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This Solution Opportunity Guide explores how you can help your customers address their productivity challenges by giving their knowledge workers, and the IT personnel who support them, the tools they need to optimize productivity without devastating their budgets.

• Executive Overview
• Serving the Needs of Millions of Knowledge Workers
• Why Customers Need These Solutions Now
• Target and Opportunity
• Benefits of the Solution
• Novell Open Workgroup Suite Components
• Additional Workgroup Products Built on the Novell Workgroup Solution
• Competition
• Why You Should Act Now
• Updates
• Quick Reference

Executive Overview

How It Benefits You

1. You will have the opportunity to offer alternative desktop and productivity tools to customers who can’t afford (or simply haven’t yet found a compelling reason to upgrade to) Windows Vista* and Microsoft* Office 2007.
2. You can offer customers a suite that delivers on the cost benefits that Microsoft’s Enterprise Agreement promises to give, but doesn’t.
3. You can sell customers a solution that’s comparable to the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement—with solid services from front end to back end—for up to 70 percent less than the Microsoft option. With that savings, they can spend more of their IT budgets on your services.

Your Customers’ Challenges

• Market conditions are driving many customers to look for new solutions.
• Customers are facing upgrade decisions for desktop, server, collaboration and office productivity software.
• Early reports indicate that problems with past Microsoft product versions have not been adequately addressed, while new features are not compelling enough to drive sales; worse, difficulties in the products themselves—in compatibility and reliability especially—are stalling upgrades.
• Productivity is becoming more costly— and more difficult—to achieve.
• Working with an unstable environment that is also inflexible and difficult to manage creates further cost burdens. (For example, in a Microsoft environment, servers go down so often that downtime is planned into IT activities.)

Solving the Challenges

• In developing its workgroup solutions across traditional and open source platforms, Novell has built a level of architectural efficiency into those mixed-source products that translates into an unmatchable quotient for savings and productivity
• Customers who lack budgetary and staff resources can leverage those mixed-source efficiencies to serve more users with less hardware and at less expense.
• For IT, identity- and role-based management systems enable intelligent automation of tasks that dramatically reduce the time, effort and cost of supporting user productivity.
• For users, unbeatable reliability and Web-enabled server-based productivity services ensure that users can be more productive, no matter where they’re working.
• For CIOs, migrating to an entire suite of productivity tools—a suite that covers the full stack of network needs, from server to desktop—at a drastically lower cost than they would pay to upgrade to the latest Microsoft solutions, provides a compelling answer to the difficult decisions they currently face.

Serving the Needs of Millions of Knowledge Workers

Finally, your customers have a choice of operating systems—something beyond Windows* or UNIX* (or even NetWare). Novell Workgroup solutions give your customers advanced productivity tools for both users and IT personnel, allowing them to maintain investments in their existing platforms as they explore the advantages of Linux* and open source.

Why Customers Need These Solutions Now

The fundamental role of IT professionals today is meeting the needs of knowledge workers. Productivity, of course, is the first concern for your customers. But cost is also becoming a serious issue. With Microsoft driving its productivity solutions through Enterprise Desktop licensing, people who simply want Windows Vista or Microsoft Office 2007 are pushed to add the back-end as well. This path can quickly become entrapment for many of your customers: pricing is deceptive, and the continuing year-over-year costs end up being tremendously expensive. Instead of spending so much of their IT budgets on software licensing, these customers could be investing in innovation, agility and the invaluable implementation and maintenance services they can only get from skilled solution providers like you. With Novell Workgroup solutions, your customers can:

• Retain freedom of choice and still use existing investments (like Microsoft products) where they’re needed. Novell has always been about choice. And choices—in terms of leveraging both current and future technologies— become increasingly limited when customers buy into a closed, single-vendor solution that evolves its enterprise product lines on an average of only twice a decade. Maintenance spends are literally thrown away, with little or nothing to show for those investments unless customers are lucky enough to hit the cycle exactly right—which most of them cannot do consistently.

  Novell offers proven infrastructure and end-user productivity solutions that give your customers the choice and flexibility they need to address their changing workgroup concerns and critical business initiatives. We recognize that each business has unique and varied business challenges that may require solutions from different sources. This requirement for flexibility calls for solutions that are built to interoperate with products from other vendors. To meet this challenge, Novell lets your customers choose the platforms, desktops and applications they need, when they need them, and delivers solutions that interoperate with components from various providers. Novell has always been committed to providing the choice and flexibility your customers require with products, licensing and programs that support interoperability. This allows your customers to leverage existing investments, transition to a mixed environment of open standards and open source solutions, or migrate completely to Linux.

  Also, Novell Workgroup products are modular in terms of both architecture and sales opportunity; they can be purchased either separately or as a suite, giving you an entirely different kind of flexibility when it comes to developing a solution for your customers. In many cases, Novell Open Workgroup Suite is less expensive than buying Novell Workgroup products a la carte. And customers who might not want to buy an entire suite could benefit from a superior Novell point solution—which gives you yet another option for making a sale.

• Bring innovation from the open source world to the enterprise. Hundreds of thousands of developers enhance Linux code every day. Novell leverages the best of this ongoing process and packages it in cycles that are common to enterprise IT practices. In this way, Novell harnesses the innovation available from the open source community and brings it together—securely and reliably—for use in your customers’ enterprises. During the time it takes Microsoft to develop and market a new desktop operating system, for example, open source developers have enhanced the Linux desktop many times over. And while Microsoft may jump on a concept like virtualization quickly, open source projects like Xen* can get code that’s real-world usable out the door even faster. In fact it is a distinct possibility that open source innovations will move so quickly, they will eventually overwhelm the ability of most proprietary vendors to compete with them. At a time when innovation can mean the difference between having a competitive edge and losing one, it’s vital to bring your customers features and functionality that translate into solid advantages. Novell can give your customers those advantages, providing open source innovation in tools they can use now to make a difference in their work—without having to wait years for the next iteration.
• Add Linux when they’re ready, without disrupting business. Linux doesn’t have to be a rip-and-replace solution. While some vendors believe that a Linux-only environment is the only legitimate way to run an open source network, Novell believes in the reality of your customers’ networks—which are most often comprised of a mix of platforms and standards. So Novell makes it easy to drop Linux into that mix. Novell Open Workgroup Suite, for example, is designed to be plugged into an existing system. The suite provides office workers with innovative, advanced productivity tools powered by open source computing, while also giving them the option to continue using familiar platforms and applications. While they offer the specific advantages of Linux, the suite and other Novell Workgroup products work well with many other platforms, including Windows. This means your customers can simply add these solutions to their existing infrastructure—and can immediately begin to leverage the strengths they offer knowledge workers, even if those solutions continue to operate on different platforms.
• Save substantial amounts of money. High licensing costs put an enormous burden on IT budgets. To obtain the most advanced version of Windows Vista and the complete functionality of the back-end servers, Microsoft has introduced the Enterprise Desktop Platform, with a price tag of US$406 per desktop and three-year minimum commitment. These licensing agreements are presented to your customers in a way that gives them the mistaken idea that it’s more cost-effective to purchase the full enterprise agreement rather than just the solutions they actually need. Even in environments dominated by Windows, it doesn’t make sense to spend significantly more for Windows when a Linux desktop will meet the need of most users quite well. As part of SUSE® Linux Enterprise Desktop, with only a minimal cost for a support subscription, OpenOffice.org is often the most exciting cost-saver for customers who just don’t want to spend so much money on features most of their users won’t ever need.
• Benefit from the skills they already have. Novell Workgroup products like Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 make the most of existing IT skill sets, allowing IT to learn new Linux skills even as they continue running the network using the skills they already have. Your customers can continue to use their existing investments in Windows and NetWare while they explore the benefits brought to them by innovative open source technologies—at their own pace.

