Novell Portal Services
Novell Portal Services (NPS) is a product from the new Novell, a hard-core believer in platform choice. Although Novell has been preaching directory services for a number of years, the company has had a NetWare bias. Company representatives were taken aback when we told them we were installing on NetWare. Our contact in the NPS product group said the people there had done most of their testing on Windows 2000 and thus were most familiar with that platform. They were able to help us get up and running on NetWare, but more important, they revealed a definite yet surprising change in corporate ethos.
In another shift from the proprietary, NPS uses any 100-percent-LDAPv3-compatible directory for portal configuration, security and management information. Novell would prefer that you use eDirectory -- and, no doubt, support issues would be smoother since Novell technical services personnel are most familiar with eDirectory -- but you can use another directory. NPS runs as a Java servlet and requires a servlet engine/Web server combination. Novell has tested NPS on JRun/IIS on Windows NT/2000; Tomcat/
Apache on NetWare, Solaris, Windows NT/2000 and Linux; and IBM WebSphere/NetWare Enterprise Web Server.
How do I Scale This Thing?
Scaling NPS means adding NPS servers and sticking a load-balancer in front of the server farm. Administrators use the Web-based administrative interface to add servers to the portal by editing the server list in the Portal Configuration Object.
NPS scalability involves two different storage mechanisms: the directory and the file system. The directory simplifies scaling NPS because it represents a single information-storage location that is replicated automatically. Make a change to a directory object and it will be replicated to every system that holds a copy of the directory. NPS connects to the directory for information about what to serve to whom, so no additional configuration is needed on the Web server itself.
NPS data and the installed components, or gadgets, are stored in the Web server's file system. This is not an unusual configuration, but it does mean you'll need to configure and maintain a file replication process to keep the portal servers file systems in sync with one another once you begin to scale up your portal solution.
It's a Framework
Novell includes a number of components to connect your portal to content. NPS includes gadgets for access to GroupWise mail and calendar information, Exchange and IMAP/POP mail, and an NNTP gadget for access to Usenet news groups. General-purpose gadgets make it possible for you to include content from any HTTP or XML data source, including frame-based content that includes JavaScript. Using the RSS (Rich Site Summary) gadget, we were easily able to customize the portal by adding a number of XML-based, syndicated headline feeds from Moreover.com.
Other useful gadgets include a phone book that publishes white pages information from the directory, a network-file gadget that gives your users access to read and write files to a server, and a Citrix Systems gadget to publish applications to the portal.
That's about it out of the box. At this stage, NPS doesn't include a search and relevance engine, document-management facilities, collaboration features, indexing or content crawling. While Novell's GroupWise compares favorably with competing products from Microsoft and Lotus, the same can't be said of Novell's portal offering because of its bare-bones feature set. As a portal framework, we think NPS is a good start with its standards-based, cross-platform server based on Java, HTML, XML and LDAP, but it suffers in comparison with the competition. With per-user pricing at $59, Novell has priced NPS competitively. The company also offers per-server pricing at $49,000.
Novell Portal Services 1.0, $59 for one user license. Novell, (800) 453-1267. www.novell.com
Ron Anderson is a senior technology editor at Network Computing. Before joining the staff, he managed IT in various capacities at Syracuse University and for the Veterans Administration. Send your comments on this article to randerson@nwc.com.
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