Novell Completes Sale 202
symbolset writes "Today Novell completed its sale to Attachmate. The company will be a wholly owned subsidiary and be delisted from the stock exchange. Novell was once a dominant player in network software, and its passing signals the end of an era."
No good? (Score:4, Funny)
So my 3.12 CNE is no good any more? Dang!
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well it probably runs just fine.
I know I have a complete install of 3.12 and manuals around work some where. the hard part is getting it to work with windows XP.
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Wooooooosh.
A CNE is a certification for Novell (Certified Novell Engineer.)
and you have know idea how many I knew that couldn't do squat.
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I did a lot of work with Novell back in the 3.x days and it was a workhorse. When Microsoft first decided to try and penetrate the server market NT was a joke. I won't say that current MS server products are not good, in some cases they are. In my opinion, what really killed Novell and boosted Microsoft was that anyone and their brother could write server side code for Windows (not that it means it was good code, just much easier to do.) You had to be pretty good to write server side Novell code. So bu
Re:No good? (Score:4, Informative)
Novell 4 was a great product, but it was about a year too late and the upgrade was FAR too expensive for most of their customers. Microsoft realized early on that 'good enough' really was good enough for most of their customers. Novell wanted to take the time and do their LDAP implementation correctly, and customers didn't want to wait for centralized management. Then in one of the dumbest pricing schemes I've ever seen, at the beginning it actually cost more to upgrade from 3.12 to 4 than it cost to install from scratch. Pissed off an awful lot of admin.
So what will happen to OpenSuse? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Attachmate have stated that there will be no change in the relationship between SUSE and OpenSUSE
http://www.attachmate.com/Press/PressReleases/nov-22-2010-SUSE.htm
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Indeed, given that Suse was reportedly one of Novell's main profit centers, it seems unlikely that it or OpenSuse is in any danger of disappearing. In fact, it looks like Suse may be becoming a separate subsidiary of Attachmate, independent of the former Novell
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I wish. 7.2 was the last version I really liked.
Final Abend (Score:5, Funny)
UNLOAD NOVELL.NLM
System halted Wednesday, April 27, 2011 4:30:00 pm EDT
Abend: Page Fault Processor Exception (Error code 00000002)
OS version: Novell NetWare 4.10 November 8, 1994
Running Process: SCRSAVER.NLM
Stack: AC 1F 65 01 E7 66 03 F1 50 CA 65 01 03 00 00 00
D0 1F 65 01 09 00 00 00 B0 81 01 F9 54 CE 65 01
39 67 03 F1 0B CB 65 01 B4 D0 65 01 B0 81 01 F9
Press "Y" to copy diagnostic image to disk.
Otherwise press "X" to exit.
21 gun salute, console edition. (Score:2)
FIRE PHASERS 21
pew! pew! pew! pew!
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The ancient DOS IPX/SPX client had its own logon script language. One of the commands available was "FIRE PHASERS", which made an appropriate noise using the PC speaker.
I would guess the .WAV files must have come with the Windows client? I (like many Novell other people) jumped ship around then.
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Congratulations! You have just vanquished a dragon with your bare hands! (Unbelievable, isn't it?)
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Move over Richard Keil - this is a true memorial abend!
(for those too young: http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/memorial.shtml [f-secure.com])
Corel Wordperfect is still around (Score:4, Interesting)
Reading this, I kinda wondered what ever became of Wordperfect, once a dominant player in the business world (along with Lotus 123), before Microsoft, well, Microsofted them.
Now I remember, Corel [wikipedia.org] bought Wordperfect, and apparently it's still around [corel.com].
Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around (Score:4, Interesting)
Reading this, I kinda wondered what ever became of Wordperfect, once a dominant player in the business world (along with Lotus 123), before Microsoft, well, Microsofted them.
Now I remember, Corel [wikipedia.org] bought Wordperfect, and apparently it's still around [corel.com].
Microsoft really had nothing to do with Wordperfect's death. They were far and away the number one DOS word processor and felt they could ignore that newfangled Windows thing that came along. By the time they realized that Windows wasn't a passing fad, it was too late. And it didn't help that their intial Windows versions were crap.
