Re:help me out here... (Score 5, Interesting)

I think you'd be surprised who uses Netware and it's services. I work for IDC, International Data Corporation. We use Netware and Suse in most of the 47 countries we have offices in. I used to work in the corporate headquarters in the US where we have Netware 5.x and 6.x file/print/services servers in all the offices. They mostly run for over a year or more between reboots. Those are usually for service packs and rarely for abends. Netware/eDirectory is very low on the scale of adminstrative burden and it allows us to manage the network and desktops for 750+ users in 7 offices across the States with only 2 full time desktop support staff and 2 admins who also take care of many other systems. Most of our sites with 10 to 50 people don't have a local admin and run quite happily. Novell's ZenWorks is phenomenal for remote application delivery, imaging, remote control and inventory for the desktop. I moved to Australia in May to bring IDC AP over to Novell services, running on the Linux kernel with OES. It's a slow process getting the entire region ready for the change. So far I have our New Zealand office migrated and the Sydney office is very soon to follow and some of our services in Australia are already on Netware. Since I got here I've had to manage two Windows domains and though I started with NT domains many years ago I feel like I've got an arm tied behind my back administering the Windows networks, services and users. Things that are so painless with Netware are either difficult or not possible with NT domains. I've been so spoiled with Netware I can't wait to be rid of the domains! Active Directory is better than NT, but from what I've seen (it's in a few of our offices over here), it's not nearly as fully featured as the far more mature Novell eDirectory product. Our current Netware sites will gradually migrates to Open Enterprise Server runnin on the SLES Linux kernel and many of our core services are running on Linux. If it wasn't for vendors who only roll out applications only for Windows machines - Patchlink, ePo, etc, we wouldn't have any Windows servers. I agree with an earlier post that Novell's marketing efforts have always been their downfall. It's too bad really, because it is such a superior product to choice of the huddled masses.