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Microsoft Claims 3.3 million NetWare Migration Win
Anonymous Coward writes "For the second year in a row, Microsoft has waited for Novell's annual BrainShare show to start before claiming a huge customer migration win off NetWare and onto Windows. According to this article Microsoft says that there were more than 1.8 million successful commercial sector migrations in 2005 alone, and a total of 3.3 million customers migrated over the past two years. It has also launched a new program to lure customers in the education and state and local government sectors off NetWare and onto Windows." Novell's comments are enlightening about where they see themselves within the market.
And in other news today: Apple smuggly announced that the iPod is greatly outselling 8-track tape players.
I'm Novell certified and have (had) been admining Netware boxes for over a decade. But I haven't touched one in more than three years. NDS is worlds better than Active Directory, especially in a true enterprise-sized installation. However, the supposed debate is moot in 2006. Netware got clobbered like Netscape Navigator did. Too many software vendors have stopped writing versions of their products for Netware, and too many hardware vendors don't write drivers. I commend Novell for trying to turn their ship around and not resigning themselves to annilation. Their committment to SuSE is a very wise move, IMHO. So enough with the marketdroid strutting already. This hasn't been news since the last century.
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The first one of you Windows 2000 babies to say "What's Netware?" gets smacked with my walker.
these customers are choosing to upgrade to Windows, rather then follow Netware's recomended upgrade path (linux)
In other news water is wet, fire is hot and rocks are hard. Our sources predict that soon Microoft will trash linux, stay tuned....
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
This really illustrates the greed inherent in the capitalistic model. It has nothing in particular to do with Microsoft. If Novell were cleaning Microsoft's clock, they'd probably do the same thing. Microsoft's only sin [in this case] is that they have ammo while Novell's clip is empty.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
With the exception of NDS vs. AD, Novell did not win on a technical front. I've been admin'ing Netware servers on and off for 10 years and I must say that the OS itself is rather arcane. The interface (console) is awkward and the OS is built on obsolete computer science. It uses cooperative multi-tasking and almost all NLMs run at the kernel level. So that a bug in most NLMs can and will abend (BSOD for you Windows guys) the server. Personally, I'm sick of it. I currently maintain 2 Netware 6 servers and simply unloading a module can either hang the console (requiring a reboot to fully recover) or cause some kind of critical system fault (sometimes and abend).
That said, we're not about to migrate the servers to Windows. So we're kinda stuck until we can find a satisfactory Groupwise replacement. And I still like NDS. I am also a Linux admin, and so far I haven't found any good open or closed source groupware packages for Linux. Almost all of them that I have found maintain some proprietary user database. That just won't do. We need centralized directory authentication.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I work in a Novell shop. I'm a Windows sysadmin. My preference is for Windows, so I'm looking at this from that point of view - and I'll admit I'm biased towards Windows.
Novell QA went right down the crapper in recent versions. Netware would crash multiple times per day when it was first set up (we moved from Banyan Vines) - it took years of patches from Novell to get it to any semblence of stability. The Novell client often breaks things with each new version - and it's a pain to instruct new users on the difference between a local (Windows) login and their Netware login.
While NDS is great, the management tools for it absolutely suck. Novell went schizophrenic on the management tools - you have iManage, NWAdmin, and ConsoneOne, all of which can do some things but not everything, so you need 3 management tools just to manage Netware.
Groupwise is absolutely hideous - the client is unintuitive and fell out of the ugly tree. Things which are easy to do in Outlook are a chore to do in Groupwise. Oh, and Groupwise didn't even have a flag in the client to indicate if you had replied or forwarded a message until ~2 years ago - I'd have to go searching through my Sent mail to figure out if I had replied to a message.
Novell fumbled, and Microsoft picked up the ball - Microsoft went out there with excellent marketing, developer support (including hardware/device driver support), and incentives to switch. Microsoft didn't get it right with their first versions (Windows NT 3 anyone?), but they kept at it and kept improving the software.
I grew up with Netware. I started my career in IT with Netware 3.x. You could load it on a box with 5MB of disk space and very little RAM. It made one hell of a print server and file server. NDS came out, and quickly we began setting up NW4.11 servers. I finally acquired a job at a multi-billion dollar corporation with 10s of 1000s of users and 1000s of computers. NDS was a champ. Group policies were a cinch. If you wanted to do something at any OU level, you could imagine it and do it easily. You could set a login script or permissions from the top or at any place down, all the way to a single user. It was understandable, flowing and made sense. It happened immediately. NW4.x servers could run tons of applications and not miss a lick. We had 300 sites nation-wide with a mix of 3.x and 4.x servers.
.12 boxes that ran for years. The time they finally died was when the corporation decided to go to Windows and we turned 'em off. We had a running tally of the longest running box found. The winner had years of run-time on it.
3.12 was a gem. Those damn things ran and ran. Only hardware would take it down. Most of the time problems stemmed around 3rd party backup software. Netware was never perfect, but to me it was as perfect as any NOS could be. People rail against Btrieve, but I supported it and never remembered it being that big a deal. We had 3.11 and
There wasn't a single, solitary thing wrong with Netware and no good reason, either support or money, to switch off it.
We went to Windows. NT4 was liquid shit. The old Netware guys were boggled at why we did it and wtf management was on. They joked: "got an application? make another server." Literally, we had to build a new server per database, per application, per anything. For the first time we understood that you had to restart windows, so a priority became scheduling weekly restarts of Windows boxes for no other reason than to make sure they kept running well.
As our IT shop grew and younger blood came in, we were hiring sharp, young guys who had known nothing but Windows. NT4 being ancient to them. So our main Cisco switch seemed to be an issue one day, and what do they do? They restart it. It turned out not to be the switch, but you can see their mindset -- restarting is what you do when managing servers. It's what you do with Windows.
Active Directory comes out. We use it today, but it's improved little. I manage it ever hour, and am constantly faced with the awkwardness and inability to do things in it that I could easily do a decade ago in NDS.
A server shouldn't have a fucking GUI. A server shouldn't need restarting. A server should serve data and services and that's it. It should be reliable. A directory service, directory tree should not need constant massaging and developers to create things that were built-in to another DS years ago.
The last time I ranted like this, I got modded down, but that doesn't change the fact. Management migrates off of working platforms and onto Windows for no other reason than marketing....
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Your strange little editorial on what the article says:
Asked where Microsoft had gotten those specific numbers, Gavin said they represented the number of "successful migrations completed in partnership with Quest Software in 2005," but he was unable to immediately provide eWEEK with information on whether these numbers represented individual customers or total users or what versions of NetWare they were running.
What the article actually says in case anyone is interested.
Asked where Microsoft had gotten those specific numbers, Gavin said they represented the number of "successful migrations completed in partnership with Quest Software in 2005." The figures also reflect the number of users rather than individual commercial migrations, and reflect migrations off Netware versions 4, 5 and 6 with Novell directory services 4, 5 and 8.
Sheesh! Directly after you stope your quote they specifically say exactly what you say they don't say. And it gets modded up?!?!?!?
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert