with the basic idea being to allow users to
access information in a hierarchical system that can be replicated and
redistributed throughout an organization.  He said that Novell had to
anticipate changes in the X.500 specification during the development of
NetWare 4.x so that NDS could be a fully-fledged directory services that
goes beyond the X.500 concept of being merely an e-mail directory.  Hence,
although NDS does not match the 1993 X.500 specification, he stated that
this would not be practical in that NDS is designed to support
administration of servers, users and services in the tightly integrated
means with the network O.S. that happens to also do e-mail services.  For
the future, he stated that the NDS needed to develop better authentication
and authorization via the development of a public/private security
component.  In summary, he said that "to make directory services useable,
it must be administerable" (unlike, in his opinion, the full-spec X.500)
and this is what Novell was achieving with NDS.

The next session I attended was "The Future of Computer Software: OpenDoc"
which discussed Novell's choice (along with Lotus, Apple and other
companies) of technology for compound document creation.  The presenter,
Neil Williams of Novell, said that pure application software as we have
know it is being replaced by compound documents that allows the features of
several different programs to be combined together to make a single piece
of information.  He compared and contrasted OpenDoc with Microsoft's OLE
technology and demonstrated how OpenDoc was technologically superior in
such ways as OLE being a single-layer of complexity while OpenDoc could
provide multiple and hierarchical layers of document construction with much
better cross-platform (i.e, DOS to Macintosh) availability.

The next session was "Designing and Implementing an Enterprise Document
Management System" presented by Todd Abney who worked for SoftSolutions
when it was acquired by WordPerfect which was in turn acquired by Novell.
He talked about the development of a "25 elite person technical group"
called "SWAT" that was being put in place to support all of the products of
the Novell applications group (business applications [PerfectOffice],
consumer applications and the GroupWare products that include "GroupWise",
the "In-Forms" forms design and management software and the SoftSolutions
document management technology).  The team can be reached at
"swat@novell.com".  He went on to describe the SoftSolution document
management technology and stated that it can be used for all types of
files, not just word processing documents.  Through its Open Document
Management System, the SoftSolutions product created a database of
documents that can be fully indexed and searchable.  He stated that both
DOS and Windows clients can be used to archive and retrieve the documents.
One interesting feature of the system that a participant told me about
after the session is that when a document is save to the system, it can
make a copy on both the server-based database as well as place a copy on
the local hard drive, thus created a two-place store of the document.

The next session I attended was "Configuring NetWare 4 for the Mobile User"
by Marcus Williamson that provided a number of interesting tips on
configuration that can be applied to both the mobile and stationary user.
Due to time constraints this morning, I will have to come back to this
subject in greater detail in my final report.  The final session I attended
was entitled "Migrating from Legacy LAN Mail Systems: Upgrading to
GroupWise" that covered conversions from the old WordPerfect Office,
cc:Mail and MS Mail systems.  It was presented by Mr. Andrew Ehat and Ms.
Karen Buckner.  Regarding cc:Mail to GroupWise conversion, there is a
Novell product called the cc:Mail / GroupWise Gateway that allows for both
a migration to GroupWise (with all folders, messages, etc.) and a
coexistence with cc:Mail (until the migration process is complete).  The
gateway requires the cc:Mail Import/Export programs and the cc:Mail
Automatic Directory Exchange program; you establish one computer on the LAN
as the gateway machine between the two mail systems.  You can specify which
side, or both, will be the "master" of the other during the
migration/co-existence period (in other words, you can use cc:Mail
Administration to make changes that are then exchanged into the GroupWise
system via the gateway or visa-versa).  Users can be migrated on an
individual basis or a postoffice basis; the priority of exchange of data
via the gateway is mail messages first, directory synchronization next and
migrate user requests last.  An organization converting to GroupWise could
continue to use the gateway to pass messages from GroupWise back to cc:Mail
and then via the cc:Mail SMTP to the Internet until the migration was
completed in order to not loose this functionality during the conversion.
In speaking with these individuals later that evening at the "Meet the
Experts" session, Norman and I learned that GroupWise does not require the
laborious "check-stat / reclaim" procedure to be run in the GroupWise has a
dynamic, background recover and repair mechanism that takes advantage of
the NetWare 4.1 file structure.

