I am in a new position in a school district and it is up to me to decide to switch from Netware5 to windows2003 or simply upgrade to Netware6. Last year I finished my MCSE on W2K but worked in a winNT environment. So for selfish reasons I want to switch to win2003 so I can actually retain what I studied over a year for. For not so selfish reasons I want to switch due to the uncertainty of Netware's future. Also, I will retain the second novell domain which hold the school administrators accounts. I will only be switching the High School domain and I will have all summer to work on it without any downtime to users since there will not be any users untill September. I welcome anyone's input into this decision.

Not sure what your concern is about Netware sticking around. NW6 can be installed on a linux kernel. Now that is progress to open source. NW is not going away.

Upgrading is way cheaper than O3 and client licenses.

Netware has subblock allocation, builtin defrag, builtin quotas, NDS which has been around longer than AD... and more.

You need to approach this is what is best for the school. You need to take into consideration how they are using the system now and how they want to use it in the future. Consider the applications they are running and what the cost will be to run them on 03. Consider how they are interfacing with other schools or organizations. Compare short term and long term costs. You have about a year of fact gathering before you can draw a productive conclusion.

Best of luck!

I am employed at Novell, and I assure you Novell is not going away, especially with all of the goodies that will flood the market in the next few years. If anything, Novell will become larger and stronger. As large as Microsoft? No, but we're here to stay.

BTW, you'll need less hardware with NetWare to support the same configuration in Win03, making your setup less expensive. And your down time will be significantly less with NetWare.