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Mike Sanford of Santa Cruz Operation, widely known as SCO, presented
information about their cooperation strategies with WinNT. They offer a
product which competes with the free Samba package which makes an SCO UNIX
server look like a WinNT server to Windows client workstations. The package
uses technologies licensed from Microsoft through NCR to provide these
capabilties. UNIX servers and printers show up on the Windows desktop in
the "Network Neighborhood". Underneath, the UNIX file system protections
provide final authority on just which UNIX files a Windows client can
access. UNIX print queue managers actually drive the printers.
SCO also offers their Vision products which provide Windows clients access
to various services of a UNIX Server. These include Xterm access, SQL
access through ODBC, and others. All of these services support a Microsoft
specification for allowing a Windows client to access server services.
Since Microsoft is trying to use these specifications to extend their
domination of the desktop into the server market, they tend to change
frequently. Microsoft also introduces little technical refinements designed
to exploit WinNT server features into these client interfaces.
SCO is also working on a project called Gemini which integrates OpenServer
UNIX and UnixWare into a single package.
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