Many of the attendees came to hear about NetWare, just as in previous years, but NetWare was barely mentioned. This indicates to us that NetWare 5.1 is the last big hurrah for this venerable server operating system, and Novell's focus has shifted elsewhere.

How does this affect our clients? Not a lot. Novell lost their small business focus years ago. Well we remember the days when small business clients demanded NetWare and considered only Netware, but now it doesn't even occur to them. Novell offers a very nice, very competitive "NetWare for Small Business" network / Internet suite, but you aren't even going to hear about it unless your integrator is a long-time Novell shop.

If you currently run NetWare, there's no reason to change. If you have an older version, it may make sense to upgrade to 5.1. Several of our clients running NetWare 3.11 or earlier moved to Linux as their Y2K upgrade. One was forced to NT by their software vendor. A few moved to netware 5.0 and one moved to 3.12, but that one has become a problem due to 3.12's restricted OS/2 namespace (used to store Windows95 long filenames).