ZENworks at BrainShare 2006 – Birds of a Feather breakouts

by ezs | Mar 13, 2006 | Uncategorized, ZENworks

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I wrote last week about BrainShare 2006 – just one week to go!

A new session introduced a few years ago is the ‘Birds of a Feather forum‘. This differs from the usual technical track in that rather than a Novell or partner subject matter expert giving a one or two hour presentation and demonstration – you run the session and decide the content.

A Novell moderator acts as a host, keeps the peace – and generally facilitates the discussion. Also in the session are several Novell and partner subject matter experts. The rest is entirely unscripted, unrehearsed – and very useful.

There are five BrainShare Birds of a Feather sessions for 2006 that directly cater to ZENworks:

My advice? Get them on your BrainShare Scheduler – it’s now live – and get there early. These sessions are usually standing room only.

Written at: Provo, UT

Security and Privacy – the non software part

by ezs | Mar 12, 2006 | Uncategorized, ZENworks

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Here is an interesting social experiment – can you resist not looking at a presentation being written on someone elses laptop screen?

Thought not; it’s human nature!

If I then asked you to list your top actions within the IT department for handling the barrage of regulations and laws that cover personal data and information – I’d not be surprised if you included a lot of Novell’s award winning solutions.

Novell Identity Manager, Secure Login, ZENworks, Novell iChain – and many others – play a vital part in securing data and workstations wherever your employees happen to be.

One thing that many people forget is that laptop users often work in public places. As an example I am writing this blog post at San Francisco International Airport. I’ve also been using my laptop on a flight in from London Heathrow this morning. On my flight across I saw presentations being written for many different industries – including those for Novell competitors and partners! One person on the flight was even writing annual performance reviews.

Not so good eh?

Written at: SFO, San Francisco, CA

The issue becomes more critical when you consider the privacy implications of HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, Data Protection Legislation – and others.

I saw about a dozen people using laptops – and not one person thought to consider the audience around them. [As a side note: I’ve not been working on confidential information on flights for about two years now for this very reason]

Several vendors make security screens – 3M have an advertising campaign right now – but there are many others available.

The moral of this story? Consider the ‘non technology’ aspects of a data security policy too!

Share your own best practices here; let me know your horror stories too.

Written at: SFO, San Francisco, CA

Microsoft Origami / Intel UPMC

by ezs | Mar 11, 2006 | Uncategorized, ZENworks

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Many of you may have seen the immense media hubbub regarding the ‘Origami Project‘; many news and gossip sites have been speculating what the Microsoft and Intel project really could be.

The hardware device itself was showcased at CeBIT in Hanover this week – and honestly reviews have been mixed.

My biggest question to you – is this just another gadget? (After all – it’s just a small form factor Windows XP Tablet Edition box.) Do any of you expect to see these appear in a corporate setting? Will any of you be expected to manage these devices!

I wager $5 that someone has SUSE Linux running on one of these things within a day or so of ship!

Written at: Birmingham, England

ZENworks Server Management

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