Novell Open Enterprise Server

Last week, I went to a class for Novell Partners on Open Enterprise Server - the transitional NetWare 6.5 that's based on SuSE with all the NetWare services ported over. I was duly impressed - the released product fits right into the typical NetWare shop - it can be managed as just another server in the tree and even ports over the NWCONSOLE so users can have the familiar CLI available. For ConsoleOne users, that's missing, but otherwise it's pretty much the same old. The base file system is now EXT-based, but it's transparent. And since it's Linux under the hood, you can now run all your Linux application processes on it instead of relying on NLM's.

Combined with the current NLD 9 (and the just-announced-at-Brainshare NLD 10), Novell is making a strong case for Linux throughout the enterprise, as well as finally providing an attractive migration path for the legacy NetWare users besides Windows 2003. The tough part will be getting the last of the NetWare 3.x users to move up - there's still a lot of them out there (like my old company), and nobody's really doing a great job of luring them.