[Justin Thyme]

You're right Mark, Novell does have some great technologies. And many of their supporting products integrate great with NDS.

I think one thing that held them back, is that they waited too long to introduce an ability to do fairly routing administration tasks (creating users, groups, printers) at the server itself.

And I think, marketing and the power of the Microsoft machine had some to do with it too.

Mike
CNE

[usconservative]

I think one thing that held them back, is that they waited too long to introduce an ability to do fairly routing administration tasks (creating users, groups, printers) at the server itself.

That, and crappy marketing. Hate to say it (as a former CNE who let his certification lapse long ago...) but Novell is all but dead. Their market share is dwindling, and about all they can do right now is hang onto what they have. NDS may be a superior directory service, but Microsoft's marketing machine is gonna kill it with the next version of Active Directory. In fact, did you know that Novell's NDS team is down to 7, and many of them jumped ship and went to Microsoft to work on AD? Novell is investing almost $0 in upgrading NDS. Microsoft is spending tens of millions of dollars on A.D. Paul Reiner, one of Novell's chief NDS Architects now works for Microsoft. Reiner authored the authoritative NDS books for Novell.

Remember Novells "Changes" campaign? Boy, that really sucked. I cringed everytime it came on tv.