As of this week, Novell has launched OES2 SP1.
See the announcement

OES2 SP1 is packed with powerful features and makes for an excellent replacement for your Netware systems.

One *very* cool feature that's included in OES2 SP1, is DSfW.

For those feeling forced to migrate to Windows, mostly because there is high demand for some form of application integration that is only available on AD... DSfW might be your ticket to getting best of both worlds!

DSfW, full out Domain Services for Windows, is a service that enables your OES2 server to emulate the functions of a Windows Domain Controler. With this you can specify which parts of your eDirectory will also be propagated as full AD objects.
The DSfW service will emulate a total Domain that holds the user accounts, groups and other objects you want to propagate.

This solution goes past your ' normal ' synchronisation solutions, e.g. Novell Identity Manager, as there is no copy of the original object... the object you have in the eDirectory is the same object that you present in your AD domain.

This brings you a very powerful solution to yet again be able to maintain your Novell implementations and at the same time being able to introduce AD integrated products, without the hassle of having to maintain two synchronised directories.

I'll be writing more about this, also on how we plan & implement the solutions it brings.

In the mean time... have yourself a look and seeing the holiday season is coming, you might find some spare time to build yourself a small test environment and see for yourself what it can do for you!!

Cheers,
Wj