Select Page

BrainShare 2006

I’m now in downtown Salt Lake City for the week of BrainShare. It’s raining – but the BrainShare banners are everywhere, attendees are starting to arrive, hotels are full (or even overbooked!) and already there is a definate buzz building.

I’ve been down to the Technology Lab already; dropped off my demo servers for the keynotes; checked everything looks ok.

Tonight is a catchup with the team; tomorrow is an all day analyst event. I’m off to the spa 🙂

Novell Cool Bloggers – Product Managers rock!

Keyboard

According to Shel Israel – Product Managers are one of the best sets of bloggers.

I like this sentiment – I also agree!

Product managers and other people who are passionate and knowledgeable about the details of a product are often better.

A product manager … is mostly loyal to his or her product and accountable to customers. The product manager is often tied to happy customers.

Product managers also speak in a language closer to everyday people.

Read the full post here. I’ll happily use this as a fire underneath the engineering and support Cool Bloggers!
Written at: Provo, UT while preparing BrainShare Keynotes

Who are the best bloggers?

According to Shel Israel – Product Managers are one of the best sets of bloggers. I like this sentiment – I also agree!

Product managers and other people who are passionate and knowledgeable about the details of a product are often better.

A product manager … is mostly loyal to his or her product and accountable to customers. The product manager is often tied to happy customers.

Product managers also speak in a language closer to everyday people.

Read the full post here.

ZENworks Server Management – part 2

Training shoe

I wrote last week about ZENworks Server Management in the real world.

In that post I described how a deployment of ZENworks can deliver some rapid benefits – namely patching and updates for NetWare and its associated services.

Next I want to cover the second major benefit of ZENworks Server Management – Tiered Electronic Distribution. Using TED will save you time, money – and shoe leather!

Written at: Salt Lake City, UT

Tiered Electronic Distribution has been part of ZENworks since ZENworks for Servers was first released; it allows ‘content’ to be moved across your infrastructure (WAN and LAN) efficiently, between servers and sites, supporting multiple platforms.

The ‘content’ can be of multiple types – I quickly covered NetWare updates, but any type of file content can be moved using TED. We have customers moving all imaginable data using this technology.

One of the most cool uses of TED is integration with ZENworks Desktop Management – moving desktop applications from a development/test/staging area – to production – and then out across a campus, departmental or branch infrastructure.

TED

We have many customers using this type of infrastructure today – and seeing huge benefits.

How do you know this will work in your environment – just ask a few simple questions:

  • am I manually (or semi-manually) moving ZENworks applications across my network?
  • are my administrators creating and re-creating application objects for each site and department?
  • does a change to a global application require days, weeks or months of rollout; touching each site and server?

If these questions trigger uncomfortable answers then maybe you should look at using Tiered Electronic Distribution in conjunction with your NAL applications.

Typically once the ZENworks Server Management infrastructure is deployed you will see payback in weeks; some customers have paid for their deployment projects with their first deployment.

I’ll leave this post for now – I will point people to Erin Quill’s session at BrainShare. TUT 350 covers using ZENworks in this manner – as well as other high availability ideas. There is also an Advanced Technical Training Session at BrainShare – ATT 345 – as well as a Technical Tutorial – TUT 347 – covering advanced application management.

Written at: Salt Lake City, UT

ZENworks Server Management – update

Server

I wrote last week about ZENworks Server Management in the real world.

In that post I described how a deployment of ZENworks can deliver some rapid benefits – namely patching and updates for NetWare and its associated services.

I wanted to add some new information about a BrainShare session – TUT 351 – being run by Martin Irwin.
The session is titled “Upgrading NetWare to NetWare OES” – but part of the session will be how to upgrade and deploy eDirectory 8.8 using the ZENworks Server Management infrastructure.

From Martin:

We worked closing with the development team for eDirectory 8.8 to actually design into the IPS scripts a placeholder and APIs that allow for a ZSM software package (CPK) to edit and run NWCONFIG.NLM to upgrade your eDirectory 8.73 servers to eDirectory 8.8

So what can you do now?

In 30 minutes you can run a CPK that upgrades your NetWare 6.0 servers to Open Enterprise Server running on NetWare then in another 5 minutes you can run another CPK that upgrades the same server to eDirectory 8.8

The demo will also be available in the BrainShare Technology Lab – and also showcased at Meet the Experts.

Written at: Provo, UT