Target and Opportunity

With so many market indicators showing a “go” in the Linux arena, Novell Workgroup solutions are the perfect products at the perfect moment. Not only do these products speak to your existing NetWare customers and give you a new reason to call on them, but they also provide ample opportunities to contact most of your customer base—even those who are not currently using NetWare.

The workgroup itself, as a solutions market, continues to grow, affording you many new revenue opportunities. Clearly, there is money to be made in workgroup-related markets, with a total market growth pattern that is measured in the billions. The next few years show nothing but a steady climb in potential revenue possibilities.

• IDC predicts that for the next three years, Linux servers will be the fastest growing segment of the new server market, growing at a rate of 30.6 percent.
• Gartner cites “a high degree of dissatisfaction with [the] Microsoft” social networking solution, and explains that while customers may look forward to the next release of SharePoint*, they are “also fearful of greater investment in the product.”

With Novell Workgroup solutions, customers get advanced networking and productivity services plus an industry-leading directory-based management model, all running on the best-engineered commercial Linux platform—SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. This allows your customers to continue running their environments as they always have, but with the freedom to choose lower-cost applications and avoid vendor lock-in.

Specific revenue opportunities include the following:

• Upgrade the installed base of millions of NetWare customers worldwide
• Migrate Windows customers looking for more flexible, cost-effective alternatives
• Help customers move from x86 to x86-64 servers
• Provide SharePoint and Office Communications Server customers with a compelling open collaboration alternative
• Deliver the functionality small business customers need at an unbeatable price
• Give schools an affordable strategy for educational computing

NetWare customers. Who wouldn’t want an opportunity to mine sales from the entire existing NetWare customer base? NetWare runs on more than four million servers, with at least 90 million users worldwide. All of these users are your low-hanging fruit. For these customers, Novell Workgroup solutions like Novell Open Workgroup Suite and Novell Open Enterprise Server are excellent ways to protect their existing NetWare investments while taking advantage of the inherent benefits of Linux. Also, Open Enterprise Server (available as a standalone product or as the server element in Novell Open Workgroup Suite) can provide benefits to these customers that NetWare can’t—like virtualization and Dynamic Storage Technology, which are Linux-specific. These new technologies present powerful reasons to upgrade.

Windows customers. Not all of your customers will want the financial burden (or headache) of upgrading to the latest Windows operating system. Many will not want to be forced into it. With the newly released Novell Open Enterprise Server 2, you can give them an alternative that doesn’t whittle into their revenues or disrupt business operations. You can also give them innovations that Windows can’t provide, like virtualization and Dynamic Storage Technology. And these customers don’t even have to give up their Windows investments. Novell Open Enterprise Server works well with Microsoft products, including Active Directory*, so customers can continue to use their existing Windows investments where they are needed and applicable.

x86 customers. Customers who need more processing power than x86 servers can offer need a solution that gives them mainframe performance at PC prices. Novell gives these customers the comfort of a new choice—with no vendor lock-in for either software or hardware. Customers using NetWare, Windows or UNIX can use Novell Open Enterprise Server to get Linux processing power without paying big-ticket server prices. For many of them (NetWare customers, for example), skill sets will transfer and they will be able to leverage their support staff’s knowledge.

SharePoint / Office Communications Server customers. Novell Teaming + Conferencing provides a strong response to Microsoft SharePoint and Office Communication Server, as well as IBM’s Lotus* Quickr and Lotus Connections products. Because server components run on both Linux and Windows—and clients are compatible with a mix of proprietary and open source desktop operating systems, productivity applications and messaging products—your customers can explore these innovative collaboration tools even as they leverage their existing investments. Teaming + Conferencing gives you a new and effective tool to help retain existing customers and bring on new customers interested in solving pressing business challenges through open collaboration. It also opens the doors to the more than US$2 billion Collaborative Applications market, which—according to Gartner estimates—will enjoy double-digit compound annual growth rates over the next five years.

Small-business customers. According to IDC research in 2007, there are 67 million organizations worldwide with less than 100 users. In total, their yearly IT spending is US$404 billion. Many of these organizations don’t have a server-based IT infrastructure, and many are using older software versions and desperately need to upgrade. The small business market is also growing faster than the market as a whole. This represents a huge opportunity for you as a partner, and by working with Novell, you can differentiate and get that competitive edge needed to win. And, the new Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition features a highly efficient, full-featured desktop-to-server solution—all at a fraction of the cost your customers would have had to pay even a couple of years ago.

Benefits of the Solution

For Novell, the enterprise workgroup encompasses the tools, services and processes required to meet the needs of knowledge workers and users. This big picture of the workgroup includes authoring, document storage and sharing, collaboration, teaming, information management, content management and contact management on the user side. But it also includes the platform, IT infrastructure and management tools required to deliver those services, fully supported by you or your customers’ IT teams.

Though users don’t tend to think of it often, the foundational tool behind their productivity is actually the network server. From there, productivity tools are provided to users, with the server supplying application access and client services. Which client services the server provides depends on which server platform your customer chooses. But with a flexible choice—like Novell Open Enterprise Server—adding those services to your customers’ infrastructure is as easy as dropping in the server software.

The desktop platform also plays a large role in determining what users can and cannot do, based on what the platform supports. And beyond productivity tools and services, there is the stability of the workgroup to consider. If server or desktop hardware and software elements do not work well, either alone or together, the workgroup suffers from the results. Downtime, viruses, incompatibilities and other challenges can threaten to overwhelm workgroup goals. Knowledge workers just want to use the technology to do their jobs, so it’s up to the IT staff to make sure the components that support those users are stable, accessible and always ready to perform.

This is why Novell defines the workgroup from both sides of the usage coin: users, for whom the desktop and its environment were created; and IT professionals, who need vital advantages in management technology to keep these productivity tools working. In both cases, productivity is the key concern, and Novell recognizes that productivity is just as important for IT as it is for workgroup users themselves. When your customers can empower both of these teams with tools that help them respond to opportunities more quickly, resolve issues more easily and eliminate the mistakes and latency that come with the old ways of interacting—that’s when they start realizing the true value of workgroup productivity.

Novell Open Workgroup Suite Components

Novell Open Workgroup Suite provides everything you need to bring high levels of productivity to your knowledge workers, including:

• Industry-leading enterprise networking services with Novell Open Enterprise Server
• Secure and reliable collaboration with Novell GroupWise®
• Cross-platform systems management with Novell ZENworks® Suite
• Open source desktop with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop
• Open source productivity suite with Novell Edition of OpenOffice.org for Windows and Linux

This powerful combination has several key components that make it highly appealing for businesses that want to maintain high productivity at an affordable price.

Novell Open Enterprise Server
Novell Open Enterprise Server delivers powerful capabilities to provide the backbone of any IT infrastructure. Built on the best-supported enterprise-class Linux—SUSE Linux Enterprise Server—Open Enterprise Server offers features like file sharing, anywhere file access, automatic personal data backup and scalable, self-service printing that help ensure user productivity. Customers can also deploy any number of certified third-party or open source applications to meet specific workgroup needs. In addition, supporting a mixed environment of Linux, NetWare and Windows servers is easy with Open Enterprise Server. Browser-based management tools, migration utilities and deployment tools allow organizations to introduce Linux without the extensive training that is typically associated with a platform change. And with the release of Novell Open Enterprise Server 2, these capabilities are enhanced with 64-bit support, industry-leading virtualization, storage management innovations and additional services available on Linux.

