More Novell

Here are more observations from my attendance at a Novell conference.

I attended a session titled "Defense against Microsoft"  The speaker spotted me right away and we had a good conversation.  I listened quitely to his argument for Groupwise and against Microsoft Exchange.  His facts about exchange were either old or incorrect. It was hard for me to listen, but I really wanted to know what was being said.  He said things like Exchange 2007 is built on SQL(WRONG), Exchange 2007 requires Vista 64 Bit (WRONG, yes Exchange 2007 server does have to be on WINDOWS 2003 64bit, but the clients can be running 32 bit), 32 Gig was the largest supported Post office(just flat WRONG), and 500 users was the max you could reasonably expect to support on one server(My mailbox is on a server that has over 5000 users, yes it is a BIG server, but we each can have up to 2 Gig mailboxes, that's a big server!!)

I heard several times that Exchange 2007 requiring 64BIT hardware and Server OS  was a "Bad Thing" Just amazed me.  I really don't think they understand what that means.  Almost all servers sold today are 64 bit anyhow!  And they played up the "No inplace upgrade"

Most of his data was on Exchange 2000 and 2003. Installation marketshare slide he had was 3 years old.

The discussion around Outlook was very interesting.  He said, "give up the desktop, people want Outlook, it's not a bad client".  But then turned around and said Outlook has the most Security holes, etc.

 After his session we had a great conversation. I got him access to the Exchange 2007 Beta and we exchanged contact information so I can help him get more accurate information in the future.