Novell bought Wordperfect for $800 Million and just a couple of years later sold it to Corel for $200 Million. Then a few years later Corel (the entire company) was sold for $200 million.
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That and the version they did come out with, 5.2 for Windows, was crap. By the time they did come out with a good version it was way too late.
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Wasn't there a problem with WordPerfect working with windows due to api details being withheld?
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Hmm, I think MS was completely behaving badly at the time (and probably still are, I won't buy any Nokia stock), but I can remember a nice demo of WP on Windows that took down the whole machine (this *was* the pre-NT time we're talking about) during a large presentation. I don't know what they were trying to pull, but they were late to the party and the initial implementation was rather crap.
I never really liked WP - I especially loathed it's menu structure, but I don't hate it as much as I loathe Word righ
Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around (Score:4, Interesting)
That's indeed part of the problem. MS used secret API's in Word that made it work much faster (you know, back in the day when everything was optimized in order to be able to run acceptably) than WordPerfect. It also happened that if you installed a version of Word, WordPerfect would start crashing because of a missing or replaced DLL.
But WordPerfect was not without fault either, they made mistakes marketing, they made mistakes programming, they basically pulled a Vista. They had (and still have) a much better word processor than Word and it's continuing to be used although they're not the cash cow they once were.
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In the Win3.x and Win9x and NT4 days I built and maintained computers labs at a community college.
For Win3.x, WP5.x and 6.x shipped with a msvrt.dll and one other MS provided DLL that was identical binary (and version number) to what was shipped with Windows itself. The WordPerfect installer replaced the Windows installed copy with it's own copy where the timestamp was the only difference.
As soon as you installed MS-Office these two DLLs (in the windows directory) were replaced with different binaries whic
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That was ordinary, garden variety, DLL-hell. Every Windows app suffered from it. Microsoft simply understood the details of how to leverage it to make sure their apps weren't on the receiving end of the fail stick.
Microsoft's version control universally sucked. Windows installers sucked even harder. Everyone suffered from that crappy architecture, including the competitors to Word.
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Um, some of us were actually around when it was all happening, some of us can read court documents, and some of us have *long* memories.
I call astroturf.
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Windows version that by the time they did they were irrelevant to anyone but lawyers still using DOS.
HAH, our clients have some of those, and they dont use DOS.
Have you ever tried to get 16 year old software to run on windows 7? Its a lot of fun.
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Great. Now teach a 60+ year old lobbyist, who is too resistant to change to switch off of WordPerfect 5.2 to something less dated, how to fire up a VBox session, log into this machine-within-a-machine, how to share files between them, etc etc etc. Im sure he will grasp it all perfectly.
Memories (Score:3, Interesting)
Netware
Utah
WordPerfect
QuattroPro
Digital Research
DR-DOS
Simian GNOME
Suse
USL
UNIX
SCO
patents
Mono
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Burma shave.
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Why do I find myself wanting to follow that up with, "we didn't start the fire..."?
Sic semper Microsoft particeps (Score:2, Insightful)
not the least bit surprising (Score:3)
Just another example of innovate or die. They had a HUGE place in business servers years ago, and then they just sat down on their laurels, and never stood back up.
Was there even anything worth acquiring in this sale? even the name brings a musty smell to a conversation.
Re:not the least bit surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Just another example of innovate or die. They had a HUGE place in business servers years ago, and then they just sat down on their laurels, and never stood back up.
No, their prices were being undercut by Microsoft, which had independent revenue stream in the form of MsOffice and Windows. It is impossible for any company to fight this in their own turf. Microsoft will simply wait for you to run out of cash and then sweep in and peck on the carcass.
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No, there network stack was horrid, and they where late to tcp/ip. trying to force IPX to be the de facto standard.
Novell was under cutting MS, not the other way around. They moved very expensive net cards at cost, and if pressed they would give you netware.
Novell could not handle large business and large business number of users. In a desperate attempt to deal with this they bought Unix. Instead of improving their design.
By the 90s MS TCP/IP implementation was starting to blow Novell IPX out of the water,a
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Ahh but the days of bindery hacking were fun.
