Tool from start-up to unlock net directory data

AUSTIN, TEXAS - Software from an Austin, Texas, start-up will soon let network managers without programming skills transform directory information into business applications.

Visual Click Software's application development tool, dubbed click:Vision Manager, will let users create applications from information that is often not readily available to nonprogrammers.

Founded in May, the company is debuting software for NetWare that lets a net manager click on NetWare directory information and drag and drop it into position to create applications for NetWare. For example, net managers could write applications to find out which users have too many access rights, generate company telephone lists or easily migrate directory data from NetWare to Windows NT.

The software will be followed by a release that works with Windows NT and Windows 2000 Active Directory information.

Click:Vision Manager will allow the use of a variety of information maintained by the network operating system. For instance, in NetWare users will be able to monitor how well the network is operating or troubleshoot user problems by tapping into the performance data and statistics that NetWare keeps.

John McCann, president and co-founder of Visual Click, claims that NetWare's NDSAdmin and ConsoleOne utilities do not let net managers access and make use of all the information contained in the directory. This restricts net managers without programming knowledge and familiarity with Novell's APIs and function calls.

Click:Vision Manager transforms the same NetWare APIs and function calls into components that execute an action. For instance, a network manager could create an application for department administrators that allows them to change passwords for each user in the company, without giving them access to all the other features of NWAdmin.

McCann, using traditional programming techniques, wrote such a program in eight hours for a customer. Using click:Vision Manager, McCann could write such a program in about three minutes.

Bob Markham, senior network architect for the American Red Cross in Washington, D.C., was a click: Vision Manager beta tester. Markham is using the tool to build applications for his network, which serves 30,000 full-time users and more than one million volunteers. "I need to create software that is immediately intuitive and easy to use because I have a high number of volunteers that are not trained on using the network," Markham says. He also expects he will be able to give click:Vision Manager to his network administrators and others so they can develop applications.

Click:Vision Manager will be available in November at a price of $595 per server; a Windows NT release will follow in March 2000.

Visual Click: www.visualclick.com