The last time we really had anything to do with Novell, apart from using it functionally as the University's e-mail system, was back in the dim dark days of 3.1 and 4.01. Things have certainly changed a fair bit since then.
Installation was straightforward, the Novell engineers who assisted the Lab with the installation suggested a large enterprise install and configure would take between five to eight hours. Management is excellent mostly being achieved remotely by Novell's centralised management tool called ConsoleOne. ConsoleOne can administer several Novell servers from the one administrative workstation.
For those interested in the behind the scenes nuts-and-bolts there is still a purely text-based interface on the server which mostly allows engineers to monitor activity and log events. It is always good to know that when the GUI stops responding there is still a CLI to turn to before panicking. As one would expect, Novell uses its directory service for the majority of the user and group control.
Groupwise should easily scale up to 30,000 or even 40,000 users. An interesting feature is Novell's quickfinder technology which integrates a document management indexing and search facility into the users interface that is updated periodically (default is once every 20 hours) that allows authorised users to search through global or group document stores for keywords.
Overall a powerful package with perhaps not so many customisable options as Domino, but still worthy of evaluation if a large-scale mail server deployment is on the cards.
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Huh? IBM wins Scenario 2, but MS Exchange wins overall?
Sorry? And MS costs almost as much for 25 users as Domino does for 200 users!? And your rating is 3.5 to 4.5!
I am not a raving Domnio person either - I have installed a demo, but not fully committed to either: In fact I need Scenario 0.5 - 100 users, mulitple offices.
Which I guess is somewhere else IBM comes ahead - you can run multiple servers, as it is licensed *per user*. Unlike Exchange, whose cost skyrockets if you want redundancy!
Your report seems to have some bias in that it also did not price MSeX for wither Scenario - just gave one simple price!