rvanherk's blog

Two weeks ago Ted Haeger gave some insight on the thoughts behind the Mac-PC-Linux videos. Somehow the videos got over a million views so they seemed to be quite successful. But how do you get over a million views? Well it's due to the fact that people tell others, mention it in blog posts and it might even be discussed on Slashdot, it's all the magic of communities on the Internet.

It's interesting to see how companies more and more try to use the Internet to get some attention for their product, putting their commercials on YouTube or create funny thing's on the web and just hope that people will refer to it. Somehow Google has been able to get lots of attention through e-mails that showed some funny places on Google Earth.

Yesterday someone send me a mail with some info on how to avoid expensive flights between Europe and the US. Great info:

• go to Google maps
• enter: Paris to New York.

Just adding the route “Swim across the Atlantic Ocean” must have given them millions of hits. People telling friends, forwarding e-mails and even writing about it on their blog (like me :-)). Sometimes it's too easy, you just have to come up with a smart idea.

OK, now go write an e-mail telling all your friends you saw this cool post on Cool Blogs :-D

Three months ago I wrote about the fact that filefinder had been shut down and from that point on patches needed to be retrieved through Novell Downloads. Not everyone seemed to be happy with that change (and yes, we had lots of feedback telling us you where not happy about this) and many of us needed some time to get used to the new system.

Most of you might not even have noticed, but in the past few months we have had several updates on the search features on Novell Downloads, the issues that where brought up have been looked at and many of these have been implemented.

Have another look and let me know if you have any other suggestions on how we can improve.

With all the news around ZENworks Configuration Management we would almost forget to mention that we just released ZENworks 7.2 Linux Management, it's available at Novell Downloads.

OK, so what's all the good news coming with 7.2?

• The 7.2 release is a free upgrade for all ZLM 7 customers, so if you are an existing ZLM 7 customer, just grab the update from the web and get to the new release.
• Cool thing, the Dell management features (Like BIOS and RAID configuration) that only used to be available in the Dell Edition for ZLM only are now part of the 7.2 release as well.
• Not only support for SLES on 32 / 64 bit Intel / AMD, but also on Itanium, IBM Power and zSeries
• And yes we do run on RHEL as well ;-)

For more features, have a look at the info available on the download page.

A few of my Novell friends are out in San Diego this week representing Novell at the Microsoft Management Summit 2007, great to have Novell represented at such an event. As Jeff Jaffe mentioned in the Monday keynote at BrainShare “With ZENworks Configuration Management, our aspiration is to be the best manager for Vista desktops”, we just need the world to know.

With ZENworks Configuration Management it's going to be a lot more easy to attract non-Novell customers to consider using ZENworks as their management solution for Vista, the fact that we can hook up with Active Directory directly without doing any schema extensions in AD makes user based application management in an AD environment a piece of cake.

The amount of customers planning a full roll-out of Vista within the next few months seems to be limited, however several customers and partners are evaluating Vista as a potential platform for the future. Together with their evaluation of Vista, customers and partners will also be looking at the management products available and will try to determine what is the right tool to manage Vista, so the right time to get in to new customers with ZENworks (but yes, that's the same our competition will think ;-) ).

It's going to be an interesting year for ZENworks....

The people that have been at BrainShare must have seen some ZENworks, somehow it seemed to be all over, the demo's during the keynotes and the many sessions, but also at T-shirts, your lunch tray, the elevator door, etc.

For those people that couldn't get to BrainShare (you've missed something) and would like to know a little more about the new ZENworks Configuration Management, have a look at this article in Novell Connection Magazine (yes, the BrainShare attendees had this in their bag). A nice introduction to “The Next Generation of ZENworks”.

In the same release of Novell Connection Magazine you'll also find an article from Mark Schouls regarding the deployment of Vista using the Next Generation ZENworks, interesting info...

For me the BrainShare Sunday generally means I'll take some time to see some partners. It's the day where I've got some time to talk to some of our ZENworks partners but I also try to see some of the non-ZENworks partners to see what they have to show.

OK, so what have I seen?

I had a talk with the people from Touchpaper and had a chat about their integration with our new ZENworks Configuration Management. Well, they are demonstrating the integration between their IT Business Management Suite and our new ZENworks Configuration Management already, I'm impressed!
Sure I also talked to the magicians from ENGL, they are working hard to make sure their imaging solutions and other add-on tools will be working with Pulsar as well. They have got some great work done, this is going to be a good ZENworks year!!
Next thing I did was looking at was what GroundWork and Zenoss are doing, they both offer an open-source management solution, I was very impressed with what I saw, now I just need to find some time to have a play with both of these.
I also had some non-ZENworks I looked at, somehow I always have a look at what the people from Omni are doing (probably it's the orange color that attracts me). They have sound working separately on their Desktop Multiplier stations and USB sticks separated on each station as well, have a look and see what they are doing.

OK, enough for now, what cool things have you seen?