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One place they had some business was in migrating businesses from Netware to Linux. I once talked to a salesman about their Linux business trying to understand how they were going to make money. His answer was that they would offer user hand-holding support, but no custom development contracts. They were intent on offering free tools to make it attractive to move away from Netware and Novell intended to basically charge for the service doing that. But they seemed to have no plan what so ever about how t
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Can't live on legacy business forever (Score:3)
They had a HUGE place in business servers years ago, and then they just sat down on their laurels, and never stood back up.
Their Netware product was arguably better that Microsoft's offerings but the problem was that Microsoft's competing product was good enough for most customers and it was cheaper and bundled. Businesses don't make money by buying network management software. Novell built their Netware business around features that was missing in Microsoft's offerings. When Microsoft provided it, Novell's business model no longer made sense. The only reason they hung around as long as they did is because ripping that sort
Whats attachmate? (Score:4, Funny)
Whats "Attachmate"? Dating website? Some sort of trademarked fastener, you know, like tapcon (tm)?
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Some robotic device NSFW, I guess!
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"What's the difference between a lawyer and a tick?... when you die, a tick falls off!." - Joke of the Day.
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It's a papermate line of pens with added superglue.
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>Whats "Attachmate"?
I think it's a friend who's needy... we all have one of those ;)
alternatively, it may be a BDSM position... not sure, not an expert in the field :)
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Mainframes are alive and thriving.
They are a superb piece of technology that 'cloud computing' and PC servers and software are just starting to acquire. AND they are cheaper to run.
I can do thing with a 30 year old mainframe that STILL isn't in any consumer PC.
Value (Score:3)
Andsomethingthatusedtobeofvaluewaslost?
another ms partner.. (Score:5, Informative)
will meet you all here again when its Nokias turn
Crap (Score:2)
Now I feel really old. Again.
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Corporate Darwinism, I guess... (Score:3)
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You're basically talking about eDirectory vs Active Directory, right? And you are implying that eDirectory was the better product?
Uh no. That was true 15 years ago, but as soon as Active Directory came out it was time to jump ship to MS. Still, to this day Novell has a few hold outs ( and sadly, I've worked at several of them ). The difference between AD and ED is startling. Why any company would put up with ED is beyond me; I'm fairly certain that some of the CIOs involved were getting kick backs from
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In other words, Netware was cheaper, more reliable, and required less hardware. On top of that, Netware had very few security flaws to tend to. On th
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I was told the same thing, by admins who were in the process of recovering from an abend ( the window servers had no unplanned downtime in recent memory ).
So that throws reliability out the window ( pun not intended ). Next up, capability; Everything today is written for windows, and there are only a few edge cases that edirectory addresses that active directory can't do. So ya, toss that one out too. Bloated? That's a fuzzy term really, that most people fail to understand. Sure, the base install is la
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A Windows server, on the other hand, like any other Windows box, will occasionally crash just out of the blue. No Windows server has ever been anywhere remotely close on its own to a Netware server in terms of reliability.
Next up, capability; Everything today is written for windows
That is irrelevant. The server software that is important to run on a server is available on systems o
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Ah, a troll. You got me.
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Actually, what set you to troll status was the fact that you said windows will randomly crash. Anyone who's spent any time administrating windows knows that windows, by itself, doesn't randomly crash. Hasn't since the 2000 days. It's software and drivers ( note: the same thing that will abend your high and mighty netware servers ) that'll do it. Well, and flaky hardware. All of which are common problems for all OSes.
I've worked several places with SLES, netware and the various versions of windows runni
Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess... (Score:4, Informative)
Under Banyan Vines it was called StreetTalk. Your login was your name @ office @ organization or jsmith@houston@slashdot
It was far superior to NT 4.0's domain system and was licensed for inclusion into Active Directory starting with Windows 2000. In Banyan, all file shares and printers were easily located in the directory the same way. Resource @ server @ organization such as: publicfiles@serverca001@slashdot or xeroxprinter@serverny003, part of the reason Microsoft licensed the technology was to enable placing resources in the directory structure.
The downside to StreetTalk was networks with over 1024 servers. It was never intended to grow that large back in the 80's and early 90's. The largest Banyan Vines network was actually run by the United States Marine Corps with over 5800 servers. The Marines had to break the network up into three sections each containing less than 2000 servers. They created what was called ELMS gateways that linked and allowed some resources to be shared across the three different "zones".
