SAN DIEGO — Novell Inc. has confirmed it will release NetWare 6 near the end of August or the early part of September, but NetWare 5 users will be able to get the net services software’s two main enhancements, iFolder and iPrint, before it is released.
Rick Nortz, senior vice-president of sales for Novell, said at the Novell Edge conference Monday that iPrint and iFolder will be made available to channel partners before the release of NetWare 6 mainly because customers do not buy products anymore; they want technology solutions.
Don Chapman, vice president and general manager for Markham, Ont.-based Novell Canada Ltd., said iPrint and iFolder are being offered as additional services to NetWare 5 in Canada as a special promotion.
“It is for customers to upgrade to NetWare 5 and then reduce the cost of maintenance for when NetWare 6 comes out,” Chapman said.
“NetWare 6 starts to give (users) ubiquitous access to information inside or outside on a One Net basis. Your capability is to be able to authenticate into the network inside or outside from any computer,” Chapman added.
NetWare is still Novell’s bread and butter. Nortz said NetWare consists of 44 per cent of the company’s entire sales. They have shipped more than US$1 billion worth of NetWare 5 in three years.
“With iPrint (Internet printing) you can print anything on the Web anywhere and through iFolder you no longer have to e-mail yourself documents or files when you are on the road. You’ll have access to everything. You just put a file on iFolder and then with the Web and any machine you can access that file. You don’t have to own that machine or bring a notebook with you to work on that file,” Nortz said.
NetWare 6 will also offer Netready security, the ability to file, print and other storage resources to be accessed as One Net across all types of networks. It will have support for up to 32 processors on 32 clustered servers.
Novell also plans to ready its channel players for NetWare 6 by offering two-day boot camp sessions. These sessions started last month and will be on a 26-city tour during the summer.
“It was just launched in Seattle and a few Canadians attended and they had some great feedback,” said Michele Ross, regional education manager for Novell Canada.
The boot camp is coming to Toronto in September for partners only so they can get up to speed on NetWare 6 before it starts shipping to customers, she said.
Ross added that Novell started to train partners before the launch after the NetWare 4 release. At that time, both customers and partners received the product and Novell channel partners were able to resell training to their customers because they had already become familiar with the product.
There is no cost involved to the channel partner for the NetWare 6 boot camp.
Novell executives also said the Cambridge Partners acquisition is scheduled to close by mid-July.