Today was an interesting day. The usual Friday things happened: I came in, read my email and responded to those that required it, we had our 15 minute daily team meeting and I had my half an hour (or so) meeting with my master’s supervisor about metadata filesystems. Of course the usual occurs with work progressing. Today’s work is UniHIRTS again and I think I’m at the point where I’m happy enough with it. I’ve gone through and wiped out a few of the simpler tasks that I could handle with a few remaining tickets that are nice to haves. I’ve done a bit of a reskin and unfortunately it doesn’t all look good in IE but it still looks tolerable.

But most interesting today I heard word from my old Council friends that they’ve finally gotten to ditching Novell. Whilst I was there a project called “Get Rid of Novell” and “Get Rid of Legacy” which seems to have been given a heightened priority since Novell decided to double the licensing cost of their software. Council now has 90 days in which to remove all Novell software. This should be interesting as they have a lot of Novell supplied software: SLES, SLED, the Netware servers, eDirectory and its client, Novell’s IDM product, iPrint and  Zenworks. One of the things that kept Novell software around was the fact that it was half the price of the Microsoft equivalent, however with this it appears that this isn’t going to be the case so one of the reasons for retaining Novell, cost, is gone. And whilst it is a great solution for a lot of problems, the software that is slowly being deployed within the organisation is increasingly dependent on Microsoft’s software: running on Windows, integrating with Active Directory and providing management tools that integrate into Microsoft’s management console tools. Should Novell had let them be at the original price for another year, they’d have the money instead of doubling the price and well ending up with nothing. But life moves on.