Starting in 1998 the Marines Corps began transitioning away from Banyan Vines to Windows NT 4.0 and the release of Windows 2000 with Active Directory which was updated to address the issues the Marines had with large networks was the final deathblow to Banyan in the US market. Shortly afterwards Banyan announced they were going back to making hardware only and licensing the StreetTalk directory out. Within a couple of years Banyan was gone from the networking world.
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Banyan originally started out making ICA (communication cards) for mainframes and other Network OS's. They decided to have a go at making their own NOS to exploit both the hardware and software side of the house. The Banyan servers sat on top of a bastardized unix operati
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Given that in this day and age there are several prescription treatments for ED along with dozens of bogus "herbal" remedies I can understand your frustration. No one should put up with ED anymore.
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So you're saying their Mac users?
Suddenly, it starts to make sense.
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Novell behaved perfectly rationally (Score:2)
Software companies have their own "physical laws" of operation.
1. Innovate
2. Incorporate
3. Reorganize
4. Downsize
5. Distribute the proceeds
It's just completing the cycle.
I couldn't name a company that has escaped this Schwartz child limit. Microsoft isn't so much that type of company as a "holding company" and it has a longer life cycle. If companies were stars, Microsoft would be a red dwarf, Novell a yellow sun, Netscape a blue giant (or maybe a Eta Carinae that went Nova).
If Microsoft lasts as long it cou
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If Microsoft lasts as long it could be with us for billions and billions of years (lol).
God I wish there was a +1 Scary moderator option.
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What a stupid pile of crap.
Things grow, and eventually die. Geez, what a fucking lighting bolt of wisdom that is.
How do you explain the software companies that dies before step 3?
An era (Score:2)
the required 54 3.5" floppies to install it's product. Also, an era of crappy network stack design.
I shall play a game of Snipes in your honor. (Score:2)
Novell lives? Lantastic! (Score:2)
Anyone remember the sheep? Novell pretty much did them in. I'll bet they're laughing now.
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Novell's demise is mainly a result of Microsoft's obsession with fighting old battles. Meanwhile, allowing itself to be outflanked on multiple fronts.
I don't think we really care who owns Unix, it's just a trademark. And Linux Is Not UniX.
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And Linux Is Not UniX.
Funny you should say that, because there's a post from Linus Torvalds on kerneltrap.org in which he says that that Linux is Unix. Unfortunately, the entire kerneltrap.org site seems to be down right now, but if it ever comes back up you can find his post here: http://kerneltrap.org/node/11 [kerneltrap.org]
What Linus actually said in that thread was: "the design of UNIX made a scaffolding for the system".
To be honest, "Linux" just means "Linus's Unix clone". But I prefer my interpretation, don't you think it's clever?
Over time, Linux has evolved from "close enough to run most oldtime Unix programs" to obeying Posix/SUS really pedantically closely. You could say "Linux is not Unix[tm] but it is Posix". And then a lot more of course.
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If this is victory, I don't know what defeat would look like. Novell shareholders will get roughly $2 billion dollars; SCO shareholders will probably get nothing.
Novell's rights to the legacy System V business was only of significant value in SCO's fantasy world where Linux was a derivate of System V.
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Why did you replace?
Why didn't you revert to Netware?
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Why didn't you revert to Netware?
The word came down from management that Exchange/Outlook was going to be the way of the future. So we needed a domain server, a Exchange server and a couple of file servers. Of course our Novell server did this all in one machine, and did it a hell of a lot faster.
Novell didn't go out of style because of poor design, it went out of style because Microsoft put more advertising out and convinced more users in upper management that it was the best thin
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"Novell didn't go out of style because of poor design,"
HAHAHAHAhahaha... oh my. *wipestearfromeye*.
That's rich.
Re:So Long Novell (Score:5, Interesting)
I recently got called in by a client to "help out a relative with their server". A smallish family business at least three generations deep (selling and maintaining farm equipment). When I arrived I was greeted with a lot of questions - about if I could possibly help them move their office to a smaller space down the road. They were very concerned about their server, because a bigger local consulting company had told them it would cost $4000 to move it to a new office.