Mr. Norman Spirt adds the following thoughts and observations:

       BrainShare '95 - Day 4 Sessions attended:    Keynote -
Don Tapscott, CEO New Paradigm Learning Corporation     1) Abend Recovery
Techniques for NetWare 3 and 4     2) NDS Security - Access Control with
NWAdmin     3) Novell MultiProtocol Router in the Novell WAN     4) NDS
Partitioning and Replication

     I know that Tom will be detailing the keynote speech, but I would just
like to mention how invigorating and exciting a speech it was on the "New
Promise of Information Technology".  It was easily the best keynote speech
this week.  If the new book Mr. Tapscott co-authored (Paradigm Shift:  The
New Promise of Information Technology) is even 50 percent as entertaining
as his talk, I would highly recommend that you read it.  I know I will.

     Easily the most exciting breakout session of the day was moved to the
vast Huntsman Center and brought in almost as many people as the morning
keynote speeches draw.  Abend Recovery Techniques (Dana Hendriksen)
enlightened many LAN Administrators to the little documented NetWare
debugger.  The consensus among the participants that I talked with was that
when a server abends, there was little recourse but to power it down and
back up.  Well guess what.  A series of keystrokes (<Shift> <Alt> <Shift>
<Esc>) will invoke the NetWare debugger, which will allow the now well
armed administrator with a tool to trace the offending process.  Besides
loosing the feeling of helplessness as we resign ourselves to the reboot
process, we are now armed with the ability to restart the server long
enough to allow it to finish all disk writes, and to down it in an orderly
fashion, reducing the need for vrepair, lost data and wasted time.  This
point was strongly emphasized, so let me also do the same; do not use the
debugger to restart the server and leave it running.  It should only be
used to determine the source of the problem, finish the disk writes, and
down the server in an orderly fashion.  Continuing operation without
downing the server can lead to serious repercussions.  One more caveat.  It
does not always work.  Abends caused by interrupts often leave the keyboard
disabled, and only a reboot or extreme hardware patch can fix this.  More
information and a description of the debugger commands is to be released
soon as an Appnote.

     Novell MultiProtocol Router (Jeff Marchese) was an interesting
alternative to third party router solutions (Novell uses both in their
Network) and the session was centered around Novell's use of MPR to solve
many of their WAN routing problems.

     NDS Security (Bryan Walton) was a nice synopsis of the security
features built into NDS and how to implement them.  NDS Partitioning and
Replication (Steve Jackson) was a very detailed explanation of the
partitioning and replication feature of NDS.  The session was made
particularly interesting by the participant questions and the vast
knowledge base of Mr. Jackson.

Today is the final day of the conference; Drew will be back to hopefully
redeem himself from the Tuesday sleeper.

------------------------------

Summary of Day 5 of the Novell "BrainShare '95" conference.

On Friday, 24 March 1995, the last day of "BrainShare '95," another three
inches of snow coated the city and the surrounding mountains.  Today's
keynote speaker was once again Drew Major and this time his address was
vintage Drew: it was enthusiastic, informative and inspirational.  Entitled
"Raising the Bar: Novell Today and in the Future" he began by outlining his
top-twelve items at "BrainShare:"

1) Network Directory Services (NDS).  He said that everyone was realizing
the value that it provides to the infrastructure of a network and the much
of Novell's new development work would be in improving NDS.  I would agree
and I am sure that my colleague Mr. Norman Spirt would agree since he
attended many of the NDS sessions which were all packed beyond the capacity
of the assigned room.  This was not the case a year ago when, with so few
organizations having converted or even contemplating conversion to NetWare
4.x, the NDS sessions had only average attendance.

2) The 32-bit Client.  Drew said that the 32-bit client (for '386 machines
with 8 MB of RAM or better; DOS, Windows, Windows-95 and later OS/2 and
other implementations) would also receive considerable attention from
Novell's development efforts.  He emphasized that the greater memory
capabilities of this client would allow for a more powerful client that
will provide better file directory and in-workstation file caching
features.  He said that a very important feature would be the "client
assist in server failure" capability of the software that will allow for
restoration of the entire state of the workstation upon failure of the
server, allowing upon reattachment to the network for the client to find
services (perhaps on another server of the network) and to rewrite/update
changes on the network that were processing in the client when a server
went down.  In my opinion, this is all very nice; my only complaint is that
Novell is delaying the delivery of the 32-bit client until after the
release of Windows-95 and is not making any significant efforts to support
the 32-bit operating system which is available today (OS/2).  The other
"discovery" I made at the conference with regards to the 32-bit client is
that the Novell NetWare connectivity that will be part of Windows-95 was
developed by Microsoft and that users will have to wait for the release of
Novell's 32-bit client a month or so after the release of Windows-95 to
employ optimal NetWare connectivity for Windows-95.

