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Smart Windows Deployment

ENGL

I have been working all week on a ZENworks lifecycle demo and session – part of this involves delivering a consistent Windows XP SP2 operating system to workstations, in an automated, hands-free manner. Certainly this toolkit has saved us days of time in building our demonstrations.
Part of the solution has seen us integrate the ENGL Imaging Toolkit into our demo; this allows the creation of a ‘universal image’ – it works well. In our demo we have a single 800MB Windows XP image that can be delivered to any type of hardware – Dell, IBM, HP, Lenovo, whitebox and even VMware.

The ENGL Imaging Toolkit has a great write-up in the current Novell Connection Magazine. Read it here.

[STOP PRESS – ENGL were awarded Novell EMEA Partner of the Year at BrainShare 2006 this week]

Written at: BrainShare 2006, Salt Lake City, UT

ZENworks and end-point security

A couple of announcements that may have slipped under the radar – two security partnerships at BrainShare:

SecureWave – providing removable device lockdown and security, application white and blacklisting – all tied in to Novell Identity
Third Brigade – providing a smart, small, host based intrusion detection system.

Press here from Third Brigade. I’ll add SecureWave when it hits the wire.

ZENworks, Identity and Access Management

Euros

I have been asked many times during Novell BrainShare for examples of how Novells Identity, Security and Access Management products will integrate with Novell ZENworks – our cross platform management solution.

One example I have been giving is that of a customer looking to deploy a new Line of Business application – typically a complex multi-tiered client-middleware-database infrastructure.

Written at: BrainShare 2006, Salt Lake City, UT

The non-Novell way of doing this is to deliver an application to the desktop; create user identities within the new application – and give the end user another login and password to remember. Certainly not a good experience for the user; and not cost effective for the enterprise.

Using Novell Identity Management solutions you see a very different story. ZENworks can deliver the client application components to the desktop – cleanly and consistently; Novell SecureLogin can enable Enterprise Single Sign-on to the application; and Novell Identity Manager can provision the correct users, their password and their credentials into the identity store for the application.

The differences are striking. Lowered costs of deployment, increased agility, less challenges for the helpdesk during deployment – and ultimately a simple experience for the user – just click on the application icon and it ‘just works’.

This is another real-world example of how Novell is integrating solutions – from security, access, identity and resource management.

Let me know how you are dealing with these challenges.

Written at: BrainShare 2006, Salt Lake City, UT