Network Operating System Certification Schemes
Madge Networks is a member of Novell's NetWare Certification Alliance
(NCA) and maintains a Novell accredited test facility at its Research
and Development headquarters. This allows full certification testing
of Madge products with the latest Novell software to be performed
by Madge under the conditions defined by Novell. Once completed,
Madge test reports are submitted to Novell for verification. Approved
test results, detailing the products and environments tested are
published by Novell as technical bulletins, which are available
on-line from the relevant pages on Novell's WWW site (http://labs.novell.com).
This enables Madge engineers to test and certify our own network
drivers in parallel with Novell's on-going operating system development
program. This means that, when a new version of NetWare is released,
Madge already has a fully tested and certified set of drivers.
Thus, the next "Green River" release of NetWare in 1996
is expected to ship with certified Madge network drivers "in
the box" from day one.
Madge actively participates in IBM's 'Tested and Approved' certification
programs in order to verify compatibility between its adapter
cards and OS/2 Warp-based systems. Once a Madge adapter completes
internal quality testing, it is submitted for independent testing
by the IBM Integration Test Lab in Austin,Texas, USA. This involves
testing with a wide variety of IBM and non-IBM hardware and software
products in customer-like environments. Once a product passes
these tests, IBM publishes the test report and issues a notice
that confirms its compatibility.
In the past, Madge products were certified under IBM's OS/2 and
Warp LAN Systems certifications programs. Madge products are now
tested as part of the new "Tested and Approved for OS/2 Warp Server "program
that has now superseded these earlier schemes.
For more information on these schemes please refer to the IBM WWW site (http://www.developer.ibm.com).
Madge has a long standing relationship with Microsoft, which began
as early as 1988 with the licensing of Madge Token Ring source
code for the original version of LAN Manager. More recently, Microsoft
signed a technology licensing agreement with Madge, which enables Microsoft to embed Madge driver source code in the latest 32-bit operating systems, starting from the new release 4.0 of its NT client-server network operating system.
Microsoft perform both compatibility and product development-level
testing in their own labs, which includes Madge Token Ring adapters as a standard component
in their test PCs. This means that Madge adapters are both used
with early pre-release versions of software and tested in a broad
and representative range of desktop hardware and software environments.
New adapters drivers and products are submitted as early as possible
to Microsoft for testing and approval. Newly certified products
are then added to the Microsoft Hardware Compatibility lists for Windows 95 and Windows NT
(refer to the following WWW sites for more information: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/thirdparty.htm and http://www.microsoft.com/NTServer/hclintro.htm).
Currently, all Madge adapters are certified for Windows, with the latest generation of Madge Plug 'n' Play adapters for ISA, PCI and PCMCIA applications being certified as "Designed for Windows 95".
Madge actively participates in the SCO Tested and Supported program, in order to verify compatibility between its adapter cards and SCO software. Once a Madge adapter has completed internal testing it is submitted to SCO for compatibility verification testing.
SCO produce a Hardware Compatibility Handbook which lists all the third party hardware that they have tested or that
the hardware vendor supports. For more information on this guide or on the Tested and Supported program in general, please refer to SCO's web site (http://www.sco.com).
Banyan publish a Hardware Compatibility Guide which lists all the third party hardware that they have tested and approved for compatibility with Vines. For further information on this guide, please refer to Banyan's WWW site (http://www.banyan.com).
The Solaris Hardware Compatibility List is published every two or three months. Madge submits drivers for certification by Sun and these are included in updates to the operating
system. For further information on this guide, please refer to Sun's WWW site (http://access1.sun.com/gateway/certify/hcl.htm)
![[Adapter Installation]](../../../graphics/bk_hw.gif)
![[Driver Installation]](../../../graphics/bk_sw.gif)
![[Software Utilities]](../../../graphics/bk_cfg.gif)
![[Additional Information]](../../../graphics/bk_plus.gif)
