Dublin, IRELAND — Jan 09 2006 — Novell has announced the completion of the deployment of a high performance email and calendaring solution at Institute of Technology Network (ITNet) Ireland. ITNet is a higher education network project comprising of 13 Institutes of Technology, which has selected Novell® NetMail® for its 'E-Mail4Life System'. Hosted on Novell SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 9, Novell NetMail will initially provide email and calendaring to 17,000 students from both the Institute of Technology Tallaght and Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology.

The key technology drivers for ITNet in choosing both the email and technology platform were reliability and scalability. Novell NetMail was designed to fit any size environment, from two to 200,000 users (or more) on a single server, and Novell SLES 9 running MySQL is a scalable, high-performance foundation for secure enterprise computing. In today's information intensive society students increasingly need to communicate effectively and speedily amongst themselves, lecturers and the institute faculty.

The Novell solution gives students the ability to create their own accounts based on a set of credentials that ITNet supply, including a unique email ID - which the student chooses - linked into the official Student ID, thus reducing administration and overheads. The modular deployment gives the added advantage of allowing ITNet to easily modify the look and feel of the web page, without having to make any changes to the underlying code.

According to Martin McCarrick, ITNet Application Services Manager at ITT Dublin, the motivation behind choosing Novell was clear: “This deployment enabled us to consolidate three servers into one running Novell SLES 9. Users are empowered to create their own account IDs and control how they want to use their email. The system has a more feature rich interface and goes well beyond a traditional web based email system. Having implemented the original system in 2001 we migrated to the current version in October 2005. With this system the ROI is tangible and was proven the very moment we went live – through both increased student take-up and the removal of the manual account creation process.”

Barry Brown, Novell Technical Specialist believes this deployment continues Novell’s view of mixed source solutions based on open standards– “Novell NetMail has always been based on Internet-standard messaging and security protocols, so much so that Novell open sourced parts of the code as a foundation to get the Hula project started. By running this solution on open-source Novell SLES 9 and MySQL, ITNet has confirmed that large scale deployments across the different Institutes can be run more efficiently using a mixed-source platform. The system is ready to roll out to all Institutes of Technology if the demand is present.”

About Novell
Novell, Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL) delivers software for the open enterprise(TM). With more than 50,000 customers in 43 countries, Novell helps customers manage, simplify, secure and integrate their technology environments by leveraging best-of-breed, open standards-based software. With over 20 years of experience, more than 5,000 employees, 5,000 partners and support centers around the world, Novell helps customers gain control over their IT operating environment while reducing cost. More information about Novell can be found at www.novell.com

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