I took a look, and found a pristine (c) 1992 DEC server (x86) running Netware 3.1 with two software mirrored SCSI drives. 10-base-T, and an old "concentrator". Heheh...
Workstations were IBM PCs (the old style) with Novell ethernet network cards.
I backed up their entire server (SYS vol and DATA vol) to my FLASH DRIVE. Did some testing offline to be sure their (c)1994 accounting software could be made to run independently of the server if needed, and moved their stuff the next weekend. The server had been up for 2664 days. Uneventful move. Server is still up. We plan to replace it with a small SAN sometime this summer. That thing had been running 24/7 with only a few reboots due to power loss since 1992. This just happened a month or two ago. (And no, no one had ever applied the Y2K fixes to it...)
Crazy reliable.
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It's hard to believe that the hardware kept working for 19 years, particularly the hard drives, but just as surprising the power supply (which tends to suck in so much dust and lint that they eventually die from overheating). The cooling fans also tend to give up the ghost after about 5 years as well.
I'm more interested in how you backed up the server to USB when all of the computers were made before USB ports existed.
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1992 hardware did not require as much cooling as it does now.
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While that's true of CPU components, it's not true of things like Power Supplies which expend a great deal of heat. Older computers drew a lot of electricity as well. 1992 hardware was likely a 486 of some sort, possibly clock doubled or tripled (which ran a bit hotter as well).
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I wonder if he realizes the 4k to get a company to do that is a fair price?
But hey, things are cheap if you don't value tome or accountability.
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i did something similar 3 years ago. the netware 3.1 server just never died. when we los tpower and rebooted you had to reset the clock as the calendar was fine software wise but the hardware bios wouldn't set right upon boot.
However the company closed/sold out and i made two copies of their SYS and DATA vol each one to a separate computer. all i had to due was flip a couple of settings and redirect some file pointers and the server became two separate computers with all data intact.
One of those has si
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I ran Novell servers on generic PC hardware (i386 cpu's with 16MB RAM) in the early 90's, starting with 3.11 and then migrating to 4.1 some time later. They were crazy reliable, going easily 1000 days or more between reboots. When the company I was working for moved to another state and I chose to stay behind, the new local guy they hired didn't know Novell so it was replaced with NT 4.0. Damn servers had to be rebooted almost daily to keep them working properly. Server maintenance went from being a side-ta
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I worked in a 4.11 shop, it worked just fine, years of uptime. Groupwise had some problems, the migration to 5 was nightmarish.
I really think IPX instead of IP was a mistake after 1995 though.
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You haven't lived until you genned sys on netmare* 2 with only floppys. Better get it right the first time.
Once you got the first server up you copied the floppy images onto the bastard but there was no avoiding that feed at least once. What possible reason could there be for an installer to need the floppys that many times? I carried a server with me to do installs after once.
I think a large part of Netwares demise was CNE. Theoretically, they wouldn't even sell you a license unless you were in 'the c
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Slash code ate my less then 3 or greater then or equal to 5 * comment.
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Googling around I found this (very recent) re-implementation for Linux: LoadSnake [opera.com]
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Actually, I've always wondered this. Are there a lot of corrupt/illegal kickbacks in I.T.? I'm not in management, but sometimes it feels like the entire organization is pointing at a cheap, simple, effective solution, and management goes and picks some multi-million-dollar monster that takes a year to set up.
Also, I've met a LOT of I.T. sales folks, and most give me the willies.
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In my experience, the answer most often is that the simple solution really isn't the best for all parties. Every group that will use a piece of software has a simple solution. And it doesn't work for any of the other groups that will be using the software.
Really, very few IT have any real idea of the scope of a prefect needed for a company as a whole.
I am a technical resource for a lot of projects, and some pretty big ones that many people seem to think should be simple.
Time Keeping, for example.
If IT sales
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Are there a lot of corrupt/illegal kickbacks in IT?
Yes.
The worst I've done is buy thousand dollar dinners for 'decision makers' and there wives, calling it a working dinner and billing it back. I wasn't an official salesperson though.
The worst by reputation is Oracle sales. Decision makes get no-show or at least no-work jobs at 10x their previous salary.
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That 8 character limitation is the choice of your company. User names for eDir/Netware/OES can be up to 128 characters.