Benefits for users include:

• Novell iFolder®: Web-based data access and synchronization
• iPrint: location-based printing that lets employees connect to printers without calling the helpdesk
• Web-enabled access that allows users to work from anywhere, at any time

Benefits for IT administrators include:

• Ease of deployment
• Identity-based management of users, objects and devices
• Layered security
• 64-bit support (New!): Take full advantage of the extra processing power, added memory capabilities and improved heat and energy savings offered by x86-64 dual-core and multi-core processors from Intel and AMD
• Virtualization (New!): Novell Open Enterprise Server opens up some very profitable consolidation possibilities with built-in virtualization capabilities. On today’s high-end hardware, NetWare rarely comes close to reaching full CPU utilization. With Novell Open Enterprise Server 2, your customers can take advantage of under-utilized hardware by having a single machine host, two, three or more servers without noticeably affecting performance. By virtualizing a mix of Linux and NetWare on a single physical server, your customers could recognize significant savings on hardware costs, rack space, cooling requirements and power requirements. Shipping with Open Enterprise Server 2 is a paravirtualized version of NetWare 6.5 Service Pack 7, a version optimized for virtualization on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. This means that virtualization of NetWare servers can achieve more efficiencies than regular virtualization alone.
  • Virtualization allows your customers to use 70 percent more processing power per server, making the most of each hardware investment.
  • With virtualization, you can facilitate the consolidation of heterogeneous environments because one machine can run multiple operating systems.
  • Armed with virtual machines on commodity hardware, IT administrators can create new levels of flexibility and agility in their environments at a lower total cost of ownership. Customers can increase the number of applications a server runs and leverage excess capacities to cover for peak usage periods.
  • By consolidating under-utilized servers, customers can reduce not only the number of servers they run, but also decrease the floor-space those machines require. They can also save money on the power to run and cool those machines. “Running green” is becoming a real issue for IT—when you think of being able to run three servers instead of 21 (without impacting performance), virtualization is certain to decrease the footprint of both cost and environmental impact for your customers.
  • As a paravirtualized guest operating system, NetWare has been enhanced to recognize when it is running as a virtual machine and can optimize its performance to leverage the latest hardware. For your customers, being able to virtualize their NetWare investment allows them to continue running specialized applications, such as third-party applications based on NetWare and NetWare Loadable Modules.
• Dynamic Storage Technology (New!): Dynamic Storage Technology allows administrators to create policies that dictate what data is considered active or inactive. With these policies, inactive data is automatically relocated to lower-cost storage solutions and is backed up less frequently. Active data then resides on the highest-performing storage devices, is backed up more frequently and is the first data to be restored in the event of disaster.
  
  
• Failover and business continuity
• Web-based management, centralized for NetWare and Linux
• Extensive backup and antivirus support—more vendors than ever now support Novell Open Enterprise Server: for a complete, up-to-date list of backup and antivirus solutions that work with Novell Open Enterprise Server, visit: www.novell.com/products/openenterpriseserver/partn...

Novell GroupWise

Novell GroupWise delivers secure, reliable collaboration services on a variety of platforms and devices while reducing the costs associated with downtime and security breaches. In fact, according to CERT.org data from November 2006, GroupWise had only 13 documented vulnerabilities. For Microsoft Exchange/Outlook, that figure was an alarming 157. Customers can use almost any type of client to access GroupWise; in fact, they can even use the Outlook client while taking advantage of the increased security and reliability of GroupWise on the back end. They can also connect GroupWise with virtually any mobile device using Novell GroupWise Mobile Server, powered by Intellisync. Customers who purchase maintenance contracts for Novell Open Workgroup Suite are entitled to GroupWise Mobile Server free of charge.

Find out why and how GroupWise supports your customers' business goals here.

Benefits for users include:

• E-mail, calendaring, instant messaging, task management and contact management
• Web-based access client
• Secure, reliable collaboration—fewer viruses and less downtime
• Wireless mobile collaboration—no need to synchronize handheld devices with PCs

Benefits for IT administrators include:

• Novell GroupWise installs on Windows, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Novell Open Enterprise Server and NetWare servers, allowing customers to operate in a mixed environment with full functionality.
• Web and wireless access are included with the purchase of a GroupWise client license for each user; no server license or NetWare connection license is required.
• GroupWise does not require a one-to-one licensing agreement with the underlying operating system. Plus, GroupWise includes an entitlement to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, so no additional server operating system purchase is required.
• GroupWise supports up to 10,000 users on a single server with a single CPU, saving your customers additional hardware and administration costs.
• Centralized, policy-based administration means one administrator can manage several thousand GroupWise user accounts; in fact, current Novell customers manage close to 10,000 users with only one administrator.
• Quick, easy migration allows IT to migrate to GroupWise in minutes.

GroupWise Mobile Server for Linux. Organizations that have committed to GroupWise on Linux have, in the past, had to maintain a Windows server if they wanted to run GroupWise Mobile Server. That's no longer the case. Now, with GroupWise Mobile Server 2.0.3 for Linux, powered by Intellisync, customers can transition their mobile services to Linux.

If you have customers who have been waiting for this release, please direct them to the download as well as the documentation, which includes instructions on migrating GroupWise Mobile Server from Windows to Linux.

Novell ZENworks Suite
This powerful management suite includes seven ZENworks products:

• Novell ZENworks Desktop Management
• Novell ZENworks Server Management
• Novell ZENworks Handheld Management
• Novell ZENworks Linux Management

Novell ZENworks Suite lets customers manage the complete lifecycle of their systems from acquisition to retirement. It provides identity-based, true cross-platform management and makes Linux as easy to deploy and maintain as any other operating system. Novell ZENworks Suite manages desktops, laptops, handheld devices and servers running Novell Open Enterprise Server, Linux, NetWare, Windows or UNIX. It does configuration, software, patch, data, asset and license management, reducing total cost of ownership and improving security. And because it can manage all types of systems running on different platforms, Novell ZENworks Suite allows customers to adopt Linux at their own pace. They can easily manage Windows servers alongside Linux servers and also manage Linux workstations alongside PCs with Windows installed—all using the same management framework.

Benefits for users include:

• Personal access rights are based on the user, not the machine—so users get the same work experience no matter which machine they log in to, or from where.
• Self-healing applications ensure reliability.

Benefits for IT administrators include:

• Comprehensive, identity- and role-based management of servers, desktops, handheld devices and more
• Automation of most IT tasks, which reduces effort and cost
• The ability to manage the entire lifecycle of each device attached to the network (From the time a device is installed to the day it’s retired, ZENworks allows IT to manage these assets from a distance, performing most management tasks without ever needing to touch the actual machine)
• Efficiencies created by the use of Novell ZENworks Suite can have a return on investment (ROI) impact of 412 percent, according to IDC. (IDC, "Determining the Return on Investment from Deploying Consolidated IT Resource Management,” May 2006)

Note: Customers can now also benefit from an entirely new architecture, one that obviates the need for running ZENworks products on Novell eDirectory. These newly architected ZENworks products are:

• Novell ZENworks Configuration Management
• Novell ZENworks Asset Management
• Novell ZENworks Patch Management

These products present excellent upsell opportunities to Workgroup customers. In fact, customers who have purchased Maintenance on Novell Open Workgroup Suite are already entitled to getting ZENworks Configuration Management Standard Edition free. And for customers who do not have (or purchase) Maintenance agreements, you can add any of these three open-architected products to your sale, as there are no compatibility issues to worry about. For more information, read the Novell Systems and Resource Management Solution Opportunity Guide here, under the heading "One New Architecture, Three Products That Run on It."

