client/server ms windows 3.1 applications development

I am looking for any comments, warnings, or suggestions regarding the following:

Our group currently is running Oracle V6 on a Sun Sparc II. We have recently purchased a skid (18) of laptops with MS Windows Office software. This includes Microsoft Access. Corporate standards dictate we use Novell Netware. Several questions comes to mind:

(1) Is Novell Netware 3.11 or 4.0 more appropriate? Real life plusses and

    minuses of the two would be appreciated.
(2) Should we (do we need) a Novell TCP/IP product to access the Oracle

    data from the laptops? If there are other, better Novell compatible     TCP/IP products, please let me know.
(3) Once the data has been transferred to a laptop based product (Microsoft

    Access would seem to be ideal given its bundling with MS Office) is Access     a solid development product - or should the step up to Visual Basic be     t
(4) Is Visual Basic appropriate? What about other products like PowerBuilder?

    Understand, a localized (laptop) DB is needed when the laptops are pulled     off the ethernet and taken home.
(5) Do I need any other software than Oracle SQL-Net TCP/IP on the Sun box?

Thank you for your time. Please feel free to point out any important considerations I have missed.

Mark Pollard
mdp8018_at_cs.rit.edu Received on Thu Jul 01 1993 - 19:48:24 CEST