brian@cimage.com (Brian Kelley) (12/28/90)
For 1991 Novell has introduced new requirements for it's resellers. In order to be "Gold Authorized" your organization must meet the following requirements: (this is typed by me from our Novell Newsletter for January. Typos are mine). - Employ at least one Certified NetWare Engineer (CNE) prior to June 1, 1991 - Have at least one designated NetWare sales specialist in their organization complete two sales training courses prior to January 1, 1992 (Basic Sales Training and Advanced Sales Negotiations) - Have at least one technical employee in their organization pass a test based on the following product training courses (NetWare Asynchronous Connectivity - 2 days and NetWare SNA Connectivity - 3 days) within six months of course availability (estimated March/April). I think this mostly stinks. We run NetWare 386 V3.1 and NetWare 2.15 in house. Both, of course, are still quite buggy, especially NetWare 386. Netware 386 will set you back $8000. If you are Gold Authorized, you can get tech support on the product from Novell at no charge. If you aren't Gold, you pay Novell $150 an hour to talk to them about the bugs in their product. I don't think that's right. We've placed about six calls to Novell about NetWare 386 and they all were situations involving NetWare bugs. In all cases, we RTFM before we call. Often it takes Novell 8 or 9 hours to figure out the problem. We currently have a call regarding a memory problem that has been going for over two weeks and is still unresolved (with Novell starting to resort to "your machine must not be compatible." Gee, would the fact that it broke when we upgraded from 3.0 to 3.1 and that substantial changes were made to the way disk cache is handled in 3.1 (according to Novell) have anything to do with it?). Only Gold or Platinum resellers can sell Netware 386. That is too bad, since it really far superior to 2.15 (and the only real issue remaining between the two is price and to some extent, reliability). Let me mention each of the three requirements above. Requiring one CNE per site isn't too terrible. The main problem is that some sites do not have the resources or time (or need) to send their support people off for additional Novell training. Our Novell people meet nearly all of the CNE requirements and we don't care about SNA connectivity! I believe that we can handle any Novell issues we are presently encountering. We don't care about SNA! I can understand why Novell is doing this; to improve the quality of support from NetWare dealers. The only problem is that when you call a dealer with a problem, you often don't speak with the CNE, you speak with a bozo. We seldom get the answers to our questions from our distributor (or the distributor ends up calling Novell. If that's what it takes, I'd rather hear the answer direct, thanks). Requiring a designated NetWare sales specialist is also quite bothersome (as well as the sales training). What about organizations that have sold Novell in the past but whose focus has changed so that they aren't really selling Novell any more (they still have to support their old customers)? We don't sell Novell as much as we use to (and based on some of the changes Novell is making in '91, I can't help but wonder if we'll replace it with some other NOS). Sorry to let this drag on, but I'm not happy with the situation. NetWare 386 has it's strong points, but it is a very expensive product. It also has a lot of shortcomings (How about a list of all users on the system? What about disk usage statistics? And TCP/IP support is coming Real Soon Now...).