Novell Cool Audio gets an archive
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A sign that Ted and crew have been working on sharing more inside tales from Novell – Open Audio now has an archive page.
Written at: Salt Lake City, UT
Mobility – and how it changes you
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I’m on vacation – blogging. Don’t tell my wife!
You may have read the post by Bill Pray talking about GroupWise Mobile Server and how that changed his way of working. I wanted to share a few words on my experiences on how bandwidth improvements have made me more productive.
Written at: Watching the Ocean, on vacation.
First some context. When I first ‘got online’ – like many of you it was via CompuServe and my primary reason for this – Novell patches. (I discount the previous online workings at University – Unix mail across the UK JANET academic network. Gopher, telnet and ftp.)
My first modem was 9600 baud; I went through the speeds – 14.4k, 28.8k, 33.6k – and over time added a PPP dialup account via a couple of early UK ISPs. I even had a ‘web site’ (static content) as early as 1993.
At the time these speeds were fine; content was small – and being in the UK I was billed by the second for all calls. Remember – local access isn’t free in most parts of the world!
Email was the main productivity tool; in one of my first roles – as a consultant working for a Novell VAR in the UK – GroupWise via dialup was fine; mainly text emails, no spam, no massive attachments. Patch downloads were small – remember this was before the gigabyte service packs! Dialup was ‘just fine’.
I evolved over time to dual channel ISDN – 128k data connection – and VPN tunnel into Novell. Better – but as of 1999/2000 this was starting to show limitations. Attachments grew in number and size, patches fattened up, product downloads (ISOs and betas) were starting to show up.
Fast forward to today.
My main work location is ‘on the road’. That is outside Novell’s main office, often on my home DSL line, a WiFi connection at a hotspot, working from a customer site or even accessing data via GPRS. Even on vacation my holiday home had 54MB WiFi thrown in!
High speed access seems pretty much everywhere. Even on recent trips to Europe wireless internet seems to abound, many customers have good quality fast internet connections; even my family now have 2MB DSL connections.
As a result I am productive. I can do my email (GroupWise via the GroupWise Client in Caching Mode or via Web Access), I can access Novell resources via the Novell Innerweb (powered by a multitude of Novell services and products), I can VPN into Novell and work with other services.
The end result – I am ‘always available’. Good for Novell, sometimes good for me.
The real challenge – as pointed out by Bill – is the concept of ‘presence’. Appropriate messaging and appropriate content – based on policy and location awareness. When I’m on the beach I really shouldn’t be doing email.. I do care if I’m an IT administrator and my datacentre has a critical problem and I need to start disaster recovery efforts. The same is true for any systems management processes.
I’m interested in your experiences – are you ‘tied to the network’? What are our comments on an ‘always on infrastructure’? Are you in the US and getting multi-megabit connections via cable or DSL – or are you trying to figure out connecting offices across the globe using expensive, slow, intermittent connections? Leave your comments here.
Written at: Watching the Ocean, on vacation.
Chernobyl – 20 years on
The BBC has a photo series showing the city of Pripyat – 2.5km from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant – just a week shy of the 20th anniversary of the accident.
Open forum – management consoles (a little fun)
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My friend Ron Tanner really opened the proverbial can of worms when he talked about ‘the single console‘. So far the most commented upon blog entry.
I figured it was time for everyone to comment – and to even get your design hats on.
I’m not going to run the wrath of our developers or UI people – what I’m looking for are fun and interesting concepts about managing ’stuff’. Show us what you want and what works for you.
Get going – I don’t care whether it’s done in The Gimp, Photoshop, Paint or mocked up SYSCON 
Put your comments here on the blog – and mail any attachments to me – ezs@novell.com
I look forward to yor comments and visual treats.
[Disclaimer – any submissions may be posted on this blog; submisssions become the property of Novell; do not expect to see your ideas in any Novell product]
Written at: watching the ocean, on vacation, Maui, HI
Interesting?
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Short one today; Guy Kawasaki wrote on his blog about his experiences in his first 100 days of blogging.
One comment summed up my thoughts on Cool Blogs:
5. An expert who blogs is more interesting than a blogger who experts.
I hope you find Cool Blogs interesting. Let me know – comments are welcomed!
Written at: Draper, UT
LinkedIn – an update
I wrote about LinkedIn just over a year ago. It’s been an interesting tool.
I’m seeing more and more people join – and link with absolutely anyone – without regard for whether they have any personal or business relationship. I’ve always said – I will not connect with people I can’t personally endorse. One good change that LinkedIn made was to stop showing the number of connections members had after 500. This stops the ‘race for the most’ that seems to be prevalent.