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop

Novell provides an exciting new platform that makes the desktop fun again, bringing the real “WOW!” back to your customers’ desktops. Never underestimate the power of eye candy—this is a Linux desktop users will clamor to use. In SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, the Xgl graphical environment dramatically improves the user experience with features like the spinning cube, application tiling and window-preview alt-tabbing. Compiz, in combination with Xgl, opens up a new world of hardware acceleration, eye-popping animation, separation of hardware resolution from software resolution and more. As a result, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop is firmly positioning the Linux desktop at the forefront of client computing technology.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop provides a leading end-user productivity environment designed specifically to help organizations leverage Linux and open source with confidence. It’s the ideal solution for customers seeking to avoid single-vendor lock-in of their desktop systems. It can be deployed as a general-purpose desktop platform or tailored for use in information kiosks, call-center terminals or stations for infrequent PC users. It also provides an ideal alternative to high-cost UNIX-based engineering workstations. SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop users can comfortably interoperate with Windows-based users within or among organizations. And it’s known to have been vulnerable, thus far, to only two percent of the viruses documented as plaguing the Microsoft Windows desktop, which means it also offers significant security—and the peace of mind and cost reductions that come with it.

Benefits include:

• Reliable, easy to use desktop
• Features comparable with Microsoft offering—includes Web browser, multimedia management, music player, desktop security and collaboration
• Includes a complete office productivity suite—free of charge

Novell Edition of OpenOffice.org for Windows and Linux

OpenOffice.org is included with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop—free of charge—and provides productivity software to create text documents, spreadsheets and presentations, as well as other useful tools. OpenOffice.org offers two very significant benefits to your customers: 1) It’s comparable to the Microsoft Office suite, with all the productivity tools that are perfectly suited to the needs of the majority of users, and 2) users don’t have to buy a separate (and expensive) license to get it, because it comes with Novell Open Workgroup Suite.

Benefits include:

• Familiar, intuitive interface
• All the productivity tools most users need, like document, presentation and spreadsheet applications
• Can be deployed (and supported) on Linux or Windows

Additional Workgroup Products Built on the Novell Workgroup Solution

• Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition

  Help your small-business customers benefit from open source innovation. Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition gives them a comprehensive, flexible solution with benefits from the server room to the desktop. The suite delivers the essential components needed for any competitive business at an unbeatable price. It also features an integrated installation process to minimize the time and cost of deployment, letting your customers enjoy open source innovation without fear of complexity. Simply put: it’s affordable innovation for small businesses worldwide, and includes, out of the box:

  • Novell Open Enterprise Server 1 (with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 for customers with maintenance)
    

    Note: Because small business customers don’t tend to have large data center installations or needs, customers who purchase Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition are not restricted to running only workgroup services on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Small Business Edition customers can use their SUSE Linux Enterprise Server entitlement for any purpose, including hosting applications, as long as the total number of servers deployed does not exceed five and the maximum number of users or devices does not exceed 200.

  • Novell GroupWise 7
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop
  • Novell Edition of OpenOffice.org for Windows and Linux OpenOffice.org 2.0 Novell Edition
  • More than just a bundle of enterprise products priced for small businesses, the Novell suite includes essential open source components for critical services like backup, anti-virus, firewall, VPN, fax and more. It also features a simple yet customizable installation process along with remote management capabilities. This means that solution providers can remotely manage their small business customers’ IT infrastructures, thus reducing costs and improving service. These tools include:
  • A stateful firewall that provides packet filtering and address translation to protect all the computers and servers on the network
  • A virtual private network (VPN) that can accommodate a wide range of configurations
  • Remote management tools that allow IT to remotely manage desktops, servers and clients on the network, making it easy to troubleshoot problems
  • An integrated installation process that’s easy to set up and cuts deployment time, making it easy to configure all needed networking services
  • A simplified management interface that makes it easy for anyone to perform administration tasks (such as adding users and changing passwords)
  • A helpdesk tool that allows IT to provide end users with the support they need to be productive

  Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition also has a newly developed integration layer that makes it easier for resellers and service providers to integrate their specialized products into the solution. The suite is supported by popular business software applications certified to work with SUSE Linux Enterprise. And, it’s modular, so your customers can deploy its components to fit their existing business policies, processes and needs. Many organizations first take advantage of the high-performance Linux server, deploying it on the back end, and then switching to low-cost commodity hardware. This deployment offers flexibility because end users can continue to use their existing Windows desktops. There’s no learning curve for your customers—they can begin saving money right away on hardware and licensing.

  Benefits of Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition
  Organizations that implement Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition can benefit in multiple ways:

  • Cost savings. Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition helps small organizations cut big costs. Areas for significant savings include licensing costs, administration and support costs, and hardware requirements. Using Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition, organizations can deploy and use enterprise-class services and applications without in-depth management or expensive hardware. This frees up budget for value-added partner services that enhance customer satisfaction, deployment success and ROI.
  • Focus on business, not technology. Because Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition is easy to deploy and maintain, it allows small-business owners to focus on running the business, not on managing IT.
  • Mobile freedom. With Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition, users have the flexibility and freedom to work from any location. Web-based file access and browser-based access to GroupWise let users access or share files as well as collaborate and instant message from any location. Small-business users can work in the office or from the other side of the world with access to the same resources.
  • Security. Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition includes several proven and reliable security technologies that help protect organizations against attack and ensure that digital assets are secure. These include firewall and VPN capabilities as well as junk mail and virus mail protection. In addition, Linux as an operating system is far more secure than Windows and is not susceptible to viruses such as Nimda or Code Red.
  • Leveraging the open source movement. Open source has forever changed the business world, and nowhere is the interest in these cost-efficient technologies greater than in the small business market. However, many organizations lack the skills, time or trust to implement open source solutions in their environments. Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition makes it easy to implement the open source technologies that are right for your small business customers—and in a way that removes the risk and complexity normally associated with these types of implementations.

  What Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition Brings to Partners

  Unlike partners offering Microsoft Small Business Server, Windows and Office, you can bring customers the IT infrastructure and end-user productivity tools they need at a fraction of the cost. With budget left, your customers can invest more in supporting services. That helps you build deeper relationships with your customers and creates new business opportunities.

  Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition also comes with tools that help you provide additional services to your customers, including remote management tools and a basic helpdesk system. The integrated installation process and simplified management tools make it easy for you to successfully deploy Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition. This allows you to more quickly shift focus from deploying the solution to providing services such as end-user training and business process improvement projects. If you are skilled on NetWare, Novell Open Enterprise Server or GroupWise, you can benefit from these skills and successfully approach small-business customers with this suite. Thus, the addressable market is expanded and the investments needed to acquire Linux skills are easier to justify.

  That Was Fast: Novell Small Business Solution Introduces Version 2
  Demonstrating a newly agile release cycle, Novell released Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition 2 in May 2008, little more than a year after the first version made its debut. For version 2, the biggest difference may be just how fast Novell was able to respond to partner and customer requests to enhance the original product.

  “Our agile release cycle not only allows us to improve this solution with the latest technologies every three to four months, but it allows us to continually improve and enhance it based on the feedback we receive [from customers and partners]. That feedback is…extremely important to us.” (Melanie Feeney, Workgroup Collaboration product manager, Novell)

  Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition 2 includes the latest versions of the solution’s primary operating systems:

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 offers built-in application security, virtualization, and integrated systems management across the full range of hardware architectures.
  • Now small businesses can protect their security at the application level with AppArmor based on enforceable security policies.
  • Virtualization allows them to consolidate multiple workloads onto a single server or to allocate a single workload across multiple servers, which helps lower costs and improve utilization, with maximum performance and reliability. Virtualization also gives small businesses a perfect solution for high availability computing.
  • To ease management for the Linux environment, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 offers the Novell Customer Care Center, a centralized online portal where your customers can obtain software updates and patches and access Novell support.

  SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 is supported by all leading hardware vendors and is certified to run on servers, clients, single-process whitebox systems, blades or the largest mainframes. With this version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Small Business Edition customers will get software that supports 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, as well as the latest single- and dual-core processors. Vendors like IBM, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Lenovo, Silicon Graphics, Sun, Unisys and others have partnered closely with Novell throughout the design and creation of this version of the operating system, ensuring that customers get the most out of their hardware choices.

