Monday, August 11, 2008
Novell Client for Vista, the ecosystem
I just reported a bug in the beta that surprised me. I can't talk details about it, but it strikes me as the kind of bug that should have been at least reported shortly after the client released. Perhaps it was just so overall buggy that it got lost in the forest, but still. The Vista client has been out for some time now.
Having said the following rant several times over the past few days, I figure it's time to post it ;).
The problem we're running in to is that the number of users of the Vista Client is a small, small sub-set of the overall users of the Novell Client, which are by now a minority of overall users of Novell NCP file-servers. Novell spent years hyping 'clientless' approaches to file-serving, through the CIFS stack on NetWare. A lot of places bought in to that. Because of this, the percentage of NCP-client Vista users among the overall Novell File-Server market is a rather small one.
And small means you don't get a lot of testing done by people-who-are-not-us, and seemingly obvious bugs showing up in the beta Sp1 builds. I don't have any Vista workstations, so I've done exactly zero testing of the Vista Client; this particular bug was reported and troubleshot by someone who is not me (I just filed it). Even though we have beta builds of the Vista client as part of this beta, I'm not testing it. All things considered, I probably should.
Since we're wedded hard to the Novell Client, it's probably time for us to start devoting resources to the ecosystem in order to keep it alive.
Having said the following rant several times over the past few days, I figure it's time to post it ;).
The problem we're running in to is that the number of users of the Vista Client is a small, small sub-set of the overall users of the Novell Client, which are by now a minority of overall users of Novell NCP file-servers. Novell spent years hyping 'clientless' approaches to file-serving, through the CIFS stack on NetWare. A lot of places bought in to that. Because of this, the percentage of NCP-client Vista users among the overall Novell File-Server market is a rather small one.
And small means you don't get a lot of testing done by people-who-are-not-us, and seemingly obvious bugs showing up in the beta Sp1 builds. I don't have any Vista workstations, so I've done exactly zero testing of the Vista Client; this particular bug was reported and troubleshot by someone who is not me (I just filed it). Even though we have beta builds of the Vista client as part of this beta, I'm not testing it. All things considered, I probably should.
Since we're wedded hard to the Novell Client, it's probably time for us to start devoting resources to the ecosystem in order to keep it alive.
<permalink> posted by riedesg : 8/11/2008 03:27:00 PM
