* Bindview adds to bv-Control for eDirectory and bv-Control for NetWare
Bindview of Houston got its start with utilities for NetWare. The company name, in fact, came from its then flagship product, a BINDery VIEWer for NetWare 3 (the Bindery was the place where authentication information was stored, the predecessor of eDirectory).
Four or five years ago, though, Bindview “followed the money” and started taking a much stronger interest in Windows networks, even going so far as to produce utilities designed to ease the migration from NetWare to Windows after acquiring Entevo, a successful developer of Windows NT to Windows 2000 migration tools. Bindview even went so far as to conduct a nationwide seminar series (along with Microsoft and ePresence) designed to show you how easy it was to move to Windows and why continuing to use NetWare was a bad idea.
The company recently announced new versions of its bv-Control product for NDS eDirectory and bv-Control for NetWare products (which had been semi-comatose for a while) in an effort to secure more regulatory compliance business. According to the press release, the new products provide “organizations with the most comprehensive administration and security compliance solutions for Novell operating environments.” Well, maybe.
Turns out that these really aren’t stand-alone solutions, but require additional functionality (that is, additional licensed products) from Novell. The new bv-Control for NetWare is really “bv-Control for NetWare with Nsure Audit,” while the new tool for eDirectory carries the full name of “bv-Control for NDS eDirectory with ZENworks and Nsure Audit Reporting.”
If you’re already using bv-Control, and you already have Nsure Audit and ZENworks, then the new releases may be useful to you. They do add improved auditing and reporting tools that bv-Control, Nsure Audit or ZENworks don’t provide on their own, so that’s a plus. But if you have ZENworks and Nsure Audit, all the new utilities do is to automate things you can configure manually and add some canned reports.
Still, on the plus side, it’s one of the few new releases of any third-party product for NetWare and Novell environments and should be encouraged on that score. Take a look and, even if it’s not for you, you might drop Bindview a note to encourage the company to release more NetWare utilities. It couldn’t hurt.
