IT Employment

If you can ignore Microsoft's legendary security holes (even in W2K), both products have their plusses and minuses. If you believe the Microsoft hype that Novell will not be around in the future than you should art least listen to some Novell hype for balance. Novell has some products that are flat-out the best in the industry - Border Manager , NDS.

After supporting groupwise and exchange, I prefer groupwise as an out-of-the-box platform.

I think that exchange and outlook are easier for developing applications that tie into your e-mail system (i.e things like a help desk request form).

Ifyou are already using NDS, then the groupwise move is even easier. As for Novell going away, I wouldn't worry about that for a few more years. Microsoft has to take Active Directory to platforms beyond Windows 2000 to even begin to threaten NDS. While it could happen within a few years, I don't think it will go away before then.

I have done just about any combination that you can think of and I have found that it is usually eaiser to use the mail platform that matches you network IE: Novell network then GroupWise and NT then Exchange. There always seems to be that gray areawhen you cross platform about where the user gets their rights from,their user name or some other minor issue. In keeping with in one platform there is no question who is incharge. But If you go cross platform do your homework before you start thereare lots of widgets out there to help you in the migration.

I live in a GW 5.2 world... we are seriously considering scraping Netware (a ton of servers throughout the world) and Exchange. Primarily due to a number of unusual quircks, such as; one end-user created a new rule that deleted email older than 180days. It populated the rule base for the corporate server and everyone lost their 180+ mail.

You can check out this link http://www.zdnet.com/products/content/pcwk/1448/pcwk0024.html for an article entitled "Groupware Systems Are Growing Up."