  • Novell Open Enterprise Server 2.
    With the second release of Open Enterprise Server, customers will be able to leverage these new features:
    • NetWare Virtualization. Leveraging the XEN virtualization built into SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, your small-business customers can now run NetWare 6.5 in a virtualized environment. A para-virtualized version of NetWare 6.5 is designed to recognize when it is running in a virtualized environment and optimize its performance. This provides an easy path to transition NetWare servers, effectively using existing IT skills and providing pain-free consolidation to the latest hardware technology.
    • Dynamic Storage Technology. Now your small-business customers can dramatically reduce storage management costs, get help maintaining regulatory compliance, and improve backup and recovery of their critical data. Dynamic Storage Technology uses policies to automatically recognize active and stale data, and dynamically shifts each to the appropriate storage devices. This means that stale data is sent to low-cost storage devices, while the storage space on high-end devices can be saved for active data, which requires quicker access.
    • Completes the Transition. Novell Open Enterprise 2 completes the transition of NetWare services to Linux, including key components like directory-enabled DHCP and DNS, as well as DFS junction support.

  In addition to the Novell products mentioned above, Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition 2 includes the following essential open source components to further help improve security and drive down cost:

  • Amanda— A backup system that allows a single master backup server to back up multiple hosts over network to tape drives/changers, disks or optical media
  • HylaFAX— A system for sending and receiving facsimiles as well as for sending alpha-numeric pages from any client in the network
  • MailScanner— One of the most widely used anti-spam filters that helps reduce the load of spam in your e-mail system
  • ClamAV— An anti-virus toolkit designed for scanning e-mail on a mail server, providing a fast and multi-threaded daemon
  • iptables— A stateful firewall to protect all computers and servers on the network (using the built-in capabilities of SUSE Linux Enterprise)
  • OpenVPN— A full-featured Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Virtual Private Network (VPN) that can accommodate a range of configurations
  • TightVNC— A remote control software package that enables the control, monitoring and interaction of any client computer on a network
• Novell Teaming + Conferencing: An Innovative Upsell

  The expanding global economy makes marketplaces more competitive than ever, which means that businesses have to be more efficient and innovative to stay profitable. Even government entities and non-profit organizations are feeling the pressure to offer a wider range of valuable services.

  To address this need, Novell has added team workspace, social networking and real-time collaboration to our workgroup portfolio. The new offerings, Novell Teaming and Novell Teaming + Conferencing, have been developed in partnership with SiteScape. These products enhance team productivity by bringing the right people together to create, share, discuss and manage information. Through social networking, conferencing, document management, Web 2.0 and other collaboration tools, individuals are able to form high-performance teams and deliver better business results. With Novell Teaming + Conferencing, your customers can collaborate on the platform of their choice, within and beyond organizational boundaries, and without having to replace the e-mail clients and office productivity software they already use. The Novell solution also offers a compelling alternative to proprietary software development. From a competitive standpoint, these features are an easy upsell, providing services that are complementary to Novell Open Workgroup Suite.

  • Novell Teaming includes personal and team workspaces, document management and sharing, team calendars and shared task lists, discussion forums, wikis, blogs, workflow, and knowledge management with quick-search capabilities.
  • With Novell Teaming + Conferencing, your customers get everything in the Teaming product plus Web and voice conferencing, instant messaging and chat, application sharing and white boarding, and presence awareness. Together, these capabilities help teams communicate more effectively, boost productivity and reduce overall costs by simplifying the everyday business activities that users engage in to create, share, discuss and manage information.

  Robert Mahowald, IDC program director for Collaborative Computing, said, “Team workspaces, wikis and blogs, global content and expertise search, and application and desktop sharing are among the latest ‘must haves’ for companies seeking a competitive edge.

  “A particularly compelling feature of Novell Teaming + Conferencing is the extensive integration and presence indicators between the teaming and conferencing modules. By combining social software, Web 2.0 technologies and other real-time collaboration tools, the new Novell product can help businesses meet their next-generation collaboration needs.”

  

  Another vital differentiator to Novell Teaming + Conferencing is its distinction as an open source project. As part of the ICEcore open source project, Novell is launching the most easy-to-use and best-integrated teaming and conferencing solution in the marketplace. Like any other open source-based solution, it allows customers and partners to innovate with us. In this way, new capabilities are developed more quickly, resulting in a more complete and cost-effective team productivity solution.

  Customers can run Novell Teaming + Conferencing on Windows or Linux servers, and use it with GroupWise, Exchange and Notes. Customers can purchase this solution at any time, but if they already have or purchase Novell Open Workgroup Suite, they receive a significant discount on Novell Teaming + Conferencing.

  Features and their benefits include:

  • Team workspaces. Team workspaces provide a simple and powerful way to unite the people, information and resources you need to handle undertakings of any size, providing nested teaming workspaces to handle any arrangement of projects and sub-projects.
  • Folders. Folders hold the information team members need to stay productive. File sharing can provide a simple means of document collection and version control. Folder types include forum, calendar, task, milestone, photo, survey and custom folders. Folders provide an optimal place to describe and refine expected outcomes and constraints, and clearly show how projects are progressing.
  • Personal workspaces. Users create personal workspaces containing folders of information they have produced or collected, blogs or wikis of things they are currently working on and a record of what they’ve done in the past. Important personal information like education and experience can be posted, helping managers and team members find qualified candidates for projects they are starting. Managers can use these workspaces to identify talented personnel from dispersed locations and build more powerful and agile teams. Personal spaces also help members of new teams get to know each other—and when team members are comfortable with each other, they can work more efficiently, which leads to greater profit for your customers.
  • Team member list. The most effective teams function as networks, not hierarchies, and their members often come together from several different organizations. Novell Teaming and Novell Teaming + Conferencing allow teams to be formed from multiple organizations. Team members can see everyone involved in the project, and the workspace manager can set access control rights for each member, securing sensitive information.
  • Global searches. A global search tool lets users quickly find information in almost any format, in any workspace. Online chats, discussions, documents, attachments or any other items posted in a workspace are easy to find and use. The search tool also helps team leaders find talent by searching for information in personal spaces.
  • Workflow automation. Workflow automation increases productivity and decreases errors by automating processes and linking workflows to items in different folders. What’s more, workflow automation allows the real experts—the team itself— to easily create customized workflows that can be used as templates for other projects.
  • Web access and compatibility. Now your customers can publish and access information in teaming spaces through Web browsers. Interoperability between portlets and portals is assured, and it’s easy for the users to find information in online workspaces. Novell Teaming + Conferencing ships with the LifeRay open source portal—which means that your customers don’t have to connect a portal separately: it’s all included in the product. And users can publish the contents of forum folders through Really Simple Syndication (RSS).
  • Real-time Conferencing. The real-time conferencing features of Novell Teaming + Conferencing help distributed teams communicate and collaborate more frequently and affordably. Key capabilities include a conferencing client common to both Windows and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, a meeting management feature, instant messaging and chat, presence indicators, white board drawing tools for rich user interactions, and voice support via Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) through a soft phone that is included with the client.

  With either of these new, open collaboration solutions from Novell, your customers’ users will be able to achieve more because they will have access to essential information, colleagues and tools. Teams composed of the right members with the right skills, knowledge and motivation can be more effective. Deadlines and milestones, management goals, expected outcomes and other project details can be clearly published. With more consistent access to the most useful knowledge, it’s easy to see how Novell Teaming and Novell Teaming + Conferencing can raise both productivity and the quality of the deliverables a cohesive team can produce.

