NT 5 Coverage | Suite101.com

You can find out quite a bit about NT 5 and its technologies from the Microsoft NT 5 Beta Site: it has hosts of dry whitepapers about NT 5 technologies available for download, including

And if you don't want to download whitepapers, you can check out the following sections of Microsoft's beta NT web site for lists of key new features:

Application Services

File, Print, and Web Services, where you'll find some details about NTFS 5.0; read about distributed link tracking, the new backup and defragger utils; see the new features for dynamic web sites and Net Show; and the like.

Networking and Communications Services, covering mainly the improved protocols, services, and their security; Smart Cards; etc.

Management Services, including a brief overview of ADSI, Intellimirror, MMC and its snap-in modules, the blasted Wizards (Setup, Safe Mode, System Recovery, Driver Incompatibility, etc), and WSH.

The Book

All of those topics are covered, well, and in context, in NT 5: Next Revolution, the "beta" book I mentioned in the 10/13/98 Update. It's not bad for a "beta book"! There's a lot of focus on Active Directory, although I think its clear that the authors pretty much equate Active Directory with NT 5.

However, there are also chapters devoted to NTFS 5.0 and Kerebos (security), two subjects that I don't think have had a lot of treatment until recently; user and server administration (MMC, Windows Scripting Host, and so forth); and network communications. And all of it's sort of wound together (with Active Directory) to describe Microsoft's vision of distributed computing (read: Cairo, I guess).

The first chapters are devoted pretty much to the history of operating systems, NT, NT's competitors, and so forth. Threaded throughout the remaining sections are historical comparisons of technologies (like Active Directory vs NDS vs Street Talk; and COM vs COBRA) You won't really read anything in here about Sun's JINI, though.

For an excellent overview of JINI, see last week's Infoworld article.

I hate to say it, but the book is somewhat dated now -- but that's what happens with "beta books". The general conception of NT 5 now is that it's less of a revolutionary product than a necessary upgrade to an ancient one! Maybe deserving of the new version number, but not deserving the Cairo moniker... yet.