On Wed, 6 Mar 1996, Tom B wrote:

> I am just as interested in the response to this query.  In addition, who is
> running Blackbaud out there?  We are thinking of going with both the Raiser's
> ......

Funnily enough I put a similar query out yeaterday and had reply from
Julia Moore at the Indianapolis Art Centre. They seem to like everything
except the cost!

Re WinNT vs Win/Novell (Steve Rooney's msg):
Well we are broadly similar to Steve's environment (albeit a bit bigger)
and have just gone through the process of selecting between NT and Novell.
(We are currently using Novell 3.12/Windows For WorkGroups and Unix)

We are going to retain Unix (for collection databases) and scrap Novell in
favour of NT. User workstations will be a bit of mix for a while but will
settle down to Win95 and NT workstation.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with Novell 4.xx in fact it's apparently
very easy to use and much less labour intensive than the 3.xx versions.

However we have been watching a number of large NT sites very closely and
are satisifed that it's a really solid product. One of the great
attributes is the tight integration of all the Microsoft products and the
fact that a significant part of the inbuilt functionality of NT is an
extra cost in the Novell world. (and NT's a lot cheaper to start with)
We also think MS Exchange is going to be very valuable to us.

There's still a lot of,"NT isn't a real OS" comment out there, but look at
the sales graph and the companies taking it up.

The thing we'd really like to get away from is Windows 3.xx- it's really
totally inadequate for 'power users' especially in concert with resource
hungry products like MS Schedule Plus.

there's alot of intersting 'case study' stuff on the Microsoft web site-
which is of course biased.

The big worry of course is that we're all getting more and more deeply
locked into the Bill Gates view of the world!


Tim

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