  Now available: Novell Open Workgroup Suite with Teaming! Also runs on alternative messaging platforms!
  A new version of Novell Open Workgrop Suite is available with the Novell Teaming product included in the Suite. This expanded offering delivers new collaboration capabilities--like team workspaces, enterprise social networking, workflow, blogs and wikis--to the proven workforce productivity tools already available in the Suite.

  Now more than ever, Novell Open Workgroup Suite enables organizations to reduce software acquisition costs by as much as 70 percent over competing solutions like the Microsoft* Professional Desktop Platform, anchored by Windows and Office SharePoint servers. The Novell Open Workgroup Suite continues to work with currently deployed platforms and applications, making it easy to add improved productivity while using existing skills and IT investments.

  To provide even greater flexibility and to meet the needs of a broader set of customers, the Novell Open Workgroup Suite with Teaming is also available in a version for alternate messaging platforms. While Novell believes that GroupWise remains the best messaging platform available, for customers who use other messaging platforms--like Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes--the new version of the Suite will now work with alternate messaging platforms.

  Novell will continue to offer the original versions of the Novell Open Workgroup Suite without Teaming, but offers the new Suite--now with Teaming included and with the ability to work on alternative messaging platforms--to provide an even stronger value proposition for customers...and to help our partners drive sales.

  Suggested Reading:

  • Product Web site
  • Press release
  • Introducing Novell Open Workgroup Suite with Teaming Webcast
  • Novell Open Workgroup Suite Pricing Assistant
  • Boost Productivity While Cutting Costs with Next-generation Collaboration White Paper
  • Toward More Flexible, Next-Generation Collaboration Solutions--IDC Report

Competition

In response to customer needs, Novell and Microsoft recently signed a technical collaboration agreement covering, among other things, interoperability between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org. The agreement is designed to ensure that customers using OpenOffice.org will continue to be able to read and write documents using future Microsoft Office file formats, just as they can today. When it comes to the desktop and what users need there, a chance to further their interests is something we couldn’t resist. However, Novell and Microsoft remain fierce competitors on many other fronts. Here are some of the workgroup advantages we feel Novell offers your customers over Microsoft solutions and licensing.

Novell versus Microsoft
With Microsoft, customers pay some of the highest software acquisition and maintenance prices in the industry. When customers consider upgrading to Windows Vista (Microsoft’s first major overhaul of its desktop operating system since the company rolled out Windows XP in 2001), they discover that the true cost of Microsoft productivity products is even higher than they anticipated. This is because customers have to pay for more than just software and licensing; they must also factor in all the expenses associated with acquisition, maintenance, hardware upgrades, security, management and downtime.

The process begins with the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement. According to Microsoft, the “Microsoft Enterprise Agreement is a Volume Licensing program for large organizations that have 250 or more desktop PCs. The program provides a simple, flexible, and affordable way to buy the latest Microsoft products.” (Source: www.microsoft.com) But is that true? The picture looks a bit different when customers realize that they must license 100 percent of their desktops, commit to a three-year minimum agreement, and pay for Software Assurance (Microsoft’s equivalent to Novell maintenance) during that commitment period.

Given these caveats, it’s easy to see how the costs creep in. But you can help your customers avoid this trap by explaining more about predatory Microsoft licensing practices.

As you examine the potential pitfalls, concentrate on four things:

1. Deceptive licensing costs that don’t save your customers money in the long run
2. How much superfluous, high-cost technology they may be purchasing
3. The actual value of the upgrade protection they have to purchase
4. A dangerous upgrade path full of hidden costs

Licensing that Doesn’t Really Save Money
How many of your customers just want to buy Windows Vista or Microsoft Office 2007? It’s a good bet that most of them won’t want to overhaul their servers at the same time they upgrade their desktops. Cost and disruption make the approach difficult at best. And yet that seems to be what Microsoft is trying to push your customers into: a complete revamp that turns heterogeneous networks using Windows desktops into an all-Microsoft hegemony from the desktop to the back end. The company encourages users to buy the Enterprise Desktop Platform, an offering licensed under the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement. They tell customers that when they buy this way, they not only get their desktop productivity needs met, but they also get all the back-end services (services they would otherwise have to pay extra for, from Microsoft, Novell or whomever) included at an extremely low price.

This is because the Enterprise Desktop Platform includes Windows Vista Enterprise, Office Enterprise 2007 and the Enterprise CAL Suite (which, in turn, includes Client Access Licenses [or CALs] for a host of back-end services your customers may or may not need). Sign up for it and 100 percent of your desktops must be licensed—whether the technology is used or not. The annual cost is US$406 per user or device per year. The required commitment, however, translates into more than US$1,200 per user/device over the three-year contract term.

Who would want to commit for such a long period of time at such a high cost? Not many people did. Initially, the Enterprise Agreement wasn’t successful because of how little value it provided in relation to its high price. But now, if your customers want the new features in the latest Microsoft desktop products, they have to buy through the Enterprise CAL Suite.

Paying Too Much for More Than They Need
What do customers get in an Enterprise CAL suite? Often, they’re paying for a great deal more than their workforce will ever use. The Enterprise CAL Suite combines:

• Microsoft Windows Server CAL
• Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Standard CAL, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Enterprise CAL
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Standard CAL, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise CAL
• Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Standard CAL, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Enterprise CAL
• Microsoft System Center Configurations Manager
• Microsoft System Center Operations Manager Client
• Microsoft Rights Management Services
• Microsoft Forefront Security Suite

Customers who buy the Enterprise CAL Suite through their Enterprise Agreement will be paying for numerous licenses, many of which they don’t need. In addition, not every user in the organization will need the full Microsoft desktop environment.

Employees may primarily use Word or PowerPoint* out of the entire Office product, for instance—but the company still has to pay for the full license of Office Enterprise. This might not be a problem if the software were inexpensive to begin with, but it’s not. And because it’s not, too many Microsoft customers are paying far more than they should pay for software they don’t need and won’t use. In comparison, it’s surprisingly less expensive for most Microsoft customers to purchase individual licenses and CALs for servers as needed, based on what employees will actually use.

Questionable Maintenance Value
The Enterprise Desktop Platform includes Software Assurance. This is an attractive-sounding program that permits enterprises to upgrade to major new releases, such as Vista, at no additional charge. But most enterprises have come to doubt the value of Software Assurance, primarily due to delays in Microsoft’s software release schedule. Vista was years late. Longhorn, Microsoft’s server operating system, has also been delayed.

If your customers sign up for Software Assurance more than two years before new releases come out, chances are their contracts will expire before they get anything out of it. Consequently, they may end up paying again for the upgrade when Microsoft finally releases the operating systems.

Savvy businesses have realized this and don’t buy into the Enterprise Agreement as a result. Instead they choose the less-expensive a la carte approach that allows them to choose just the products each user needs and upgrade when it makes sense for their business.

A Dangerous Upgrade Path Full of Hidden Costs
But under Microsoft’s new upgrade practices, that recourse is also threatened. Even though customers may purchase Software Assurance when they buy into Microsoft licensing programs, there is no price protection to be found there. Upgrading to a new edition will no longer give the customer rights to the extra features. Customers who have purchased Software Assurance upgrade rights on their current CALs will have to pay even more to get the Enterprise CALs. We think this is a bit like being asked to pay again for software you should have already paid for when you bought Software Assurance.

In fact, it seems obvious that Microsoft is trying to get more customers to sign up for Software Assurance by limiting access to certain products if they are not covered— in effect locking customers into the Software Assurance path. For example:

• Windows Vista Enterprise is only available to customers with Software Assurance on the desktop.
• Outlook 2007 no longer ships with Exchange Server 2007 unless you have Software Assurance.
• The Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack is only available to customers with Software Assurance on the Windows desktop.

