Five years ago: Novell goes back to school to beat NT

The Green River Sneak Peek Programme will let Novell Certified NetWare Engineers (CNEs) and other IT professsionals learn features of the next version of NetWare 4.x - codenamed Green River - through Novell Authorised Education Centres (NAECs) in the UK and throughout the world. Tellingly, Novell said this is the first occasion it has offered training before a product is shipping.

Over 370,000 students have completed Novell-badged training under NetWare 4 and the knowledge base the company has built up over the years is widely regarded as a beach-head to protect Novell's 55 million user base against the progress of Windows NT on the server.

The Sneak Peek is intended to provide a detailed insight into the workings of Green River in anticipation of the product going into open beta testing next month and commercial release shortly afterwards. Key features of the upgrade include more SMP support, integrated TCP/IP, improved remote printing control, automatic detection of new hardware, and more administration tools. Migration utilities that help users of other versions of NetWare to upgrade are also included.

In 1997, Novell plans to follow up Green River with Moab, billed as the next major NetWare release and offering Java support plus better directory and traffic management across enterprise networks.