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| Author: |
ph0bia |
| Dated: |
Friday, April 08 2005 @ 01:18 AM CDT |
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1,831 times |
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 Novell often gets a poor grade when it comes to marketing, but when it comes to support, they have always done very well. Even in the early years it was apparent to Novell that they had a powerful asset; loyal subjects who used and loved their products. No small part of this loyalty came from their impressive Support Infrastructure and also from their training propaganda. This cult following so to speak was most obvious to Novell through the venue of Brainshare, and eventually through their Magazine now known as Novell Connection Magazine.
How best to leverage and strengthen such a powerful and valuable thing as what is now commonly called a community?
This is a question which Novell has tackled in an ever more aggressive way over the last few years. I believe that given the outcome, we have to give Novell a passing grade on this one, read on to find out why.
I already mentioned Brainshare and Novell Connection Magazine, these no doubt are how Novell became most aware of the existence and importance of their community. These have also without question helped to maintain and nourish that same community.
Their faithful following became critical to Novell's very survival as the Microsoft juggernaut began rapidly eating away at their market share with NT4. Everyone reading this article likely understands all too well that it was, and -is-, the faithful community who have kept Novell in the server rooms. As you read this, somewhere there is a Network Administrator or Engineer who is vigorously defending Novell to his or her CIO, and they in turn to the board - all against massive pressure to conform and assimilate...
Novell has realized this in a big way and responded in turn, because more recently they have really gotten it and put together some awesome community-bolstering tools including Novell Cool Solutions which contains among other things Cool Tools. Cool Tools is a substantial repository of community-submitted and sometimes internally developed Novell-related tools. These tools complement Novell's products by easing administration tasks, adding powerful features, providing enhanced reporting functionality, and more! Each tool is clearly licensed, many are fully open source under the GPL, LGPL, or other free licenses while others are shareware or demo versions of commercially available third-party software.
The Developer Portal has been a great support resource for many years to those working with NetWare and other Novell products from a development standpoint. A couple of years ago they added The Novell Forge to the mix, in the tradition of the now infamous SourceForge and Freshmeat. This has made some noise out there and has stirred developer activity surrounding the Open Source reinvention at Novell with their embrace of Apache, MySQL, and their acquisition of Ximian and SuSE. There are some great projects happening at The Forge so check it out!
The bottom line is that these efforts have all been a huge success, and there is a plethora of community-driven activity happening in all of the above-mentioned places. A passing grade by any standard, I should think.
The community more than anything will be what truly gives Novell another lease on life, if indeed it is to be had.
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Saturday, February 04 2012 @ 03:38 AM CST