“Nearly every IT director is familiar with Novell’s NetWare operating system and its strong network directory. But despite a string of reorganizations and refocused marketing messages, Novell’s fortunes remain tightly hewed to its base of NetWare customers, which has shrunk substantially at the expense of Windows. Chris Stone is out to change that. Stone rejoined Novell nearly one year ago as vice chairman after a three-year hiatus. His mission: explain how Novell’s trove of slick networking technology solves thorny business problems, like security and identity management.” Read the interview at C|Net News by Martin LaMonica.
Novell: Getting its Story Straight
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I worked at Novell when Chris was there before. I think it was him that pushed the “Ch-ch-ch-changes” fishbowl commercial on TV. I like other operating systems better for my personal servers, but Novell does make some really cool products. I hope they can do well.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
OS2 Warp, Beos, AMIGA, SOLARIS, NETWARE, …
What do these have in common?
If microsoft owned any of these products and marketed them what would have happened?
LEARN TO MARKET! These are/were some of the best products around.
We are going to loose Netware at my school district because they will not discount like Microsoft and Apple do. Too bad because, when we migrate we will have to hire more people.
Dan
Re Vito:
Ones perception of realiy does not alter the said reality.
Novell’s client is horendous. Takes a reasonably decent 2ghz machine and turns it into a 486. The client takes something like 64MB or *real* RAM (in our setup, anyways. Then again the Novell admins at my job are re-fucking-tarded)
Dan: I believe Novell’s educational discount is 50%. Even if M$ gives you a better discount, you’ll still need twice as many servers. Who wins in the end? On the other hand, Apple’s servers are easy to administer, very reliable, and you don’t have to pay for client licenses (which could be a huge savings).
Blah: As a Novell admin myself, I think you’re company’s Novell admins must not be doing their job well. The Novell client does eat a fair bit of memory, but it is not slow. You would be amazed how many network performance problems are due to Windows itself! A little bit of tuning can go a very long way. Tuning the client is something a Novell admin should know how to do. There is even a website dedicated to the task. http://www.ithowto.com/novell/clientspeed.htm
By the way, ITHowTo will claim you should use IPX for performance, but that is a bad idea for most networks. IP is definitely the way to go for larger networks and some of the newest features only work over IP.
Also, you may be using Novell Distributed Printing Service and ZENworks for Desktops, which also add to the memory usage, but they are separate add-on products. In fact, the ZENworks for Desktops 4.0 agents do not require the Novell client.
Finally, eDirectory and ZENworks make the Windows world bearable, even if you don’t use a NetWare server. eDirectory and ZENworks can both be installed onto a Windows server. Let me say it one more time, you do not need a NetWare server to use ZENworks. ZENworks can let a top-notch destop architect manage a couple thousand workstations. I even read about a university with over 5,000 workstations being run by only six people. That’s awesome.
You haven’t used NetWare in awhile, huh?
Client? We don’t need no stinking client!
>”Novell’s client is horendous.”
It’s using a little more than 3Mb on this machine. As a Netware Network Administrator with some Windows Network contamination here and there, I consider Linux a much greater threat than Windows. The speed of Netware networking (IPX) is so much greater than Windows networking that I find it inconceivable that people that make the change don’t deeply regret it afterwards.
>LEARN TO MARKET!
What he said. Oh, and quit the B.S. products like Groupwise. Also, I have to have an email filter for novell.com because of the amount of SPAM they send me. Oh, and quit buying companies that don’t improve Netware or NDS.