Many companies are still running NetWare 3.12 (the Y2K compliant upgrade) because of its simple administration. 3.x was the last version pitched at small business and departmental markets, while 4.0 was conceived as an enterprise product. With 4.0 the bindery was replaced with the tree structured object oriented enterprise directory now being marketed separately as NDS (Novell Directory Services). The current NetWare version is 5.1.

More than 10 years is certainly an outstanding product lifespan in this industry, and, to their credit, Novell did not move to force everyone to the latest version as Microsoft does (and is certainly doing with Win2000).