Your chance to tell Novell what you really want with your Linux

Novell is conducting a survey on its “Cool Solutions” Web site to determine which applications you, dear reader, wanted to run on a Linux platform but couldn’t. The thought was, I believe, that the company could take this data to the application vendors and say “See, you need to port your application to SuSE!”

As the introduction to the survey says: “A lot of people are converted to the idea of switching to Linux in their data center based on the tremendous cost savings that represents, but find that there are one or two key applications they need to use in their business that are currently not available on Linux. The vendors who create those products need to hear about your needs, but they need more than one or two requests to make it worth their investment.”

So what “data center” apps made the top 10? According to the posted results:

1) Quickbooks

2) Autocad

3) Photoshop

4) iTunes

5) Dreamweaver

6) Visio

7) Lotus Notes

8) Quicken

9) Macromedia Studio

10) Act!

ITunes??!?? Are you running iTunes in your data center?

There are a lot of multimedia software listed, but very little (i.e., none) in the way of network or server management which leads me to believe it’s developers, not IT managers, who have answered this survey. There’s still time for you to contribute, though. Judging by the e-mails I get from readers of this newsletter, it’s networking services and tools, network and server management and IT productivity software that you want ported to the SuSE (or any other Linux) platform. It’s one of the major reasons why you’re still running NetWare. So here’s your chance to tell Novell and see what it can do to help.

By the way, I noted that the form you fill out at the Novell site asks what Novell products you are currently using, with a drop down list for you to select from. Notable missing from the list: NetWare. Open Enterprise Server is there, half a dozen different flavors of ZENworks are there, GroupWise and even Hula are there, but no NetWare. Not even a choice of “other” or a blank line. So when you do take the survey, and you should, be sure to indicate in the “comments” field that you use NetWare, and you’re proud of it.