3) Telephony / ACNS.  Drew reemphasized Novell efforts with AT&T (as was
presented on Monday) to provide wide-area networking connection
capabilities via AT&T's ACNS services (which will be offered sometime later
this year).  Drew talked about "point and click phone calls," heterogeneous
voice and data connections and better integration of LAN and PBX
capabilities.  In my option, this type of combined WAN / voice service is
appealing but it is a future that may be very costly.

4) The Power Server demo.  This was a multiple workstation network setup in
the cafeteria of the conference that was putting out 30,000 packets per
second using high-speed EtherNet connections.  Personally, since I spent
almost no time in the cafeteria (I never sat down to eat lunch all week), I
only saw this setup in passing.

5. NetWare and UNIXWare.  He said that he was impressed by the improvements
in UNIXWare and that "competion" between development teams at Novell was
helping to achieve higher transaction processing capabilities through such
technologies as "Tuxedo" that would be of benefit to NetWare over time.

6. Novell Distributed Print Services.  This was a new product that Novell
announced at "BrainShare '95" that Drew said would provide better ties
among network printers and other business devices such as fax machines.

7. UNIXWare 2.0.  He once again mentioned his delight with this particular
release of UNIXWare that just recently began to ship.

8. GroupWise.  Drew emphasized that aside from e-mail, this product
provides personal calendaring and colleague scheduling that "I actually
use."  In my option, this product bring a lot to the table for
organizations that are committed to NetWare: single point of
administration, good product features and integration with Novell's other
business application programs such as "In-Forms" and the "Perfect Office"
suite of products.

9. Mobile client.  Drew emphasized that Novell was making strides to
improve the connectivity capability of the mobile NetWare user.

10. NEST.  Drew reemphasized this future Novell technology and its
intention to create "a new class of users and devices" that can be
connected via NetWare.

11. OpenDoc.  Drew emphasized Novell's commitment to this technology as a
means of developing compound / distributed document preparation.  He said
that OpenDoc was more efficient than OLE in that it "cut down packet
transfer" across the network.

12. NetWare for Windows.  Drew mentioned that the latest release of NetWare
can be run as a client under Windows.  Personally, I am not a big fan of
such an approach in that a crash in the client software (Windows) can cause
a crash in the network software.

Regarding Novell / NetWare futures, Drew mentioned the following items:

-- Improved developer support; he emphasized that Novell was committing
significant new resources to assist and promote NetWare development; this
is to include better API tools and greater stability of the CLIB program.

-- Continued emphasis by Novell on the "core business" functions of an
organization; he promised to further "open up" the infrastructure of
NetWare.

-- Regarding "BrainShare" he (and other Novell executives) promised better
session scheduling for next year and Drew called for the removal of the
"Bob & Tina" conference mascots that have been around since 1992.

He then went on to talk about how Novell would assist developers and
integrators to more fully exploit NetWare's infrastructure in three ways:
1) by making the operating system fully available and open to developers;
2) full access to the capabilities of the server platform; 3) significant
enhancements to the fully-distributed server platform.

He continued by discussing technology trends. Regarding "client / server"
he said that the success of this basic technology also relies on the
"server to server" component of the overall network, the ability of the
client software to work as part of a "common team" and the concept of the
"single source" of the network for information that, to the user, is viewed
as a single, logical entities rather than a collection of servers.  He
wanted to see the network be able to add services and increase capacity but
not at the expense of greater complexity of use.  He mentioned that the
value of distributed services is greater fault tolerance, scalability of
resources and improved ability to share resources across the network.

He then continued his discussion of networking futures by talking about the
next-generation "advanced file system" that is being developed for NetWare.
 He said the NDS would play an ever more critical role in NetWare's future
file system and that all subsequent accesses to network files would pass
through the NDS.  He spoke of a "new logical view of files" that can be
more easily replicated and monitored allowing people to use the "new,
logical view" of files.  He mentioned that this will include the ability to
use the local hard drive of the workstation for file caching and storage in
encrypted format.  He revisited the theme of how the client will
participate in the process of error recovery and resource allocation across
the network.  For example, in the event of the failure of one server in the
network, the client will be able to reconnect and redirect its work to
other servers and the data stores on those servers will be updated by the
client software, all with the objective of reducing the failure of the
network when one server thereof fails.  He also added that the server could
work as a replication of the client hard drive.

