>We have found that as the number of users increased past the original spec of 90, response times have slowed down to unacceptable levels (from a few seconds to 10 seconds and more for a specific mission-critical task). At this client, we are running on a Novell server and Windows NT workstations

Have you considered your infrastructure hardware?

You could have a PIII-500+ workstation with 100Mb NIC connected to a 16 port 10BaseT hub get horrible performance simply because the data can't get across the network fast enough. Put the same machine on a switch with gigabit fiber to the server, and your performance will increase by orders of magnitude.

Unless you already have network engineers, it's worth it to get a vendor to diagnose your network. In either case, track the bandwidth utilization and throughput of your existing network before making any decisions about how to improve overall performance. Your hardware investigation might provide insight into the software configuration you require.

At our corporate office, it was determined that 80% of our bandwidth was used by Fox2x applications, with 22% packet loss due (mostly) to contention. Though we have less than 100 employees, we invested in 6 Cisco 3500 switches. Now every user has a switched path directly to the 1000baseSX server. (ie: no contention problems,10x the overall throughput) Our vendor admitted that the hardware is beyond what a typical company our size would use, but due to the extreme volume of Fox traffic, it was worth the extra muscle. They were right.