Novell To Launch Enterprise UDDI Web Service Late This Year

Novell

The enterprise UDDI service, which will be available later this year, will allow a company's partners and customers to discover, publish and access Web services from behind the corporate firewall. Novell's eDirectory can be used to authenticate users and developers interested in accessing the services, Novell executives said on Tuesday.

Novell also detailed a slew of new Web services being developed, including Novell Workspace Services, Novell GroupWise Services, Novell Portal Integration Service, Yahoo Portal XIS Service, XML Store Service, LDAP Client Service, SOAP Client/Server Services and UDDI Client/Server Services.

While Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Oracle and IBM have articulated their Web services strategies, Novell has been conspicuously quiet on that front until now. The company said at BrainShare 2002 Tuesday that it fully intends to exploit its reputation in the directory, management and security market segments for the Web services era and that its forthcoming Web services are simply extensions of existing Net services that fall in line with Novell's One Net vision.

Like Microsoft, Novell intends to transform its server products such as Workspace, GroupWise and Portal Server into XML Web services that can be leveraged over the Internet. Many of the Web services are under development and it's unclear how many will be commercialized and made available to developers, solution providers and customers by Novell.

"As Web services becomes more ubiquitous, managing them and finding them become very important," said Mitch Merrifield, a Novell product manager, during a presentation at BrainShare. "Novell gets it. We see the value and our Net services will become Web services.

XMP Integration Services (XIS) is an XML framework for creating directory-enabled services. Like Microsoft's .Net, XIS provides a way for third parties to plug-in and extend Novell products on the server. Novell has also developed directory management Web services based on its iManage and enterprise directory management toolbox, known as emBox.

Developers and solution providers will be able to access Novell's Web services from its UDDI directory, as well as those of other software companies and Web service publishers. They can also harness the collaboration services of Workspace--including the task managers, hot list, item lists and inbox components--and integrate them into their own Web services.

In addition, corporate customers can publish Workspace team projects on the UDDI registry and give access to their partners and suppliers securely. Clients also may subscribe to Novell's UDDI and SOAP Services to enable their own applications for the Web services era.

As part of his opening keynote at Brainshare on Monday, Novell Vice Chairman Chris Stone outlined a new Web services charter for Novell based on a massive rush to Internet standards and a de-emphasis of proprietary interfaces. The company plans, for example, to employ XML as the sole application interface for eDirectory and its other directory-enabled applications over time, Stone said.

Novell intends to embrace all Web service standards including XML, UDDI, SOAP and WSDL, Stone said. "We expect to drive the entire adoption of UDDI. We have Net services, and we are moving to extended Web services. We will be based on XML, and that's it. We're not doing proprietary interfaces."

Stone also predicted that the launch of intra- and inter-enterprise Web services will benefit solution providers. "What a wonderful way to re-energize the channel," Stone said during his keynote.

In the meantime, Novell has limited support for UDDI and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) in its Falcon eDirectory, due to ship in July, but plans to incorporate more full-fledged support for UDDI, SOAP and WSDL later this year or in early 2003, Novell's directory executives said at the show. One month after Falcon ships, Novell plans to release UDDI code to enable Web services on its directory server platform.

Like Microsoft's forthcoming .Net MyServices platform and Blizzard Web services, Novell's Web services are targeted at corporate audiences. "Our vision, our mission, is to embrace Web services," Merrifield said.