He cited seven major benefits of this approach: 1) reduced cost of network
management; 2) improved ability to provide backup solutions in the event of
failure; 3) placement of the data closer to the client via migration and
replication (e.g., if the users application is constantly using a
particular data store or component thereof, a copy of this data store can
be replicated in encrypted format to their hard drive); 4) hence, the local
hard drive becomes a part of the network file caching system; 5) the server
strategy can emphasize the server-to-server connections; 6) higher level of
client involvement in the network process; 7) better server performance and
less need to run utilities such as VREPAIR.

He then went on to discuss Novell's two principal networking platforms:
NetWare and UNIXWare and how they are expected to be combined over time
into a "SuperNOS."  He discussed the various strengths of both systems and
said that both would be moved to being based upon a "microkernel"
architecture.  He said, however, that this move would not be at the expense
of performance on the NetWare side and that Novell's commitment to
providing better support for API's and the ability to run VLM's in this
future "SuperNOS." He said that the principal benefit of the combination of
NetWare and UNIXWare via the development of common microkernel will be
better memory protection and the selective use of virtual memory at the
server.  He again revisited the theme that the client software side of the
equation would be improved by putting some of the services which are found
in the server into the client (e.g., file caching and file
replication/migration).

While he was making to formal announcement as to when "SuperNOS" would be a
reality, he stated that Novell "know how to do it" and was already running
prototypes of a combined NetWare / UNIXWare microkernel in its development
labs.

He concluded his remarks by stating that Novell needs help from many
partners in order to realize the "vision of pervasive computing" by the
year 2,000 (i.e., quantified as 1 billion NetWare connections by this
date).  He said that "Novell now knows where it is going" and he called on
all of us attendees to help Novell deliver on the goals of pervasive
computing.

In my opinion, the two most significant items discussed by Drew Major this
day regarding the future of networking with Novell are the growing
importance of the role of the 32-bit client software component of the
network that will be taking over some of the functions (e.g., file caching;
reconnection) that have been preserved for the server.  The second involves
subtle changes in direction that Novell is making in the development of the
combined NetWare / UNIXWare "SuperNOS" (which is something that was
discussed at last year's "BrainShare") being the commitment to the common
microkernel and willingness to use memory protection and virtual memory in
the server to bring "SuperNOS" into the realm of the more traditional
mainframe or midrange computer systems.

This day I attended just two breakout sessions, the first being "Accessing
Network Resources Using NDS" presented by Karl DeBrine.  He talked about
how network design in general was more complex in a server-centric model
but with NDS, the design could emphasize the network-centric model where
the physical layout of the network is less important than the logical
layout.  In order to take effective advantage of the capability of the NDS,
he said that one needs to understand NDS tree design, access rights as they
are controlled by NDS objects, resource / object naming and the use of
login scripts in the NDS environment (particularly in the case of a WAN
environment).  General considerations in these regards include the
organizational chart, geographic location of the organization and its
subsidiaries and the overall resources of computing and telecommunications
that the organization maintains.

He outlined access rights   and emphasized that rights should be assigned
as high up in the tree as possible in that a User Object, for example, has
security-equivalent rights of the Container Object(s) above it.  He also
emphasized the ability to use Printer and other resource objects and to
make sure their names for equivalent-function objects is the same in
different branches of the tree.

The second session I attended this day was entitled "Planning & Designing
an Enterprise GroupWise System" presented by Sean Kirby.  He stated that of
the four basic steps to a successful "GroupWise" installation (planning,
configuration, maintenance and trouble-shooting) the one that should be
emphasized because it is often overlooked is planning.  He stated that
GroupWise "is not a trivial application to implement" and that planning,
aside from mere product education, requires the installer to know the needs
of the client, the network architecture into which the system is to be
installed and the how the logical components (user and resource objects,
postoffices, domains [groups of postoffices] and gateways) are to tied
together.  He outlined the different architectures and clients that are
available for GroupWise (e.g., DOS, Windows, Remote [Async and X.25] and
telephone [for voice-mail] and he mentioned that the ability to customize
the client is good for Windows and somewhat lacking for the others.  He
concluded by outlining available resources for GroupWise system integrators
including a methodology that his group is working on, the monthly NSE Pro
Novell CD-ROM resource publication as well as Novell authorized training
and other publications (e.g., "Instant Experts" guides) that are being made
available.