I stand by my comment: connections in LinkedIn are about quality not quantity.
This still sits on my profile:
If I do not know you well – please indicate why we should connect.
I do not connect with people I do not know. My rule of thumb – if I do not know you and your work I do not connect. It’s all about QUALITY not QUANTITY.
Read this:
OpenSUSE
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Have you tried OpenSUSE yet?
Written at: Draper, UT
OpenSUSE – project site at http://opensuse.org – is sponsored by Novell and “promotes the use of Linux everywhere”.
I guess for mere mortals that means on your laptop, home servers, development boxes – anywhere that matters! I know a few people who have given it to family and friends to cut down on the support and virus workload.
There are some interesting innovations coming out of the OpenSUSE community. Take a look at the OpenSUSE build service – demoed at BrainShare just a few weeks ago. Also look at the cutting edge in desktop and laptop usability – anyone who says Linux is a long way from ready for the desktop should seriously look at the massive leaps made in SUSE Linux 10.1 – currently in Beta 9.
And finally to the information that prompted me to write this post: OpenSUSE won the Best of Show award at LinuxWorld Expo last week in Boston – congratulations!
Written at: Draper, UT
Novell product support on VMware
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One common question from customers and partners is “What is Novell’s support stance for running Novell products and solutions on VMware”
Written at: Salt Lake City, UT
Here is the official answer in the form of Novell Technical Information Document TID 10098095 – this is directly from Novell Support.
Novell Technical Services (NTS) will provide reasonable best effort troubleshooting support for Novell products in VMware configurations. This support includes both lab and production environments. NTS personnel will assist the customer in troubleshooting the problem and will work to identify any necessary configuration changes, a viable workaround, and/or initiate a defect report. Novell product defects will be handled using existing defect reporting procedures. When necessary, NTS will involve VMware using the TSANet multivendor support process.
Novell Technical Services has established this policy to ensure that Novell customers receive the best possible support when issues arise in environments that include Novell products in VMware configurations.
I’d be interested in your comments – and your experiences – about running Novell products on top of VMware server or Microsoft Virtual Server environments.
Written at: Salt Lake City, UT
Novell Cool Blogs
I’ve been splitting my time blogging between Novell Cool Blogs, my family blog and this site.
I’ve now posted over twenty posts to the Novell site in a month; and I’ve been trying to slow down. I don’t want to make that site ‘mine’. However I’m still posting double that of others.
I’ll try to keep my posts coming on all three blogs – but for Novell related things I’ll probably cross post to Novell Cool Blogs. I’ve just posted on Windows Vista – I think it’s the start of an interesting thread.
Microsoft Windows Vista
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This is the start of another series of blog posts – this time around managing desktops and laptops – and what will happen in the future with Windows Vista.
In the words of Microsoft’s own marketing – we’ll try and “Bring Clarity to your World”
Written at: Draper, UT
First to the basics – the versions of Vista and hardware requirements.
There will be at least five versions of Windows Vista – although only two of these really seem suitable for businesses: Windows Vista Business and Windows Vista Enterprise.
It seems that the proliferation of choice will be confusing at best. Will most customers choose the Business edition? Enterprise?
The next piece of the puzzle is hardware requirements. As always – take the ‘minimum requirements’ as just that. Analysts and beta testers alike are giving the following recommendations:
- general knowledge worker – Pentium 4 class machine, 1GB RAM, 80GB HDD, 1Gbit ethernet, accelerated graphics capability
- ‘power worker’ – Pentium 4 class machine; dual core and 64 bit ideal, 2GB RAM, 100GB HDD, 1Gbit ethernet, accelerated graphics capability
Now I have talked to enough of you to know that this is a tall order. Most organisations are currently working to a three year replacement program for laptops and a four, five or six year replacement cycle for tethered desktop machines. One other factor in this equation is that almost every IT team did a refresh of hardware and OS in 1999. (Remember that!)
This has led to the “Y2K + 5″ phenomenon – hardware was replaced on the desktop in 2004/2005 – and will next be replaced in 2008/2009/2010. Laptops are due for replacement this year – following a first round of replacement in 2003.
These two factors combined are significant:
- confusion on choice of Vista desktop
- massive costs (replacement and just churn costs) of desktop hardware
Already enough to make you think twice.
In the next post I will talk about another area to consider – application support. I’ll dive into some of the murky details of getting applications supported on Vista and why this may be another roadblock for some customers.
As always – comments are welcomed.
Written at: Draper, UT
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