An upgrade path marked by features that will and won’t be included under the maintenance price tag seems to set a dangerous precedent indeed. As most organizations have come to realize, Microsoft’s Enterprise Agreement is far too expensive to reasonably accept. By purchasing products needed under the Select Agreement, customers can realize far greater savings. The time is right to evaluate alternatives—such as embracing Linux and open source software as an investment for the future.

As your customers plan their future IT directions, remember that Microsoft proposes a single-vendor solution that limits their options and costs a lot of money. The Novell message is clear: you can give your customers the tools they need for high productivity even as you help them save up to 70 percent of the money they’re now spending for productivity using the Microsoft product stack. What makes the most sense? Paying more than they need for a Microsoft-only environment or paying a lot less for the Novell alternative? Once they know they have that choice, you, as their solution provider, will become even more trusted as you bring your customers proven solutions that do the job and don’t force them to spend all of their precious IT budgets on software alone.

How Novell Stacks Up Against Microsoft
Novell Open Workgroup Suite and Novell Teaming + Conferencing, for instance, provides a solution that is comparable to Microsoft’s Enterprise Desktop platform. The combined solution carries a higher initial acquisition cost than buying Novell Open Workgroup Suite by itself, adding the Teaming + Conferencing license price of US$94 per user. But even at an initial acquisition price of US$174 per user, buying both Novell Open Workgroup Suite and Novell Teaming + Conferencing, the cost of the entire solution (which offers the same level of functionality available in the Enterprise Desktop platform) that first year is still less than half the price of the Microsoft option (which costs US$406 per user, per year).

And—your customers do not have to pay that full price per year. That’s right. In both cases, the higher part of the acquisition costs is attached to the license, which your customer buys only once. After that first year, customers choosing the Novell option start paying only the maintenance costs, while customers choosing the Microsoft option continue to pay an exceedingly high price for their solutions. The Novell costs drop off dramatically, while the Microsoft costs stay at the same high rate. And from there, the cost of the Novell solution is certain to put a smile on customers’ faces.

Compare the software costs between these two solutions and ask what you’d rather be selling: software or services. Certainly your margin on services is greater than any software margins could offer.

“Novell has shown that with the right group of products and a robust support mechanism, Linux is now ready for widespread desktop deployment. SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop is a packaged, professional, office-oriented distribution of Linux which provides all the functionality of a proprietary solution at a fraction of the cost. Even with the cost of maintenance included, we estimate that the migration to Novell Open Workgroup Suite will reduce our current licensing costs by 50 percent— not to mention the freedom of choice it will give us in the future.” (Michel Martin, Director of the Strategy and Methodology Management Directorate, Belgian Ministry of Justice)

It’s easy to show your customers that yes, there is an alternative to explore: a Novell solution that is, feature by feature, fully comparable to the Microsoft Suite—but costs less than half of what the Microsoft solution would cost them.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop versus Windows Vista
“Despite the welcome improvements in Vista, using the product just isn’t exciting or intriguing any longer. It’s at least two years later than it should have been, and I don’t absolutely have to have it. You don’t either.” (Scott Finnie, Computerworld, “The trouble with Vista,” 3 February 2007)

Ouch. Any publicity is supposed to be good publicity, but with so many people wondering why they should upgrade to the latest Microsoft releases, maybe it’s better to just wait. Many users and reporters who have actually tried Vista have repeated this basic theme: Vista is okay, but it isn’t necessary, and the compatibility issues it poses means that its new features may not be worth the problems it causes. Some have even gone so far as wishing that they could request the more-stable XP when buying new PCs and laptops—rather than take their chances with Vista.

As USA Today technology writer, Andrew Kantor, reports, an application that doesn’t do what you expect it to do can be more of a hindrance than a tool. “In short … when I sit down [to Vista], I’m never 100 percent sure things are going to work properly.” ( USA Today, “Vista causes an array of problems,” March 2, 2007) (emphasis added)

“At the time of Windows 98’s launch, broadband access to the Internet was catching fire and consumers were pumped up about getting a faster, cheaper computer. There’s no such compelling reason to buy Vista… Businesses, like consumers, are in no hurry to upgrade. [And] while corporate technology departments are looking forward to some of Vista’s security features and easier administration tools, there’s little reason to switch if more secure PCs end up choking on a critical piece of software.” (Fox News, “Windows Vista problems still deter adoption,” 17 July 2007)

In PC Magazine, an ExtremeTech reporter started his article with this dismal report: “Six weeks later, the flaws are floating to the top. Windows Vista’s now a month and a half old, and most of the early adopters have formulated opinions: …it’s nifty, but nothing revolutionary. One thing’s for sure, though: message boards and blogs all over the Web are alight with reports of incompatibilities, bugs and nags. [And] a great deal of the problems we’ve encountered aren’t really fixable.” (PC Magazine, “Quick Fixes for Five Nasty Vista Problems,” March 14, 2007)

For many of your customers, the problems that come with Vista are unacceptable risks that could nullify whatever benefits it might also possess. When even power users can’t use the software easily—people who have a level of technical sophistication that your average office or home user simply doesn’t—you have to wonder how the introduction of Vista is going to negatively impact your customers’ productivity experience.

This is especially true in light of the fact that Vista does not seem to offer any truly compelling reasons to upgrade or switch. This would seem to be the perfect chance to bring up a second option: SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 Novell Edition versus Microsoft Office 2007
As long as you’re bringing up SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, you have an excellent chance of sealing the deal when you show your customers OpenOffice.org 2.0 Novell Edition—which comes free with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. This could be a huge win with many customers, who are not only looking at costly desktop upgrades but are also facing very costly Microsoft Office 2007 licensing.

Of today’s IT budget, as much as 30 percent goes to purchasing Microsoft Office licenses. For customers who would like to do more strategic projects with that money, getting a free office productivity suite offers an extraordinary opportunity to: 1) keep the functionality they need for most of their office users and 2) save a significant amount of money by dropping costly Microsoft Office licensing costs wherever they can.

This is the perfect time to bring up the subject. Like Vista, Microsoft Office 2007 is facing a questionable reception from users. Just tell users what they may have to pay—and put up with—to get the latest features, and they may rethink whatever benefits they might have thought they would get from upgrading.

eWEEK reports that “Office 2007 will rock corporate users’ worlds”—for both better and for worse. “In fact, eWEEK Labs recommends that users who do not require the bells and whistles offered in Office 2007—and who are looking mainly to edit and view simple documents—check out options such as OpenOffice.org’s namesake suite... [that runs] on several operating systems (which Office 2007 doesn’t) and [is] free (which Office 2007 most certainly isn’t).” (eWEEK, “Office 2007 will rock corporate users’ worlds,” November 16, 2006) (emphasis added)

Jupiter Research…told eWEEK that if there were ever an opportunity for … OpenOffice.org, ‘this might be it, going head-to-head against Office 2007, because we have a new file format and a new user interface, which means a lot of extra cost,’ and which could torpedo many enterprises from upgrading.” (eWEEK, “Office 2007: Users wary of changes,” March 2, 2006)

“The year 2007 might be remembered as the year when Linux corporate desktops stood up to Windows Vista. Hewlett-Packard recently announced it is making large deals with Linux desktops and that these orders might be a signal of an important shift in the market…. [And] Novell appears to be the most serious alternative to Microsoft Windows.” (CRN, “Four Linux Desktops Tackle the Enterprise,” by Mario Morejon, 26 March 2007) (emphasis added)

Novell Teaming + Conferencing versus Microsoft SharePoint
“The vast resources required to deploy and support SharePoint is also why SharePoint is not a viable solution for small businesses (and very often not viable for even medium-sized businesses). Small businesses, as well as teams in larger corporations, simply do not have the staff, the time, the ability to plan the deployment, nor do they have the budgets to hire a consultant to facilitate the deployment. (Let’s not forget that deploying Sharepoint for your team or business also requires expensive software licenses [$30,000 if you want to create customer or partner portals], hardware and development costs).” (Central Desktop, “A Peek into the Complexities of SharePoint,” 27 August 2006)

