Novell nixes personal directory

I recently wrote about an interesting technology Novell was working on - but I just found out that the technology was killed before my column ever made it to print.

In last week's Wired Windows column in Network World, I spoke about Novell's proposal of the .DIR global top-level domain to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and how it might be used.

In the column, I referred to personal directory services, a new technology that I'd just read about from Novell Developer Services, described as:

"Novell Personal Directory enables all of a user's personal information to be stored and managed in a [Lightweight Directory Access Protocol]-based personal directory under the direct control of the individual. It also provides controlled sharing of such information to external parties (individuals or organizations). It does not depend on an external server, but it can leverage one if it exists."

I'd also spent a few hours on the day I wrote the column talking with Novell's Kent Prows about the .DIR proposal and how it could leverage technologies such as personal directory.

What I didn't know, what Novell Developer Services didn't know and what Prows didn't know, was that almost a week earlier the personal directory technology had been killed by product management!

Evidently, at Novell it's not considered necessary to let the rest of the company know which products are going to go ahead and which are to be stopped dead. Not only were the left hand and the right hand not communicating, they were acting as if the other didn't exist.

Granted, the death of personal directory technology doesn't affect the .DIR proposal that much, and "federated trees" are much more important than personal directory to that effort. But it would have been a nice "extra."

It's been said that there's no such thing as bad publicity, but Novell is trying very hard to test that philosophy.

Dave Kearns is a writer and consultant in Silicon Valley. His most recent book is "Peter Norton's Complete Guide to Networks" published by SAMS. Dave's company, Virtual Quill, provides content services to network vendors: books, manuals, white papers, lectures and seminars, marketing, technical marketing and support documents. Virtual Quill provides "words to sell by..." Find out more at Virtual Quill or by e-mail at info@vquill.com

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