From what I have seen so far of the Windows 2000 beta, calling Active Directory a directory in the same sense that NDS is a directory is ludicrous.

From what I have seen so far of the Windows 2000 beta, calling Active Directory a directory in the same sense that NDS is a directory is ludicrous,

There hasn't been a [Windows] directory before, there's just been trees and network diagrams and information about who is on your network. This conversion will require people to really do some work.

They have user IDs in Active Directory now, so they have simplified things somewhat. Now they want a full Kerberos infrastructure with smartcards for their Unix systems. With VAS version 3.0, we are now providing a complete NIS replacement including migration with a full set of tools.

The notion is to [unify] Active Directory, which is about as ubiquitous as it gets, and use it more strategically. It will spur use of [these features].

They've really done a 180 on this. The new fix that they have in Beta right now for Outlook completely removes programmability except as manually authorized in each case by the user. And this will break, frankly, a large number of corporate applications, but for the general user this is the right thing to do.