Product Management naming
My team solved the ‘what are we called’ dilemma.
“Identity Products Business Team” – that encompasses the variety of skills and strengths within the team.
Product Management roles
For the last few months I’ve been focussed on a slightly different role – Outbound Product Management for Novell ZENworks and now for the entire Identity and Access Management product lines.
One challenge is defining and naming the team roles.
There are many nomeclatures in use for defining inbound and outbound roles – Product Management, Product Marketing, Program Management, Pre-sales support – lots of names and roles.
There is an interesting article on Marketing Professionals here – lots of detail on some of the roles. It’s a little inflexible and really focused on the smaller development organisation. Pragmatic Marketing have always been active in selling training on defining these roles and mentoring people through the process; they have a good article here and a nice visual of the process:
My own view is that in a larger, more mature organisation – such as Novell – there is a place for another role; the outbound product manager. This role encompasses:
- evangelist
- subject matter expert
- knowledge transfer
- competitive expert
- conduit of requirements to engineering and inbound product management
- etc
Befuddling Tivo
Everytime family come and visit they befuddle the Tivo.
What do I mean?
I mean that two weeks of [insert favoured family viewing] really confuses our preferences. Instead of Pingu, Thomas, foreign language films and BBC crime dramas – we end up with US cop shows, WWII documentaries, romantic comedies and the weather channel.
Snow, I15, Gin and Cranberry
First real winter storm of the year.
I was working in Provo at strategy meetings until late; I didn’t leave the office until 6pm.
I-15 was a nightmare. My usual thirty minute commute took almost two hours. Several inches of freezing snow on the freeway and the usual bad Utah driving.
Got home, cleared some snow and settled in. No tonic; so had to resort to gin and cranberry juice. Quite palatable actually.
ZENworks and UK National Health Service
Talk about time to value:
Novell’s desktop software distribution products have been licensed enterprise wide in this deal, enabling the move to a pervasive managed desktop environment with a lower total cost of ownership throughout the NHS. Novell will create ‘appliance-like’ solutions using their ZenWorks technology that can be deployed across an NHS organisation in as little as two days.
The full news release is here: http://www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/news/news_novell
Mail, spam and viruses
Sigh.
I keep tweaking and tightening my anti-spam rules for my mail server – but the amount of inbound spam is getting crazy. I’m catching about 95% of bad mail – and getting all viruses – but I’m looking at switching to a dedicated inbound mail filter.
I’m probably going to run SpamAssassin and ClamAV running on SLES9.
Windows XP passwords
Don’t ask why – but I had need to reset an Administrator password on a Windows XP workstation today.
I had forgotten the password, it was locked out, the machine wasn’t in AD – and I was stuck.
Luckily there are a wealth of tools to help in this situation – including this. Petter Nordahl-Hagen has written a stunning Linux based boot floppy that just fixes things like this in seconds. Thanks Petter.
World AIDS day
Time to take a moment and reflect.
Windows XP Hibernate
My laptop dual boots [I swap between two 80GB hard drives] between Windows XP and Novell Linux Desktop.
My XP installation has a really annoying problem with Hibernate – described in this Microsoft article. Put simply – it can’t Hibernate about 90% of the time.
There is a lengthy blog post describing the issue – and today a hotfix was released from Microsoft for the issue.
I am trying to get hold of the patch.
Firefox 1.5
Firefox 1.5 should now be available.
Even mozilla.com had a makeover.
Firefox 1.5 is pretty great. My beta feedback:
- inplace updates (rather than download and install) should help with the slew of point releases as Firefox has hit over 100 million downloads
- speed is improved (woo!)
- Linux ‘look and feel’ is much improved
Here’s to the next 100 million downloads!
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