Novell | Nothing of Any Quincyquonce

An introduction

by ezs | Jan 23, 2007 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized, ZENworks

My name is Andy Philp and I am a ZENworks specialist working in Novell Consulting UK. For the past 4 years or so, I have worked with many customers across Europe architecting, designing and implementing solutions with all of the ZENworks products.

So why I am on Cool Blogs? Well, I’m very passionate about ZENworks and want to hear from you directly regarding your experiences, good or bad, so we can learn from each other. Over the coming weeks and months I’ll be sharing my experiences and posting tips and tricks to help you maximise your ZENworks experience.

I hope you find my future posts informative and useful.

Written at: Frankfurt, Germany

100 days of ZENworks – flying home. Check-in powered by NAL

by ezs | Jan 12, 2007 | fun stuff, Technology, travel, Uncategorized, ZENworks

Post 2 of many in the next 100 days – talking about ZENworks.

Ah – time to travel home from Düsseldorf. Up early and to the airport.

It’s great seeing your product in use. Lufthansa check-in desks are powered by NAL. Check-in agent logs in, up pops NAL and all of the applications.

I’m travelling United from Chicago to Salt Lake City – and United are also a ZENworks customers.

Take a look next time you fly. You might be having your check-in made possible by ZENworks.

100 days of ZENworks – training in Düsseldorf

by ezs | Jan 10, 2007 | Technology, travel, Uncategorized, ZENworks

First of a long series of posts from the next 100 or so days talking about the next version of ZENworks.

I’m in Düsseldorf – running an internal training course on ‘Pulsar’. I wrote a pretty detailed, deep dive, technical training course on ‘Pulsar’ and delivered it today.

I’ve been polishing and writing labs and training course notes all week; I’ve had a couple of hours sleep in the last three days.

Today was the actual training – and I think it went well. We trained 25 internal people from across EMEA on the next version of the product; yesterday was training on our messaging and positioning; tomorrow is marketing, positioning and ITIL training.

It’s been a long time since I spent time with this many EMEA people in technical training; the response so far has been very positive.

Mail and mail servers. Hula is no more.

by ezs | Nov 28, 2006 | Novell, Technology, Uncategorized

Yesterday evening I moved my mail server from a clunky old Windows 2003 server to a shiny new SLES 10 box.

I still use NetMail – but I had a couple of fun hours with the move.

First I looked at the state of Hula; some pretty broken RPMs that didn’t do much useful for me. Then I saw this post from Alex Hudson

So, Hula as a Novell project is basically over – Novell are no longer interested in any potential “Maui” product (which was going to be an upgrade path to Netmail users), the product group has been broken up, and at least one developer who was part of that group has now left Novell.

Bummer. Kinda confirms what I had found out internally a few weeks ago in planning the mail migration.

Then I saw this from Peter Teichman (who I really respect from his work on Red Carpet Enterprise at Ximian):

Novell no longer has anyone working full-time on
Hula. As a team we have spent some time looking at where the Hula
project is and the opportunities in the market and in the end we had to
conclude that we couldn’t justify investing at the same level in Hula
going forward. So those of us who have been developing Hula full-time
will be moving on to other roles and to other parts of the company.

So Netmail as it stands is somewhat orphaned. It’s pretty much end of life.

I’ve got Netmail running on SLES 10 without major pain; it does what I need. I’ll need to look around for the ‘what’s next’ some time next year – but for now I’m sorry to see Hula and Maui not move forward.