Last issue I told you about the good news Novell is generating in the run-up to Christmas. But there are a couple of lumps of coal in Jack Messman's stocking.
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Trying to put a good face on what is definitely bad news, a Novell press release trumpets: "Novell today [Dec. 13] announced it will hold its first unified global BrainShare Conference" in March in Salt Lake City. Of course, there's been a BrainShare conference in March in Salt Lake City for the past 15 years. What this announcement really means is that BrainShare Europe and the other "mini" BrainShares that have been tried at other cities over the years are no more. It's just another cost-cutting move, no matter how Novell tries to spin it.
That's not as troubling as the report I got from longtime reader Lewis Rosenthal about his trip to Provo for a training session, which included a discussion of the Open Enterprise Server (OES) roadmap. Rosenthal wrote: "I just thought I'd share with you a little bit I picked up while attending the OES Roadmap today, at ATT Live, here in Provo." Sounds good. But he gets right into the troubling news: "I can say without much doubt that NetWare - as we know it - will be vanishing in the next few years. Sometime after Cypress ships (the next version of Open Enterprise Server), Novell will be rolling out NetWare 'viX'. This will be a specially optimized version of NetWare to run in a virtual session on the Linux kernel, allowing 'legacy' NetWare NLMs to run in such an environment until such time as these applications can be migrated to OES Linux natively."
That's both good and bad news, I guess. Novell isn't simply shutting the door on the accumulated NetWare applications and utilities you're using. Not just yet, anyway. Well, Rosenthal does say that "Novell has no plans whatsoever to port iFolder 3 to NetWare, so the end of the iFolder line on our kernel is 2.1."
Rosenthal continues: "There will be IA-64 support for the Linux kernel, but as of now, Novell has no plans to support NetWare running natively on 64-bit hardware. While Novell has made a 10-year commitment to support and update other venerable products like GroupWise, they refuse to make a similar statement regarding NetWare, and believe me, many of us have buzzed about it."
Dave Kearns is a writer and consultant in Silicon Valley. He's written a number of books including the (sadly) now out of print "Peter Norton's Complete Guide to Networks." His musings can be found at Virtual Quill.
Kearns is the author of two Network World Newsletters: Windows Networking Strategies, and Identity Management. Comments about these newsletters should be sent to him at these respective addresses: windows@vquill.com, identity@vquill.com .
Kearns provides content services to network vendors: books, manuals, white papers, lectures and seminars, marketing, technical marketing and support documents. Virtual Quill provides "words to sell by..." Find out more by e-mail.
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