OpenSuse and Novell

We have all been asked to come up with ideas about the new rollout on the network, the NM has come up with using Active Directory on MS and we have test VM servers at the mo with a network running along side the existing one, we are coming up with all the things that we'd lose like Zenworks which we use ALOT and we can't find a similar thing that would run in an AD environment!!! And we weren't sure if we'd lose all our distributed systems - if a user logs on in a certain place they get icons on the desktop with a red shortcut and everything just works and we would lose all the application rollouts like that - but our support is up for renewal this year and it looks like our Netware 6 servers are going to be wiped. Can OpenSuse do the things that Novell can ? we are running E-Directory could we set Opensuse up like our Netware servers ?? and would we be able to get Zenworks and Consoleone working on Open Suse

It's looking like we will be going down the AD route - but it'd interesting see what we could do with Opensuse.....

Does anyone know whether this would work ?

P.S we dont need alot of support because we can do alot of it ourselves within the team, our main aim is to free up some of the budget - at the moment we cant even replace things like Splitter boxes on the IWB's or even a mouse or keyboard because there is no budget left at all so we need to come up with some open source ideas as well as using Microsoft.

Cheers