Users express doubts over NetWare 6

Users are reluctant to upgrade to NetWare 6 and fear for the future of the product line, according to delegates at BrainShare 2001 in Salt Lake City.

However, delegates are generally confident that Novell will continue to succeed although possibly not with NetWare 6. Six customers went on stage to talk about their satisfaction with Novell, but none intended to upgrade to NetWare 6 in the near future.

Dan Hancock, network manager at Jefferson County, said: "I'm concerned that NetWare won't be a supported product in two to three years' time, very concerned. If so, I may have to look at Linux or NT."

Joe Simmons, IT director for electronic payments provider Verifone, commented: "There is no justification to upgrade to NetWare 6 next year. There's no need for it. I'm not led by upgrades, but by business needs."

Oracle's recent announcement that it will stop supporting NetWare in 2003 has done nothing to allay these worries. Instead of remaining a networking company, delegates said they believed that Novell will evolve into an e-directory services firm.

Bob Stevens, president of consultancy Avanti Network Systems, said: "The rumours of Novell's death are untimely. The fact is that Novell is technologically superior to most other products in the marketplace."

Novell is more confident of NetWare's future, however, saying that it will continue to support it and that it is working on a 64-bit processor version of NetWare, called Novell64.

But it was reluctant to call Novell64 a new version of NetWare, as it is intended specifically for large enterprises. "Some people in the press called it NetWare 7," said Jim Tanner, director of product marketing at Novell. "So we just let them."

Set to launch this summer, NetWare 6 is built around "transparency of access", according to Tanner. "In the internet world, users don't care how they're accessing a server or even which server it is. NetWare 6 has abandoned the idea of a client on each machine," he said.

Central to NetWare 6 are new features iPrint and iFolder. The former uses Novell Internet Printing to give a printer the capabilities of a web server, allowing users to send and print documents from remote locations across the internet, while iFolder uses the web to intelligently synchronise file backups.

This is an edited version of a story to be published in the 29 March edition of Computing