"Microsoft's SharePoint Server 2007 may be taking off in the enterprise, but the software doesn't come without holes, warts and a variety of other issues that need to be addressed in any corporate deployment. Users will find weaknesses in all six areas that SharePoint focuses on -- collaboration, portal, search, enterprise content management, business process management and business intelligence -- along with custom coding needs, dependencies on other Microsoft products, a weak selection of social networking tools, a lack of offline support, challenges integrating identity management/provisioning, lack of centralized management tools for global operations and trouble finding qualified SharePoint developers and support staff." (Source: Microsoft SharePoint popularity comes with issues: Analysts say software has holes, issues that need evaluation before rollouts, Network World, 07/01/2008)

With Novell Teaming + Conferencing, your customers can collaborate on the platform of their choice, within and beyond organizational boundaries, and without having to replace the e-mail clients, office productivity or other software they already use. Our solution also offers a compelling alternative to proprietary software development. With the ICEcore open source project, Novell is launching the most easy-to-use and best-integrated teaming and conferencing solution in the marketplace. And like any other open source based solution it allows customers and partners to innovate with us. In this way, new capabilities are developed more quickly, resulting in a more complete and cost-effective team productivity solution.

Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition versus Microsoft Small Business Server
Novell has always had a presence in small-business software. This new offering, which is both simple to deploy and use, is also more powerful and scalable than the Microsoft small-business products. Comparing both the Microsoft Small Business Standard and the Small Business Premium Servers, Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition comes out well ahead.

Novell Open Workgroup Suite Business Edition is priced aggressively, a stark contrast to the high licensing costs of all-proprietary software stacks. In fact, customers can save up to 80 percent on software acquisition costs by selecting Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition instead of a Windows-centric environment from Microsoft. In addition, the Novell suite supports up to 200 users, while Microsoft Small Business Server supports only 75 users per license. If your customers purchase Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 R2, they’ll have to purchase Microsoft Office separately. The Novell edition of OpenOffice.org— which runs on both Windows and Linux desktops—provides 90 percent of the functionality in Microsoft Office, supports Microsoft Office formats, and is included with Novell Open Workgroup Suite at no extra cost.

Why You Should Act Now

If your customers use Microsoft products as tools to aid knowledge worker or user productivity, budget review time tells them that it’s a costly approach. If they’ve made different choices but are considering switching to an all-Microsoft environment, they’re in for an unpleasant surprise because of the high prices Microsoft charges. Upgrading to Vista seems at first to be a simple and obvious path, but it’s actually more of a maze, one marked by hidden costs and questionable value. In fact, Vista is a deep-core upgrade that often costs as much—and disrupts business as much—as any wide-scale migration.

As you help your customers set the future direction for IT in their enterprises, you’ll find they can do one of three things:

1. They can continue to pay much more than they need to by moving ahead with a Microsoft Windows-centric environment based on rigid, proprietary software from desktop to server. It’s an inflexible approach with limited options, though Novell can help these users manage the transition with ZENworks Configuration Manager.
2. To avoid the cost and effort of a Vista upgrade, they can abandon Vista and go completely open source. But this is yet another extreme path that disrupts business as the existing infrastructure is ripped out and replaced with an open source product. Often, the open source product is every bit as expensive as the Vista option.
3. Or, they can explore a low-cost, high-value alternative by adopting a solution based on flexible and innovative productivity tools from Novell, other vendors (including Microsoft where needed) and open source software. With Novell Open Workgroup Suite, for example, your customers get an alternative that not only reduces their costs but also opens up new options, enabling them to choose from a broad range of best-of-breed solutions. With the suite, Novell offers enterprises of all sizes a secure, flexible and cost-effective IT infrastructure and a proven set of productivity or workgroup services. Unlike a rigid, Windows-centric solution, Novell Open Workgroup Suite is made up of open, standards-based software. It includes a complete infrastructure and productivity solution from the desktop to the server at a savings of up to 70 percent over similar capabilities from Microsoft. It can run on lower-cost hardware, so your customers can run the latest software on equipment they may already have. And it costs less to manage, so they can reduce personnel costs or reallocate IT staff to more important tasks—like growing their businesses.

Updates

Find out more about the latest updates for Workgroup solutions, including:

• New Training and Tools Available

Quick Reference

Solution Selling Resources
Get sales tools and training to help you sell Linux solutions, including:

• Solution-oriented Presentations
• Problem Solution Maps
• Solution Cards

Each tool details a specific solution you can sell based on Novell Workgroup technologies--like Team Productivity, for instance, or Open, Low-Cost IT Infrastructure. Take a look. You're sure to pinpoint solutions for many of your customers when you see this page.

The Enabling Technologies
Key Novell technologies in these solutions include the following:

• Novell Open Workgroup Suite:
  • Novell Open Enterprise Server (with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for workgroup-services only)
  • Novell GroupWise
  • Novell ZENworks Suite
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop
  • OpenOffice.org 2.0 Novell Edition
• Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition:
  • Novell Open Enterprise Server (with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for all uses, including application hosting and data center workloads)
  • Novell GroupWise
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop
  • OpenOffice.org 2.0 Novell Edition
  • Management tools specifically developed for small-business use
  • Essential open source components

A Firm Foundation for Greater Opportunities
Novell Workgroup solutions, and especially Novell Open Greater Opportunities Workgroup Suite, provide the perfect foundation for other products from Novell:

• Supplementing SUSE Linux Enterprise and ZENworks management tools with other Novell Resource Management products to automate management for assets and patch distribution.
• Other ZENworks products address specific concerns, like Novell ZENworks Endpoint Security Management for enhancing desktop security, and Novell ZENworks Configuration Management, which addresses the needs of Windows users, especially those running or upgrading to Vista.
• Evaluating the possibility of complementary solutions to enhance collaboration or data center needs:
  • Novell Teaming or Novell Teaming + Conferencing
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (for data center and mainframe use)
  • Deploying other Novell solutions that ensure workgroup uptime and availability, or further leveraging the identity-based management model inherent to Novell solutions:
  • Novell Business Continuity Clustering
  • Security and Identity solutions
  • Training and other services: Novell Workgroup solutions offer competitive pricing as well as strong management models that leverage efficiencies in both personnel and hardware requirements. This leaves more of a customer’s budget free to engage your services, which is often where your business sees its greatest profits.

Find Partner Products for Your Solution
Enhance your solution with products specifically designed to work with the Novell family of enterprise-class products. Achieve maximum synergy by teaming these best-of-breed software and hardware solutions with your Novell technologies. Visit the Novell Partner Product Guide.

Sales and Marketing Resources
Novell is committed to helping you grow your business. If you want to add further services and solutions to your business portfolio, we have the information you need. Log on to PartnerNet® to access the following Sales & Marketing Tools and Training Resources:

• Sales Tools Central: Quickly find the resources you need to get your sales team up to speed on Novell products—QuickTrain Sales Tutorials, PartnerNet Podcasts, Partner Solution Opportunity Kits and more.
• Campaign Central: Ready-made marketing campaigns for you to customize and deliver to your customers; includes materials for demand generation, customer seminars, sales and technical training, go-to-market kits and more
• Novell Utopia Demonstration System: With the Novell Utopia Demonstration System, you no longer have to build your own demos. Also, you can choose different types of demos, from online to virtual machines to recorded “Viewlets.” Utopia makes it easy to train your technical staff on new products, and even easier to demo products for customers.
• Sales & Technical Training: Access online training materials to quickly get your Sales team up to speed on Novell products and solutions. Offerings include PartnerNet Specialization training, Certified Novell Salesperson™ courses, online product sales training materials and technical training courses.