I'm just curious, what does Novell stick in there that the regular OpenOffice doesn't have? Since the college that I will be enrolling in the fall has an exclusive deal on Microsoft products (Penn State), being able to have good cross-platform ability is a requirement. Yes, I could use Wine and run MS Office in that, but that's a pain if it doesn't work and I'd rather use OpenOffice instead.

Any positive or negative experiences/comments are accepted.

Novell tends to be behind in versions, OO is at 2.2 and I can only find 2.1-19 for Suse.

The following explains the Suse Enterprise enhancements, not sure if this is also for openSuse.

This site talks about the enchancements for Suse OO 2.1 Enterprise version http://news.thomasnet.com/companystory/513378
Expanded OpenOffice.org support. SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop now includes the latest version of the Novell edition of OpenOffice.org (version 2.1), including the new OpenXML/ODF translator to convert Microsoft Word 2007 documents to OpenOffice.org, additional Visual Basic macro support, and improved Impress presentation functionality, including the ability to play embedded video as part of presentations.

The enhanced version of OO 2.02 http://boycottnovell.com/2006/12/04/...enoffice-fork/
The Novell® Edition of OpenOffice.org contains enhancements that are not available in the standard edition. These include:
Enhanced Support for Microsoft Office File Formats: OpenOffice.org supports import and export of Microsoft Office file formats, even taking advantage of compatible fonts to match document length. Transparent document sharing makes OpenOffice.org the best choice if you are deploying it in a mixed Linux/Windows environment.
E-Mail as Microsoft Office Document: The standard edition of OpenOffice.org supports e-mailing of files as PDF files from within the OpenOffice.org application. With the Novell Edition of OpenOffice.org, you can also e-mail any document as a Microsoft Office file. For example, you can e-mail a Writer file as a Microsoft Word file, so the file is automatically converted and attached to an e-mail in your default e-mail application.
Excel VBA Macro Interoperability: The Novell Edition of OpenOffice.org eases the migration of many macros from Microsoft Excel. Although not all macros can be successfully migrated, this interoperability offers more than the standard edition, which does not support migration of macros.
Enhanced Fonts: For the Novell Edition of OpenOffice.org, Novell licensed fonts from AGFA that use the same or similar names as the fonts available in Microsoft Office. The fonts also look similar to those used by Microsoft and have identical metrics. This allows OpenOffice.org to match fonts when opening documents originally composed in Microsoft Office, and very closely match pagination and page formatting.
ODMA Integration: The Novell Edition of OpenOffice.org for Windows includes initial release of ODMA integration such as GroupWise.

wow, I didn't think there was that much included! I'll have to put opensuse on at some point (hopefully I can make it go a lot faster), but right now I'm still trying out Ubuntu Feisty.

As a student you should qualify for StarOffice which is Sun's varient with it's own enhancements.