Hi Joe..Here is a good article about Intranetware
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Network World
Novell poised to push out NetWare 3.X
By Christine Burns
10/21/96
Four could turn out to be a lucky number for Novell, Inc. in getting its dyed-in-the-wool NetWare 3.X users to migrate to the company's latest release.
IntranetWare - a bundle including NetWare 4.11, Novell Web Server 2.5, an IP/IPX gateway and File Transport Protocol services - is the fourth iteration in the NetWare 4.X line since it was released in April 1993. InternetWare hit the streets two weeks ago, and customers that have traditionally clung to their 3.X servers are taking a serious look at Novell's new bundle-in-a-box.
Chuck Klucko, a systems engineer at Goldco Industries, Inc. in
Loveland, Colo., is planning to make the jump to NetWare 4.11 this spring, largely because more software vendors are writing off-the-shelf business applications for the upgraded operating system and Novell has built symmetric multiprocessing support into the product.
'With all the bells and whistles they have included in the box for free, they have really made the product interesting to us die-hard 3.X users,' said Klucko, who recently hosted a 3.X to 4.X migration seminar for members of his local NetWare user's group to demonstrate the benefits of Novell's latest release.
In the past, customers clung to NetWare 3.X for its stability.
Deterrents to migrating from it included hassles with moving 3.X bindery information to the Novell Directory Service (NDS) and the learning curve involved with managing the new directory.
Doug Freeby, a systems analyst at ABB Environmental Services, Inc. in Portland, Maine, said his company is halfway through migrating its 14 3.X servers to NetWare 4.X.
'We want the obvious advantage of having NDS everywhere, but we are only migrating at a pace that our budget and man-hours permit,' he said. 'Fortunately for us, 3.X is stable enough to allow us to stay with it until we can afford to move.'
Novell's present installed base comprises twice as many NetWare 3.X customers as 4.X ones. But Samm DiStasio, product marketing manager for IntranetWare, said sales of NetWare 4.X products now make up 70% of the company's network operating system sales.
'We've eliminated a lot of the barriers to [NetWare 4.X] adoption,' Di-Stasio said. 'We've included graphical wizards for step-by-step 3.X migration and tools to help you manage NDS. And since 4.X has been out there in use for three years now, its stability has become tried-and-true.'
One reseller who has not sold a single copy of NetWare 3.X in the past six months predicted that most NetWare 3.X users will migrate to either NetWare 4.X or Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT by the middle of next year.
'NetWare 3.X has pretty much been running out of steam. New
application support is diminishing, and its technical limits have been
stretched beyond anything that Novell had designed it to handle,' said
Dennis Cheek, senior network consultant at Networks, Inc. in Delray Beach, Fla.
Moreover, according to DiStasio any company looking to deploy a
corporate intranet would find it costs less to upgrade to IntranetWare than to buy the neccessary components to set up an intranet on a NetWare 3.X net.
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>>Novell's present installed base comprises twice as many NetWare 3.X customers as 4.X ones.<<
I never thought that ~36M users are still using Netware 3.x. Should Novell be able to convince most of these users to upgrade to 4.x or Intranetware, they will be in a fine shape. But again, Who Knows?. They seem to screw-up every opportunity.
Regards
Salah |
