Novell Announces Agreement to Acquire Leading Enterprise Linux Technology Company SUSE LINUX

Is this a good thing knowing what Novell's past performance..??

http://www.novell.com/news/press/archive/2003/11/pr03069.html?sourceid=suse_nzone_press

 

Somehow I have a feeling SCO is really going to hate this... )

 

Evolution and Suse Enterprise - looks like a replacement for Groupwise to
me.

They could be banking on having an Exchange compatible Exchange
alternative. I wonder if we'll see a port of Evolution to Windows soon?

Cheers
Anton

 

It includes IBM taking a $50 million stake in Novell.
Perhaps thats why Redhat are focussing on the Redhat Enterprise Linux
branding.

 

Mutley allegedly said:

http://www.novell.com/news/press/archive/2003/11/pr03069.html?sourceid=suse_nzone_press

They are still there.....and must have enough money around to acquire SuSE.

With Red Hat climbing up the ladder into IBM-Enterprise land and leaving
"Fedora" behind as the cutting edge 'farm team', this could be a good move
for SuSE and for Novell.....and for for small to medium businesses
especially looking for Linux solutions.

 

AD. allegedly said:

Not an easy call. Anything you port to Windows can be subverted by Microsoft
- leaving you with a support headache and customers with sabotaged software
that won't work from time to time after applying MS patches.

Any former DR DOS or OS/2 user knows all too well how Microsoft uses it's
updates to destroy compatibility with competing products.

Better to say to customers: "you want mail? You want Internet? You want an
office suite? Who cares what the OS is? Go Open Source."

 

No. They are sure to stuff it up.

Cheers,

Cliff

 

....except that mo one in their right mind would trust anything with
the Novell badge on it. Imagine! They might try to port Groupwise to
Linux!

Cheers,

Cliff

 

Enkidu allegedly said:

I've never used Groupwise.....though I'm pretty sure you have.

Evolution would be a better bet.

 

Lots of sysadmins are very happy with Netware. They don't listen to pro
MS fud from the likes of you

 

Listen, pro-MS fud indeed! I've used Groupwise and Novell so I'm
talking from experience! I'd say that Novell Netware probably is a
sysadmins dream. It certainly isn't a user's dream and Groupwise has
to be the worst groupware product ever!

Cheers,

Cliff

 

Already done (well, in beta at the moment). Java based.
http://collaborationadvisor.com/doc/12724

and

http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/gwmag/features/a_cross_platform_clien
t_gw.html

 

Enkidu allegedly said:

Dunford walked right into that one.

 

Tell me it's a joke!! I still wake up in a cold sweat when I dream
about the day that it decided I wanted hundreds of copies of the same
invalid entry in my address book! Or the day that it started a
mailstorm and brought down the Australian Internet gateway! Or the day
that it decided to turn all my emails into Greek! (or something. Maybe
it was Klingon or Elvish, I dunno).

A contact at a certain telco told me that they were changing to
Groupwise. Sure enough, I started to receive scrambled emails from
him. It also forwarded one of his emails to everyone in his address
book.

Normally I'd blame the user, but having seen what Groupwise can
achieve totally on its own account, I'm inclinded to give him the
benefit of the doubt.

Cheers,

Cliff

 

And have you actually used or administered a GroupWise system since version
5.x?

Yes end users have always hated the GroupWise Client (I myself did to)

But that all changed with 6.5 which has a new Client that is comparable to
Outlook 2000. I upgraded my organisation to 6.5 recently, and the end users
love the new client.

As for the 'worst groupware product ever'

GroupWise is in third place in terms of worldwide usage behind Exchange &
Notes (respectively) and many Exchange 5.5 sites have migrated to GroupWise
because of licencing costs associated with newer versions of Exchange.

If GroupWise is so shit, then why is Microsoft still ripping features off
GroupWise. When Novell released GroupWise 6.0 in 2001 including a new mode
for remote users called 'caching mode' it was also positioned as a method to
fit more users onto a single mail server.

Microsoft released a whitepaper slagging it off as an 'undesirable feature'.
Now with Exchange & Outlook 2003 Microsoft are going "gee look, we have this
new 'caching mode' " which they are also stating as a means to fit more
users onto a single Exchange Server.

In Outlook 2003 they have also ripped off Search Folders (which every
version of GroupWise since 5.0, circa 1996! has had) and operating remotely
over SSL without the need for a VPN (OK, to be fair, GroupWise 6.5 only came
out 8 months prior to Exchange 2003)

Yes GroupWise trialed Exchange by a long way for User Mailbox Restrictions &
Extend-SMTP (but NT4 trialed NetWare for Disk Quotas! and only just now can
you undelete network files with Windows Server 2003)

GroupWise has always led Exchange in terms of Web Access functionality as
well. I'm sure that part of this strategy has been because Microsoft wanted
to sell as many Outlook licences as possible. Exchange 2003 may finally have
moved ahead, but unless you are using IE, then how well are all those active
X controls going to run on a non-microsoft browser running on a
non-microsoft platform.

