“The line between the Internet, intranets and corporate networks is blurring, and it has become more important to get to the information - regardless of the source,” said Morris Taradalsky, NetObjects executive vice president of server products and professional services.  “Novell’s NDS provides secure, location-independent access to the valuable intranet resources needed by today's increasingly mobile end users while improving Intranet efficiency tremendously.  Not only does it simplify network management, it reduces cost of ownership, making it a win-win for everyone involved.”

 “NetObjects enterprise customers have always benefited from the unique ability to easily build intranets, but now they have something new with NDS integration,” said Michael Simpson, director of strategic market planning for Novell.  “They now can seamlessly and securely inherit the extensive information that NDS maintains about virtually every device, server, service and application within their network; which greatly reduces the complexity of intranet creation and makes NetObjects products more attractive to a larger audience of customers than ever before.”

NetObjects Authoring Server (NAS) delivers the best solution for collaborative Intranet building that allows workgroups to spontaneously and easily create an Intranet that shares valuable corporate data across the enterprise.  The NAS solution enables teams to collaborate across various roles and responsibilities by providing control of the web production process and empowering content owners who have different skill sets. Customers of NAS include Bell Atlantic Network Integration, Cellular One (Bay Area), Travelers Life and Annuity, Thomas Cook, and VLSI Technology.

With the incorporation of NDS within NAS, the network administrator can use the single, logical listing of network resources and services NDS creates to provide Intranet access with a secure login.  Open platform support of NetWare, Windows NT and UNIX environments allows NDS to be platform agnostic, ensuring a single source of access information across the enterprise.  Developers and other IT professionals are discovering the power of directory services for user access (single sign-on), system management (single point of administration) and application development, simplifying information technology use, administration and development. Together with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), a standard protocol that enables directory-based applications to consistently exchange data across directories, NDS can provide one contiguous, seamless infrastructure inside and outside the organization.

In addition to this technology support, Novell currently bundles and ships NetObjects Fusion™ with the Novell Netware for Small Business 4.2 product. NetObjects is one of the Novell Ventures’ investments and Novell executive Christopher Stone is on the NetObjects Board of Directors.

About NDS 8
Novell Directory Services, NDS—the world's leading directory service, is an integral component of Novell's directory-enabled NetWare platform strategy. It is the unifying, cross-platform infrastructure for managing, securing, accessing and developing applications for all the major components of a network. NDS 8 achieves unprecedented levels of scalable performance. It has the ability to store and manage over a billion directory objects such as users, applications, network devices and data—millions of objects more than competing directories. As a result, customers can grow their networks and Internet-based services without interruption, and deploy the highly centralized directory applications required for e-commerce and other Internet services. NDS 8 natively supports the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) v 3, enabling interoperability with other LDAP directories and support for all LDAP applications.

About NetObjects
NetObjects, Inc. (NASDAQ: NETO), majority owned by IBM (NYSE:IBM), is a leading provider of e-Business software and services that enable small businesses as well as large-scale enterprises to build, deploy and maintain Web sites on the Internet and corporate intranets. The NetObjects product family includes NetObjects Fusion and NetObjects Authoring Server Suite. In addition, NetObjects offers its customers on-line solutions, including content, products and services to help them register, host, build, maintain and promote their Web sites.

NetObjects has been ranked by Softletter 100, NewMedia 500 and as one of Fortune's 25 Very Cool Companies. Its products have won over 50 awards including InfoWorld's Analyst Choice award, CNET's Internet Excellence award, PC Magazine's Editors Choice award and InternetWorld's Industry Award. More information about NetObjects and its products can be found at www.netobjects.com.