Of the five NOS reviewed, top honors (Excellent) went to Sun's Solaris 8 and IBM's AS/400. The middle tier (Very Good) was filled by Novell NetWare 5.1 and Red Hat Linux 6.2. Trailing the others (Good) was Windows 2000 Advanced Server which was considered considerably more difficult and more expensive to integrate.

Now this can not be considered an unbiased review, given how Sandy "Windows NT is clearly the future" Reed staffed the publication. Certain little things are obvious. Linux was penalized because existing staff would need to be trained on it, while Windows 2000 was not penalized even though Microsoft has decreed all MCSEs must be retrained on Windows 2000 or be decertified because it is so much more complex than Windows NT.

We await the VAR Business ratings, gathered from people who actually have to implement this stuff in real life, to get a reliable picture of how it's going. The address for the InfoWorld article is: Mastering integration.