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Friends don't let friends use Novell
Friends don't let friends use Novell
At my last job we were a pure MS shop, almost all our servers were Win 2k3 and the rest were Win 2k, we had Office 2003 deployed to every employee (350) within 4 weeks of it's RTM (that's before you could buy it on the shelf).
At my now job, they use a "what worked here" scenario of many systems, and like many places in that boat, they still use Novell. Even though I'm one of the lucky few to have a new dell, XP (with SP2, even more rare here) and I have even installed the newest Groupwise (from Feb 2005) I can say that from an end user standpoint of this scenario, Novell is the worst experience I've ever had.
Groupwise's 6.5 client feels like it's from 1998 in both features and looks, and I'm not exaggerating. Ok while Groupwise appears to have some of today's (ex: Outlook's) features such as email offline caching it barely works, it's clunky and not slick to setup.
But why I'm really blogging is Groupwise has the dumbest spell checker I've ever seen. First, it spell checks the previous emails in an email reply, it's not smart enough to ignore the name fields of these prev emails so it always highlights those nor does it know to ignore urls!!!! But what really blows my mind is that Novell hasn't even tried to customize the dictionary file, some of the most obvious words are not in there, just today Groupwise thought MP3 and www.novell.com were spelling mistakes!!! And while I can't recall it exactly, last week one of the MS Office names weren't in the dictionary (maybe it was Excel).
While I know Novell is coming out with a vastly improved client (I've seen the pics and while the app's content looks great, the interface looks really over simplified and silly, and in a bad way). So while I will jump to the new version asap, I have mixed hopes for it.
The only reason I don't swith to Outlook is because Outlook isn't compatible with Groupwise's calendar stuff, otherwise there would be no thought about the issue.
One more thing I'd like to point out, there's no way to schedule a re-occuring appointments in Groupwise, you have to manual set the date range, and then each date gets a seperate email sent to yourself, and you have to manually approve each individual email. So god forbid you want to put a monthly meeting in your calendar!
And don't even get me started about Novell as a file server, especially in slow/unreliable networks. Maybe it's our company's fault for still using IPX which has a lot of overhead (so much that if you had an ISDN to a remote office, you HAVE to install a firewall to block most types of IPX traffic or the line would get flooded with all overhead).
Friends don't let friends use Novell.
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