If you were to install a new museum-wide LAN, would you go with Windows NT
or Windows 3.x on Novell?

Assume 60 users.  All users would run Word, Excel, a messaging & scheduling
package such as GroupWise, have limited access to the accounting system
(which is possibly a Windows system such as Great Plains Dynamics or Solomon
IV), and have internet access.  Workgroups and their database applications
are the standard lot:  accounting, development and membership, collections
and exhibitions, education (a class registration database), museum store and
mail order, and admissions.

Currently we are a hodgepodge of operating systems and applications.  We
want to trash the accounting system and the dev/mem system asap, and then
migrate the other workgroups to the LAN later, as funds allow.  We seek a
stable OS with minimum maintenance but with a future.  We are spoiled by
UNIX, which we run our accounting package on.  The accounting package is
very old but UNIX is very stable and trouble-free.  We have no in-house MIS
staff and hope to continue without computer specialists.

We rule-out UNIX because we want Windows and museum-wide file sharing and
communications.  We rule-out OS2 because developers are slow to support it
and it seems doomed.

So, Windows NT or Win/Novell?  Or ...?  Thanks.  (Will also post to mcn-l as
soon as I get my subscribe to take!)

Steve Rooney
International Center of Photography
New York City
phone 212 860-1777 ext 130
fax 212 360-6490
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