About time Novell got into action. I have been working with Suse for a few years now and think it is a great distribtuion, but as a former Novell CNE am a very large fan of Novell Directory Services for managing systems and users. I recently installed Netware 6.5 because it has some features that Linux is lacking (from my perspective) such as the iFolder option from Novell and Document Management under Groupwise. With Netware also offering Ldap, NFS, Apache, email it was looking interesting. Unfortunately I guess Netware is 'old news' and if Novell can make a stronger offering by porting their product line to Linux maybe they can recapture some of the market share. There alternative might have been to create a file system for Linux that was fully integrated with NDS, although I have wondered for a few years why they cannot manage NFS properly via NDS.
By moving the product line to Linux they bring the best management environment for an enterprise network and if they can make managing several thousand Linux desktops easier (KDE or GNOME) maybe they can compete with Microsoft again. They can effectively adopt a similar attitude to IBM and Linux. IBM spent hundreds of millions on OS/2 and Lotus Office and have no desktop share, but if they fund the open source movement into a position of competition with Microsoft I will be happy.
It also saves them having to maintain seperate ports of popular unix applications such as Apache and Perl, and will allow me to use my preferred language of Python. Of course we will probably here statements that Netware is not going away for the foreseeable future...
For me it is a good merger, Novell have some of the best technology. Although they still need a new marketing department. After so many years they still come up with bad names and mangled english. Nterprise, Nsure etc.. is that the best they can do?
Learn about Linux
Download Linux
Get Linux help
Novell & Suse
Posted by: ajts on November 07, 2003 05:54 PMBy moving the product line to Linux they bring the best management environment for an enterprise network and if they can make managing several thousand Linux desktops easier (KDE or GNOME) maybe they can compete with Microsoft again. They can effectively adopt a similar attitude to IBM and Linux. IBM spent hundreds of millions on OS/2 and Lotus Office and have no desktop share, but if they fund the open source movement into a position of competition with Microsoft I will be happy.
It also saves them having to maintain seperate ports of popular unix applications such as Apache and Perl, and will allow me to use my preferred language of Python. Of course we will probably here statements that Netware is not going away for the foreseeable future...
For me it is a good merger, Novell have some of the best technology. Although they still need a new marketing department. After so many years they still come up with bad names and mangled english. Nterprise, Nsure etc.. is that the best they can do?
#