Novell Still Runs Windows

daria42 writes "Despite Novell's internal migration to Suse and OpenOffice.org, the company admitted today that up to 3000 of its 5000 workers still had dual-boot installations with Microsoft Windows. These users are likely to be migrated to pure Linux boot systems in the next year or so." From the article: "Hovsepian's remarks indicate Novell will have at most a few months' experience as a complete Linux and open source desktop shop behind it when, according to the vendor's predictions, the software starts taking off in the mainstream." Update: 04/11 13:25 GMT by J : At the closing OSCON session, August 5, 2005, Miguel de Icaza talked about Novell's progress. My notes read: "novell's moving 5500 employees from windows to linux. first stage, office->openoffice, is complete. second stage, windows->linux, is 50% complete, proj. 80% by Nov."

Re:I'll tell you why: The high cost of training

[wurd]

i'd generally agree, but this should be less relevant in a business setting (it's a safe bet that those 3000 people are sticking with windows for quake 3). like they said in the article, things like porting macros from MS office probably aren't worth the immediate effort. along with that, any office i've worked in would be stuck with a bunch of legacy MS Access databases that would have to be converted too, and as far as I know there wouldn't be any easy way to handle reports or forms from Access using open source tools.

Re:Zenworks or what?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was in High School, we just used NIS (and NFS-mounted home directories). When the school decided to "upgrade" (after receiving a contract with Dell) to new WinXP/AD boxes, we actually had an easier time "breaking the rules." The complex system of policies was easily circumvented, although this was all moot since a virus (which, as of my graduation, was still not completely resolved) knocked it all down anyway.

Worth checking out

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW...

We've just had a vendor pitchfest for a replacement OS for an elderly unsupported RH release in use on about 4000 servers (my employer's a dotcom with piles of machines in many remote datacentres round the world.) We've had Sun pitching Solaris, Red Hat on RHEL and Novell/SuSE. I must say the Novell/SuSE pitch was the most unexpectedly impressive; Crispin Cowan's AppArmor is really, really good (I'm biased: I'm a security geek) and seems to be much more usable than SELinux. Xen also seems to be happier on SuSE than RH.

Sun had a good story now they can say Solaris is really Free, but they seemed very defensive (spent 30 mins showing us balance sheets marked "Sun confidential, internal use only" emphasising they make lots of money and aren't about to go bust. But we would definitely be a relatively small customer for Sun, whereas I'm more convinced that Novell would be prepared to go the extra mile to keep us happy.

Personally I'm going to be trying SLES out on at least one machine at home, alongside OpenBSD and Mandriva, regardless which OS our beancounters plump for.

Makes sense.

[gregarican]

There are likely some departments within Novell that still are dependent on Windows for third party apps. Like an accounting or payroll department perhaps. Are there enterprise level Linux apps that would support them? Not trying to flame. Just a question.

Re:Windows? Duh!

[LWATCDR]

I as going to say that Novell should keep some Windows systems no matter what. Think about things like Samba or if they want to contribute to OpenOffice they might want a few Windows systems running Office to check compatibility.
Frankly I would love to hear that Novell has a few Solaris systems, a few BSD systems, and maybe even a VMS system or two.
I am all for open standards and supporting as many different OSs and ISAs as is practical.
BTW was the other company you worked for the one that is now unspeakable?

Wine

[Anonymous Coward]

Until wine is in decent shape, it is pointless to approach general public to switch. While it will never run 100% of the applications,
it is not necessary. It just a larger fraction of the applications than it currently does.

Having said I was surprised to see how far it has come. I tested several niche applications used in the insurance industry with codeweavers. None of them had a problem. While I am not ready to recommend wine as an option in our company, I have a hope that
in future it can become a reasonable recommendation.

Report

[supra]

I wonder if they are generating a report of the migration (positives and negatives).
And if so, will they publish it?