A clientless future...

...will be populated with a lot more itsy bitsy agents.

If Novell wants us to be able to access their servers without any additional software on our part, they have a lot of work to do. You see, the client is a think app. It does lots of things. It allows you to have NCP-access to the Netware server. It allows your NDPS to work correctly. It resolves your Novell hosted resources. And most important of all, it has a login script.

I'm afraid you're going to have to pry that login-script out of our cold dead hands.

iPrint is a nifty idea, but requires an agent. It installs pretty easy, and the user may not notice that it is an agent. Works good. Requires login for audited printing. Users get dinged for each page they print just like they're supposed to. Spiffy.

And NetDrive allows you to map a drive to a Netware server not running Native File Access Pack. And if it is running NFAP, theoretically you can login without anything special. Though, your clustering may not work as well as it would with NetDrive. Pretty cool when it works.

ZenAgent allows your machine to be more hackable administerable from your administrators. Extra spiffy. With niftiness.

But where is my U: drive? My P: drive? My Q: drive? How the heck am I supposed to remember the UNCs for all the drives I need access to? Aren't they supposed to magically appear wherever I go? How am I, as an administrator, going to force every user that logs in to my servers to run a specific executable, such as a Zen update? Login script!

Yes, Zen may be able to reproduce a lot of that through cunningly crafted Group Policy Objects. Or Run Always application objects with drive-mappings. But that's not the same. Oh, no. A login script is universal to all Novell Clients from back in the 16-bit netx days to the latest Win2K/XP v4.90sp2 client. It runs more often, and more reliably, than Zen for Desktops runs. Oh, login-script. How I adore thee.