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100 days of ZENworks – training in Düsseldorf

by | 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.

Training

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.

on New Product Management

by | Jan 7, 2007 | Evangelism, Technology, Uncategorized

An interesting post by Charles Zedlewski of SAP on Product Management. He also references Storm Grillin – another blog on ‘agile Product Management’.

Especially interesting; we had training from Pragmatic Marketing a few weeks ago – which was a good refresher.

Here are the interesting comments; readers at Novell – I’m pointing fingers at you.

a product manager needs to be:
A salesperson. Selling the vision of the product to the development team is essential. How else can they come up with lots of good feature ideas or believe in the priorities? More energy is spent explaining the “why” of the product versus the “what.” 

This also means a product manager should not be:
A document generator. Why bother to generate that 100 page PRD? It’s going to change a month into the project anyhow.

These shifts in focus also change the psychic rewards for the product manager. Most product managers I’ve known love being the satisfaction of being resident expert.

and from Storm Grillin’

Agile product development is all about focusing on real value and delivering it as quickly and measurably as possible.  Many times this means we focus on story cards and use cases and velocity.  But on Monday, the dev, qa, and support folks took things to a completely new level.  They wanted to talk about the business.  They wanted to understand the key metrics that determine financial success, and they wanted to measure their progress against those metrics!

 Interesting thoughts.

LinkedIn

by | Jan 4, 2007 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I wrote over 18 months ago about LinkedIn; and some trends I saw of people just linking with unknown contacts.

That’s still rife; I see colleagues who are linked to people and I know they have no idea who they are.

Guy Kawasaki wrote an interesting article about using LinkedIn – certainly good basic information; especially for those looking to hire or be hired. I especially like the comment about tracking down your potential manager.

WordPress 2.0.6 RC2

by | Dec 29, 2006 | blogging, evilzenscientist, Uncategorized, wordpress

Update time again – this time for another security issue.

Here’s the mail from wp-testers:

http://wordpress.org/beta/wordpress-2.0.6-RC2.zip
http://wordpress.org/beta/wordpress-2.0.6-RC2.tar.gz

RC2 addresses the following vulnerability.

http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2006/Dec/0463.html

We also changed how we escape HTML attributes. Escaping is done with a new
attribute_escape() function.

http://trac.wordpress.org/changeset/4656

This touched a lot of files so we need to do some broad testing to make sure we didn’t fat finger anything.

Should be GA soon; advisable to upgrade.

Of mail servers

by | Dec 28, 2006 | evilzenscientist, Linux, Technology, Uncategorized

I wrote about moving my primary mail server to SLES 10 and Netmail 3.5.2 a month ago.

Everything has been working really well – great uptime, better performance, another box moved to SLES 10..

Except for one little thing. Grania has been commenting that some of her email is missing.

Well – it’s not been in the inbound SpamAssassin kill files; it’s not stuck on the mail server; there are no errors with connectivity; no problems with DNS or MX records. The mail has been from all over – so it’s not someone like Yahoo being picky. Also normal mail has been coming in fine – so we’ve not been blackholed.

Tonight I decided to hunt down the problem.

It was me. I missed one step for the migration of mail; to use Netmail rules and forwarding the AutoReply agent needs creating and configuring.

The AutoReply Agent also enables users to forward their messages to another e-mail address. Users can specify if they want to retain a copy of the message in their NetMail mailbox or forward the message to the designated address.

Ooops. I missed that one. Three mouse clicks later and everything is back to normal.

I just trawled the aliases and there were over 400 mails to forward to the real mailboxes.

Vista – one month on

by | Dec 18, 2006 | Technology, Uncategorized

A month ago I got my hands on the RTM DVD of Windows Vista and took the plunge. I installed Vista Ultimate on my production IBM Thinkpad T42p; 80GB HDD, 2GB RAM. I installed Vista into my Active Directory environment

Currently here is what I’ve got running, as well as a list of applications that are working for me:

  • Windows Vista Ultimate
  • Office 2007
  • Firefox 2.0
  • Novell GroupWise 7
  • Open Office 2 Novell Edition
  • Putty
  • TextPad 4.7.3
  • Adobe Creative Suite 2
  • iTunes 7.0.2
  • Microsoft Windows Live Writer
  • Audacity
  • WinISO 4.3
  • WinZIP 9 SR1
  • BulletProof FTP Client 2.59
  • Symantec Anti Virus 10.2
  • Freemind 0.8
  • Nero 7 Ultra Edition
  • Collanos Workplace 1.0.0.9
  • Apple Airport Admin 4.2
  • GLoSS
  • GAIM 2 beta 5
  • Skype 2.5

The only applications I’m having trouble with so far are

  • Nortel Contivity VPN client
  • VMware Workstation (Vista as host)

I found a couple of defects; Microsoft worked with me and got a fix for one:

The most annoying thing was the User Account Control – every action required confirmation. I’m a domain admin and local admin on the box; my own fault if I do something foolish. I turned off all of the UAC features within a few hours – just too in your face.

Next steps are to find the Lenovo/IBM Thinkpad tools for some of the key mappings; not essential. Also have another hack at the VPN client.

Usual disclaimer – some of the apps listed are not ‘supported’. In fact I’m probably the only person testing Collanos Workplace on Vista 😉