Years ago I did contract support on a Novell network at a local office building. Quite a learning curve but it was a well designed network. I never really got really good with Novell but I didn’t break anything either. 
Not sure if it was my skills or the resiliency of the network.
Just curious. Is Novell still popular and going strong?
In small business…its dead IME. I can’t speak to larger operations (say 20+ users). My partner is a certified novell administrator (and used it daily in a previous job) We have seen exactly one novell based system in 8 years in business.
Novell Netware is a dead product - no longer developed.
Novell replaced it with Open Enterprise Server, which is really just a Linux server with some extra applications/services.
Wow, that’s kind of sad. It was really popular in the early 90’s. I guess there wasn’t room for both IPX and TCP/IP.
Glad now that I didn’t put the time and effort into getting my Novell Certification.
I used to design, install and service Novell networks in their heyday. The nuts & bolts under the hood were very good, and far superior to what Microsoft offered even years later. And they treated the developers and support network with respect, even providing white papers detailing some of the internal concepts; how they worked and how they performed in different situations. I was impressed with Novell and disgusted with Microsoft’s feeble attempts to copy them, but we all saw the handwriting on the wall.