Stark and Clear? (Score 2, Insightful)

What do you base your stark and clear choices on? Banyan was the first company to come up with directory services. Novell really took directory services to the next level when it came out with NDS and NetWare 4. Wow one place to manage users, servers, printers, file system, DNS and DHCP, pretty cool. Well, Microsoft not to be outdone started calling NT's domain a directory so that they could compete with Novell. Novell threatened to sue MS about the false information on the MS web site about NT's "directory" and MS had to pull it. So, you guessed it MS had to have a directory and eventually after years, came up with Active Directory. Novell's NDS has evolved and MATURED, key word here, to eDirectory. eDirectory is a very scalable, over one billion objects, robust, LDAP v3 compliant directory services. Novell's Identity Manager product gives one the abililty to manange identities in a mutli directory/database environment. eDirectory runs on NetWare, Linux, AIX, HPUX, and Windows. There are other directories to consider including Sun, IBM, Seimens. Novell also has Groupwise email and groupware, and a pretty awesome desktop management suite, Zenworks, both managed in eDirectory. If I were you I would talk to the vendors and better yet talk to sites who have implemented AD, eDirectory and the others to do some due diligence and help make a good choice. Lot's of people think that Novell is dead. This is not true. Check it out.