And with GroupWise, our organisation has NEVER suffered an outage due to an
email based virus attack.

Novell are now working on a version of the GroupWise backend for Linux, and
a GroupWise connector for Evolution.

 

No, I stopped at 4. But from what I hear it has not improved.

But NOT because it is so much better. In fact it is not.

Why shouldn't they? One or two good ideas don't make a good product.

Oh, you mean like synchronisation in Lotus Notes?

OWA works quite happily on Opera and on Mozilla.

Maybe, but Groupwise is perfectly capable of screwing itself up. It
was (V4) quite capable of filling an address book with hundreds of
corrupt entries. It was quite capable of sending emails to the wrong
people. It is quite capable of showing you someone else's email. It
was quite capable of causing mailstorms. It is quite capable of losing
emails, even when stored safely, it was quite capable of letting you
delete an email, and then have it reappear when you restarted and it
was definitely capable of causing a machine to crash. All these things
happened to me. Frequently. And others that I've mercifully forgotten.
It was a daily trauma.

When we got to use Lotus Notes it was a great relief, though Notes
would not be my choice.

Good luck to them. They will need it.

{Please reply, but I'll stop here. We'll soon start to revisit old
ground. Let's agree to disagree?}

Cheers,

Cliff

 

Just coincidentally read (in a MS newsgroup admittedly) of an
organisation that had their NDS trashed by a virus. Poster was a NDS
fan.

Cheers,

Cliff

 

That is just like saying that Exchange Server 2003 is shit just because
Microsoft Mail Server was (which it was back then), hello we are talking we
are talking almost 7 years difference in development.

Version 4 as you know was the first 'Novell' version of GroupWise after they
acquired it from Word Perfect Corp (OK, I won't go there : )

Given a personal choice between Outlook 2003 & GroupWise 6.5, of course I
would agree that the Outlook Client is a lot more feature rich & that
Exchange Server is a significantly better platform for development &
third-party development.

But isn't the primary purpose of a mail system to do messaging? Do you think
all the people @ Ford Motor Company or @ Compaq were wondering 'Gee Exchange
is a great development platform' when most of their Exchange Infrastructure
was down for over 24 hours as a result of Love Bug and the rest of these
email viruses. (Ford did take most of their infrastructure down voluntarily
to avoid further infection, but an outage is still an outage).

Sure you block attachments & disable VBScripting & Outlook to stop all this,
but then Exchange & Outlook aren't quite as 'feature rich' then are they if
you have to disable these things to stop virus infection.

Agreed. Point Taken.

No I do not mean sychronisation like Lotus Notes, Caching mode operates
completely transparently to the user in the background. Before that
GroupWise had Remote Mode which operated in a 'semi-automatic' fashion
making it more similar to Notes' Synchronisation.

Premium mode of OWA (as opposed to Basic Mode) under Exchange Server 2003
does not work at all under Mozila 1.5 OR Opera 7.21 -a fact I tested this
morning.

Yes I am sure they will probably work fine with OWA 2000 or 5.5

V4 was a long time ago, although I do agree that generally if you have a bad
experience with a product, you generally don't want to go near it ever again
no matter how much other people say that later versions have improved. A bit
like me with ARCserve really -although in ARCserves case it's in reverse : )
a good product getting shittier & shittier.

Yes they will, they are betting the whole survival of their company on
Linux, past history may not support my argument, but I think they will
survive.

After all, isn't that what Microsoft wants everyone to believe? You better
go with us because we are going to kill all the competition and then you
will be stuck with costly migrations to our products anyway?

Microsoft products generally are good. I don't disagree that a well setup &
administered Exchange System will run with five nines uptime, but then again
so will a GroupWise system or a Notes System.

Anyway it comes down to more then just technology, it comes down to choice.
If no one had a problem paying Microsoft's licence fees, then I think
everyone would be using their products, but Microsoft don't believe people
should have a choice. They talk about ABM's ('That guy is an Anything But
Microsoft'), but they are all NBM's (Nothing But Microsoft).

For the record my preferred Desktop OS platform is Windows 2000 / XP, my
preferred browser is Internet Explorer and my preferred Office Suite is 2000
/ XP.

This is where Microsoft get 80% of their revenues from, but that isn't
enough. Their business strategy is simple.

Everything.

 

It was probably NDS which was based on the RECMAN database, a simple but
primitive Fixed Length Record Manager. The last version of NetWare to use
the RECMAN database (NDS versions 7 and earlier) was 5.0

NetWare versions 5.1 & later have used eDirectory which uses a highly
scalable indexed database with full roll-forward & roll-back transaction
logging.

Novell have scaled eDirectory to over a billion objects, each with thousands
of attributes.