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Novell on the Web

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.

Novell on the Web

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.

We heard you loud and clear!

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.

SC Magazine awards Your vote counts!

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.

Updated: Identity Manager Driver Health & Statistics

Updated: This iManager plug-in will be part of a milestone release after the release of Antelope (IDM 3.5.1).

Identity Manager users have requested UI that presents a driver's health. Access to specific driver cache statistics has been added to the 3.5.1 release of Identity Manager. The IDM administration team has developed new driver health and statistics UI in iManager that reads the driver and server and presents health information. The following describes the new UI.

Driver Health & Statistics

The driver set graphic view now includes a health semaphore on the driver icon. The semaphore represents the health of the driver as configured by the administrator. If the health thresholds are not configured for the driver, the semaphore does not display.

Clicking on the semaphore will display the health and statistics dialog.

The Driver Health and Statistics dialog shows the driver cache file and related details. The cache file size is dynamic, by default, therefore, the graph representing it's size will fluctuate depending on the percentage of space consumed by the unprocessed transactions. The dialog also includes the current semaphore light, similar to the driver icon.

The bottom section represents the detail of the driver cache file. This section includes the unprocessed transactions total and a bar graph for each transaction. These include: add, remove, modify, move, rename, resync entry, request resync, and custom.

Driver Health Configuration

The Green and Yellow states of the driver health semaphore can be configured. If the conditions of the Green light fail, the semaphore changes to the Yellow light. If the conditions of the Yellow light fail, it switches to the Red light. No conditions are set for the Red light. Therefore, an administrator can define what conditions determine when a Green or Yellow light will display. They are configured in the “Health Configuration” option in the contextual menu when clicking on the driver state icon.

Driver Health & Statistics Dashboard

Also included in the UI is a dashboard view of all the drivers in a driver set. For each driver, a Health & Statistics window is displayed. You can set the refresh to continually refresh all the windows on the page. A user can also change the display to 1, 2, 3, or 4 columns, depending upon the resolution of the user's monitor.

The idea behind this UI is to expose known driver functionality so that Identity Manager experts and administrators can start learning about how their drivers are working. Over time, this knowledge can help when troubleshooting a specific driver problem.

Any feedback or comments on this new UI is anticipated and greatly appreciated.

ZENworks, NetWare, platform support and the future

This post took a long time to put together - hopefully it answers a lot of questions raised on Cool Blogs. I especially want to clear up the misconceptions about ZENworks 10 Configuration Management - and some incorrect assumptions about being tied to a Windows server infrastructure.

Written at: San Francisco, CA and Draper, UT

To start we need to re-read the blog post from Jason Williams from June 2006 - in it he explains much of the rational for the drive to Open Enterprise Server 2 and the shift of services across from the NetWare kernel to the Linux kernel.

And here is the real crux of the matter; Novell has two choices in front of it:

1) Continue developing the NetWare operating system

2) Bring the services over to a new platform for the future

It is not as if Novell suddently woke up one morning and decided to port all of its services to Linux and buy Ximian and SuSE. The decision making process was long and drawn out and a good deal of customer feedback went into the decisions. And so we find ourselves in the here and now.

To this end the ZENworks team have worked closely with the Workgroup team at Novell in many ways.

First - to make sure that we both co-operate and our products work well with each other

• ZENworks 7 runs on both NetWare 6.5 and SLES 10.  We have lots of examples of customers choosing the deploy ZENworks on a mixed environment of NetWare, OES and SLES together.
• ZENworks 10 Configuration Management runs on SLES 10 and the forthcoming Open Enterprise Server 2.

Second - we have also tied our support lifecycles together where it makes sense.

• We know customers will run NetWare and ZENworks "for ever" - to that end we support ZENworks 7 suite until 2017 - longer than NetWare 6.5.
• Take a look at the support lifecycle here http://support.novell.com/lifecycle/lcSearchResults.jsp?st=-1&sl=-1&sg=1
• This means that we will have support packs, updates and security fixes during the general support period.

Third - we jointly came up with some creative product bundling

• Take a look at the Novell Open Workgroup Suite. http://www.novell.com/products/openworkgroupsuite/
• NOWS includes ZENworks 7 suite - which runs on NetWare 6.5 and SLES 10
• NOWS also includes an entitlement to ZENworks 10 Configuration Management which runs on SLES 10

I hope these help emphasise our strong commitment to customers who have purchased and deployed ZENworks in a NetWare environment.

Let me repeat again: we support you with ZENworks 7 during the life of your NetWare infrastructure. We welcome you with the newest additions to the ZENworks product family as you move across to Open Enterprise Server 2 and SLES 10.