If I am correct novell is for a kinda remote desktop thing, right? They are using clientpro pc's!
Novell acts as a container over your network. Let's say you have 5 world wide branches in 5 world wide locations, Tokyo, London, New York, L.A., and Hong kong. Each with its own domain controller and subnets. Novell would act as a container over all the networks combining them together. You only use Netware servers for user database, authentication, and file sharing, everything else you could use Linux, OS X, or windows servers for and you could make them leaf items in the Novell tree. Now you can still use zen works if you wanted to, or windows SMS along with the novell client. That is the beauty of Novell, is that it can be used with anything (although not always that easy).
Basically Novell created modern networking, MS stole NDS and created Active Directory, except they call theirs like forest - branch or something other. Open Directory is the Unix/Linux version of this which kind of came right after Novell started to develop NDS which became eDirectory now.
Novell, has since then bought out SuSe Linux and gone towards integrating both eDirectory and Open Directory together. So, Netware is pretty much a dead technology, and Novell has a knack for creating a kick ass product and then not being able to keep up with everyone. However, MS will back lash since their developing has pushed the envelope but it has also created bloats, and bad coding. The market is already starting to flop and with the economy on the decline people will want to shift to cheaper solutions. Currently, Microsoft Licenses are the most expensive.