The remainder of the day I spent reviewing the conference computer
laboratory and working with the conference LAN connection that featured
"GroupWise" and other components of Novell's business applications programs
including "Perfect Office" and several "In-Forms" applications.  The
integration between the components of the "Perfect Office" suite and
"GropuWise" is good (you can directly send the document you are working on
in WordPerfect via e-mail) and the "In-Forms" product allowed me to fill
out and send a conference survey form that could have easily have been any
typical business form (e.g., travel authorization) that would then be
routed via e-mail to the next appropriate recipient.

Norman Spirt adds the following thoughts and observations:

      BrainShare '95 - Day 5 Sessions attended:    Keynote -
Drew Major, Chief Scientist and Senior Systems Architect, Novell
1) Building Large-Scale IPX Internetworks     2) NDS Design Cookbook
3) NetWare Communications Architecture     4) Taking Advantage
of Fault Tolerance in NetWare 4

     Well, day 5 of BrainShare has come and gone, and another wonderful
week of brain overload is behind me.  I will try to pump some life into the
one remaining brain cell and give you a quick recap of the day.

     Both Building Large Scale IPX Internetworks (Radia Pearlman) and
NetWare Communications Architecture (Paul Turner) were centered around the
use of IPX on WAN's, a concept that has peaked my curiosity for some time.
Session 1, expertly taught by Radia (who has a sort of "valley girl"
delivery) dealt with the issues of IPX address space, routing, SAP and RIP
overhead, NLSP enhancements, and security in a WAN topology.  She basically
showed us that it is possible to design and implement IPX as an Enterprise
protocol that is suitable for WAN's.  NetWare Communications Architecture
was also a well presented session that dealt with IPX, RIP, SAP, NLSP and
Burst mode protocol;  their interaction in the login sequence, with
routers, servers and workstations.  The various packet structures were also
examined in some detail.

     NDS Design Cookbook (Blair Thomas and Orland Seaver) was an
entertaining and very informative methodology for NDS tree design,
partitioning and replication and time synchronization.  Mr. Seaver was the
author of the 100+ page document found on the NCS Tools CD which gives a
detailed step-by-step guide for NetWare 4 implementation, and the session
reflected the vast experience the speakers had in the above mentioned
facets of this implementation.  The best information I can give besides
this brief summary is to tell anyone interested this;  you can get the
latest NCS Toolkit CD by writing to "NCS_TOOLKIT@novell.com".

     Finally, Fault Tolerance in NetWare 4 (Randy Stevens) satisfied my
curiosity as to the viability of SFTIII as a solution to a companies need
for high level fault tolerance.  SFTIII has always been on of those
Laboratory experiments that looks great on paper but never seems to result
in a usable product.  SFTIII is essentially a configuration of mirrored
servers and takes the implementations of disk mirroring, disk duplexing ,
TTS (transaction tracking), redundant FATS and hot fix to the next level.
With the release of NetWare 4, it seems that SFTIII has finally achieved
the ranks of a truly feasible solution to fault tolerance.  It also comes
at a fairly reasonable cost; $1995.00 for 100 or less users and $3995.00
for > 100 users (plus MSL hardware - NIC like cards that provide a high
speed link between the servers for sync purposes).

In summary, while there were no block-buster announcements at this year's
"BrainShare" conference like last year when Novell announced the merger
with WordPerfect, the time spent at "BrainShare '95" was worthwhile and
demonstrated to Norman and me not necessarily how much we know but how
much we do not know about Novell, NetWare and Novell's various add-on
products like "GropuWise."  I believe that we are both convinced
("brainwashed" might be a better word) that NetWare 4.1 finally has the
benefits that Novell has promised for sometime regarding the
performance and management features of the operating system.  The
challenge now is to apply what has been learned to a successful
conversion process.

Thomas E. Costigan Jr.
Pan American Health Organization (PAHO)
PAHO ACS Unit / User Support Group
525 23rd Street, N.W.
Washington, DC  USA
tel: 202-861-3357  fax: 202-861-8441
work e-mail: costigat@paho.org
personal e-mail: tcostigan@mcimail.com

