coolguys's blog

Bob Flynn, Novell President and General Manager, announces the release of Novell Filr. Novell Filr is a file-sharing solution that gives users access to their home folders, shared network folders and personal files from anywhere via desktops, laptops or mobile devices.

It's been an interesting week for the web team. We have had the opportunity to chat with several of you about your impressions and feedback about our new site refresh, and we appreciated your candor and suggestions.

The new site design has engendered an unprecedented level of feedback, good and bad, so we thought hey – let's blog about it so people understand the thinking behind it.

As we developed the Identity Manager Driver Health and Statistics feature, we shared with you our ideas and proposed user interface. We quickly heard back from you that it was "great" and "cool" but you wanted more. OK, we heard you loud and clear!

Custom Conditions and Actions

A new custom state tab allows configuration of custom conditions and actions that are “…a stand-alone set of conditions and related actions to be performed when the conditions are met independent of the health state of the driver.” Evaluation of the conditions and execution of the actions takes place entirely within the Driver Health Job.

We also added transaction history to augment the available conditions.

Driver Health Actions

Driver Health and Statistics is terrific but you need actions to add power to the driver status. OK, we'll give them that, too. We've added actions to the "Driver Health Configuration" of an Identity Manager driver.

Looking at the screen above, you can see the available actions. You can now start, stop, or restart a driver; clear the driver's cache; send an email; write a trace message; generate an event; execute a custom ECMA script (javascript); start a workflow; and handle error situations. When the conditions within the status group evaluate to true, all action will execute in the order specified in the configuration.

The first six available actions are straight forward actions that will help you manage driver administration. The last four action give you advanced functionality to accomplish customized events, scripts or workflows. Here's a quick look at some of the advanced features:

Generate Event Action

The Generate Event action sends events to the Audit client. This client is automatically installed with an IDM installation. The Audit client publishes events that are collected by an Audit server. Define the server by setting the logevent.conf file. Change the setting LogHost=ip address, where the IP address is the audit server's host address. Then restart eDirectory.

Auditing and logging are configured within the Audit and Logging plug-in in iManager.

ECMAscript (Javascript)

You can write a custom ECMAscript (javascript) to be executed by the Driver Health Job.

Start Workflow

Select a Provisioning Request Definition object to start a workflow based on the defined parameters in the object. Provisioning Request Definition objects are associated with the Identity Manager User Application technology which includes powerful identity provisioning capability.

On Action Error

If the Driver Health Job detects an error when executing an action, there is an action to set up what to do in case of an error.

Thank you all for the great feedback we have received. It has obviously given us direction in developing a better, more valuable Identity Manager management tool. You can now download the NPM files for iManager 2.6 and iManager 2.7 to start testing these new features interact with the configuration UI. These NPMs are the first iteration of the plug-ins and don't include any Actions or Custom tab functionality. (hat tip Edwin)

Download the files here:

IDM Plugins for iManager 2.6 (IDM 3.6 M1)
IDM Plugins for iManager 2.7 (IDM 3.6 M1)

Update: Once you download the plug-ins, you should be able to see and interact with the UI but the functionality will only work with a IDM 3.6 server (which isn't available yet).

Update: Creating a custom tab (not included in above NPMs)

To create a custom state tab, first select the 'Actions' menu item in the heading and then select 'New Custom State' menu item.

Once the custom tab is created, add conditions and actions by selecting the add button in each subheading.

ZENworks imaging can use the Preboot eXecution Environment - PXE - to start its imaging engine. When the imaging server components (TFTP server, Imaging engine, Proxy DHCP) are running on the same server as the DHCP server there are certain configuration changes that need to be made.

Voting for products in the Readers Trust Award categories of the SC Magazine Awards 2008 is open now. Winning products are chosen by readers, who pick the solution that is most effective in helping them to address the problem for which it was designed. The following Novell products have been nominated in these categories:

- Best Identity Management Solution: Novell Identity and Access Manager
- Best Event Management Solution: Sentinel 6 from Novell
- Best Audit Vulnerability Assessment: ZENworks Patch Management
- Best Policy Management: ZENworks Configuration Management
- Best Handheld Management: ZENworks Handheld Management
- Best Endpoint Security Solution: Novell ZENworks Endpoint Security Management

To vote, please visit SC Magazine at

http://www.scmagazine.com/us/awards/categories

between now and Friday, November 2.