Vote early and often!

Tech Republic is running a poll: "Are you running any classic Novell products on your network?" Here's your chance to let the world know that NetWare is your choice!

Novell less rubbishy

Novell just released financial results for its fiscal third quarter which ended July 31, and the news isn't all bad. As reported by Timothy Prickett Morgan at IT Jungle:

"the fact that NetWare sales are not plummeting, as they have been doing for many years, is probably equally significant and worthy of some attention."

The company managed to reduce it's net loss by over $3 million (from $6.5 million to 'only' $3.4 million). Morgan seemed almost giddy as he said:

"If aggregate NetWare and OES sales declines continue to shrink, as they have done in the past two quarters, and if Linux sales continue to grow, as they have particularly since Novell's distribution deal with Microsoft, then Novell could actually end up being a profitable company again..."

Just think what could happen if the company actually spent a couple of bucks marketing NetWare/OES...

Practical joke

Mike Hillwig posts a note on his blog today recalling a practical joke played "back in the days of Novel [sic] 4.0."

"When I was at Fiserv, we had a senior vice president that nobody seemed to like, including my boss. This was back in the days of Novel 4.0, a good eight or nine years ago. Somebody had set the VP’s password to expire every few days. And then, they set the password change prompt so that it would prompt him five days before the password was due to expire. On top of that, his account was set so that he couldn’t use the last hundred or so passwords. This annoyed the shit out of the VP. When he called the helpdesk, nobody could seem to figure out what the problem was. But with this setup, he was somehow being prompted to change his password every time he logged into the network.

My boss called the whole team together and wanted to know who the hell did this. He tried to yell at us because that’s what was expected of him. As he tried to be upset, he just couldn’t keep a straight face. It was quite possibly one of the best IT pranks any of us had seen to date.... or since."

Novell branches out!

My clipping service dropped this headline into my inbox today: "Novell Introduces The BIG Wedding Ring For The BIG Commitment"!

At first I thought the Linux business must be really in the toilet - but there were all those Linux World press releases that seemed to say otherwise.

Who knew there was a Novell Design Studio in Roselle, NJ? But check out the cute logo!

Novell - Stop Blaming NetWare

The Kiwi, "Retroguy" has some interesting facts and figures posted over on abeNd.org calling into question Novell's mantra that they discontinued NetWare because sales were falling drastically. Definitely worth a read.

Users: plus ca change...

From ComputerWorld's Shark Tank: "Why we love users":

"NetWare admin pilot fish receives a trouble ticket from the help desk and now can't decide whether to be more irritated at the foolish user or at the clueless help desk worker who didn't spot a phishing expedition. The problem: 'User reports that she received an e-mail at home stating that she had tried to log in with an incorrect password too many times to a banking system that she wasn't even a client of, and so that banking account ID had been locked. Could this be why she had trouble logging into her NetWare account at work this morning?' "

Users haven't changed in 20 years!