RM Net LM was a very successful product. In fact, it was probably one of the most successful LAN Manager based products around the world. Launched in 1992, it offered one of the most appropriate network solutions for UK educational establishments. It was based around Microsoft OS/2 LAN Manager, which launched in 1989 as a joint venture with IBM. However, Microsoft and IBM were unable to maintain a working relationship, and IBM subsequently produced IBM OS/2 LAN Server. Microsoft then began development of an entirely new Operating System, Windows NT.
Microsoft had always promoted LAN Manager as their preferred networking solution, and wanted it to become an industry standard comparable to that of Novell Netware. LAN Manager offered significant integration benefits over Novell Netware, with a more mature set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), giving greater control of events around the network. RM were able to take advantage of this and developed RM Net LM to provide a highly educationally orientated integrated network solution.
Although when initially released in 1992 problems were seen with some of the components, the overall concept behind the components has remained the same throughout the release of RM Net LM 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 and RM Net LM 2.0. The level of integration built into RM Net LM meant that it was rare that a Network Manager or a user of the network should have needed to use the standard Microsoft tools to the control the network environment, except for changing details such as access rights or changing server configuration parameters. Also, the majority of the tools were Windows based, enabling a familiar user interface to be used which was reasonably intuitive to the user, and detailed help on Administration tasks.