by ezs | Mar 10, 2006 | blogging, evilzenscientist, Novell, Uncategorized
Novell Cool Blogs finally went live and public this week – we’ve now got half a dozen regular posters – and seemingly hundreds of readers.
The next challenge is keeping up the quality and quantity of posts; we also plan to add other Novell people to the blogosphere – and finally got out and tell the world about the site!
One challenge we have is making the blog ‘less corporate’ – but still remaining a trusted and valuable source of information.
Written at: Birmingham, England
by ezs | Mar 10, 2006 | Uncategorized, ZENworks
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I spent the morning with a large, strategic Novell customer who asked a seemingly simple question:
“Can you give us a quick overview of ZENworks for Servers – we have it as part of our MLA and are wondering what to do with it”
A good question isn’t it?
Well – we talked for over an hour about three of the main roles that ZENworks 7 Server Management can play in an enterprise environment. I’ll cover these in a series of posts in the next week.
To start I’ll describe a common administrative headache – updating NetWare.
Written at: Edinburgh, Scotland
Patching and Update for NetWare
Sounds simple eh? But think about what really happens when you have to patch a NetWare server.
Most customers today (the ones that are not using ZENworks) download the Support Pack from Novell, unpack it, test it and then manually copy the Support Pack to servers (lots of XCOPY, batch files and crossed fingers here).
Next notify users that service will be interrupted (even if it is 3am in the morning).
Then it’s RCONSOLE to your server, unload NLMs, start the installation process, reboot and fingers crossed you have a good experience.
That takes time. It’s also not efficient and for everyone concerned about consistency, reliability and uptime this method doesn’t stand up.
Sound familiar? Are you the administrator stuck in the office at the weekend working into the small hours to patch servers?
The answer is to use ZENworks Server Management.
Novell are providing more and more patches and updates for NetWare in the ZENworks CPK format – examples include NetWare support packs, updates for the NetWare Java Virtual Machine, eDirectory – and – the newest addition – ZENworks Support Packs.
My colleague Martin Irwin has also worked to produce a migration from NetWare 6 to Open Enterprise Server using this technology!
Testimony from customers like yourselves really shows the value of this. I have worked with customers who have used ZENworks Server Management to automate NetWare and ZENworks Support Pack installation. They have taken the time needed to deploy from ‘weeks’ to ‘days’ – with a corresponding saving in time and effort.
Let me know your experiences with ZENworks Server Management – there’s a lot more information to share. Next time I will write about how Tiered Electronic Distribution can make the desktop administrators life easy.
Written at: Edinburgh, Scotland
by ezs | Mar 9, 2006 | Novell Open Audio, Uncategorized, ZENworks
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I recorded a series of podcasts for Novell Open Audio – the first part of this is now live!
This time round I give some background on ZENworks 7 Linux Management. Still to come – Asset Management, Patching and BrainShare 2006.
Enjoy!
Written at: Edinburgh, Scotland
by ezs | Mar 8, 2006 | Uncategorized, ZENworks
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I am Edinburgh for a few days visiting some of our global ZENworks customers.
One thing that I love about visiting customers is seeing how Novell technology is being used. Every customer deployment opens my eyes to the seemingly endless imagination of technical architects and administrators like yourselves. Every large customer deployment is somewhat unique – whether for ZENworks, Novell Identity Manager or any of our technologies.
The other part that makes customer visits so vital, is getting a first hand account of new trends and activities within IT organisations. It is direct interaction like this that helps Product Managers collect requirements for better, innovative products.
I’ll report back on what I find in the next couple of days.
Written at: Edinburgh, Scotland
by ezs | Mar 6, 2006 | blogging, Evangelism, evilzenscientist, Uncategorized, ZENworks
Novell Cool Blogs is live – but very much running live in stealth mode.
Feel free to visit and take a look; over the next few days we’ll get the rest of the community posting – hopefully by then all of the teething troubles will have been ironed out.
by ezs | Mar 4, 2006 | Uncategorized, ZENworks
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Many of you will be familiar with BrainShare – Novell’s annual gathering of customers, partners and channel partners.
One thing that may be news – this year BrainShare will be bigger than ever – the event is now ‘BrainShare Global’ – where people from across the globe will descent on Salt Lake City, Utah for a week of bonding, information gathering, research and fun. As always ZENworks will play a central part in this major event.
I will be blogging frequently in the next few weeks about the run up to the event – but we have keynotes, breakout sessions, Birds of a Feather sessions, hands-on-labs and much, much more.
One event that I encourage every technologist reading to attend – is Meet the Experts. This is a unique chance for you to spend some face-to-face time, in informal surroundings, with the people that make Novell’s products happen. Architects, engineers, support people, testers, localisation engineers, the odd Product Manager – we’ll all be present to let you ask questions. Any questions. No – I mean it – anything! From experience I know that this truly is ‘Meet the Experts’ – and it’s humbling to know that often you are the expert.I’ll give a running commentary of our BrainShare preparations in this blog (and some behind the scenes updates too).
Written at: Draper, UT
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