rvanherk's blog

I still remember the first time I used NAL snapshot to take a snapshot of what happened during the application install. At that time MSI packages didn't exist yet, snapshot was the magical thing that made application deployment easy. Snapshot was ahead of it's time but with the introduction of the Windows installer we have seen that MSI has become the industry standard for application deployment on Windows and specialized products got developed to do the application packaging.

Last Friday I've visited the “Packaging Event” in Amsterdam, an event about Application packaging and Windows installer technology. The packaging event was all about MSI and using the packaging tools available to create these. One of the most interesting sessions for me was the session from Tyler Robinson (Microsoft, Windows Installer Program Manager), Tyler did a session about the new features within Windows Installer 4.0, the version that will be in Vista. It was interesting to see what changes will be in version 4, if you also want to learn some about what will be changing, have a look at Tyler's team blog there is some interesting info and some links to a few web casts that discuss the new features of MSI. After Tyler there where sessions about Wise and Installshield (you know, we ship the ZENworks edition of Installshield with ZENworks), these sessions went into the new features of the products and discussed how to do packaging projects.
One thing I noticed at the event was the fact that there where quit a few companies that specialized on application packaging, some that offered packagers to do projects at the customer and some that offered outsourcing for application packaging. I know there are quit a few large companies that outsourced their packaging to a few companies in India, but according to the people I spoke with at the event, quit a few of these get back from the idea to move this to India and prefer to do business with local packaging specialists. I'm wondering if this is something that just happens within the Netherlands, do others see the same trend? Has your company outsourced application packaging or is all still done in-house? What are the tools used to create application packages?

As a support engineer I find it quit frustrating to see customers having problems just due to the fact that there are some problems with the product license. It's the first step to start working with the product and if something goes wrong there it doesn't make such a nice impression. I must say I'm quit happy with the licensing within ZENworks, we hardly get any serious problems with it except from a few Patch Management questions that come in from time to time.

I was just reading an article from Dave Kearns on the licensing for Vista and I must say I'm happy we haven't got a similar licensing methods. When I read articles like this I always wonder how this is going to affect our customers and how might this affect us with the support we deliver on ZENworks, is this going to cause us some additional headache? I understand that Microsoft is trying to fight piracy and protect their investments, I however wonder if Microsoft isn't shooting themselves in the foot by making the life of their valid customers much more difficult.

I assume time will tell.......

Typically if you work at a support organization you react on what happens at the customer. As soon as problems appears in a certain area, a support engineer will need to investigate what happens and see how the issue can be resolved.

OK, so do we just wait and see what will happen and respond as soon as something new comes up? No, of course we try to prepare ourselves and try to anticipate on what happens. Looking at the last few years, with the ZENworks suite we have seen new technology like the Middletier server, Patch Management, Asset Management and recently the endpoint security with SecureWave Sanctuary. In some cases we as support are able to prepare ourselves properly and get intensively trained on a product, sometimes it's more difficult to get up to speed and learn the new products we support.

So what's next? As we all know time doesn't stand still and technology evolves, it looks like that early next year Microsoft will be delivering Vista and at the same time Novell is working on the next generation ZENworks. I'm sure next year will be an interesting one for me and my colleagues within the ZENworks support teams at Novell Technical Support. If new products get released it's always the question how many impact will this have on the amount of support calls we will get, sometimes a new release causes a huge amount of questions and sometimes we see a very slow start and in these situations we do not see such a huge difference in the amount of support calls we get.

The big question.... I have heard people screaming to get beta software that will allow them to start testing Vista while others indicate they won't even start thinking about implementing Vista within the next year. What are your plan's with the release of Vista, would you like to implement it the day it gets released, or would you wait for a month, half a year, year, 2010, .......?

What's your plan? Initially install it on a test-workstation at the IT helpdesk, run some pilots with a small group or do you want to move your entire company as soon as possible?

Let me know.....

As mentioned I was at GWAVACon last week where I delivered a few sessions. As always when you visit an event like this you're trying to prepare yourselves as much as possible. Unfortunately with all preparations, still sometimes things might go wrong, a beamer that can't run the resolution you would like to use for your demo or a demo that doesn't want to run like you've don this in the 10 times you ran it while preparing.
Like many others, I use VMware quit frequent while doing demos, with the snapshot feature it's easy to get back to the stage where you want to start your demo and you can be sure you've got the same setup every time you restart your VM's. Another benefit of VMware images is that they are easy to copy so I normally always copy my VM's to a DVD or another hard-drive (I've got two hard-drives so I can swap the primary disk in my laptop). I had it once where 5 minutes before I needed to do a demo I had to switch to my second hard-drive due to some problems I had with the other. My machines where booting while I started my presentation and by the time I needed to start with the demo they fortunately where booted properly.

Have you ever had some of these moments while doing demo's? Tell me, as somehow it's always funny to hear about thing's that go wrong :-D

Well, talking about thing's that go wrong, while browsing the web today I saw a nice picture about a demo that made me smile a bit.....

(just click on the image to see the origional size)

OK, back from a few days in Munich where I presented at GWAVACon Europe.

Over the last few years GWAVACon has been a great GroupWise event (indeed, this isn't just a GWAVA event, it's all about GroupWise) and this time we extended the event and made it a GroupWise and ZENworks conference. As you might understand my main focus has been ZENworks but it was interesting to speak with some of the GroupWise partners/customers and talk about what they thought of the event and the fact that ZENworks was added next to GroupWise. Well, we had some great feedback about the fact that the event combined the GroupWise and ZENworks and as a result GWAVA has planned to do the same for GWAVACon North America in January (more info will follow) :-).

If I just look at the ZENworks part of the event, we had 22 ZENworks sessions that where highly attended, besides Novell speakers we had sessions from ENGL, Macrovision, Tall Tower and Touchpaper who discussed how their products tie into ZENworks. Of course the sessions that where held has been an important part of what we've done, but the benefit of an event like this where there is a high focus on just two of our products is that it's more easy to have some discussions outside the normal schedule. One of the interesting discussions I had was with one of the attendees from Czech, he pointed me to a great new add-on product they had developed around ZENworks that makes managing desktops in an education environment. If you are working in an education environment have a look at Z for Classrooms, I was impressed by the first look I had at this.

Before I forget, of course one of the highlights for us was the fact that we where able to show a pre-alpha build of our next generation ZENworks, our evilzenscientist did a great job explaining the great benefits of the new architecture and the feedback from the people in the room was great.

Well, enough for now and back to work....

Today someone mentioned to me “you're so passionate about Novell's Resource Management products”, and I must admit I am. But why, why do I think that Novell ZENworks is such a key product for Novell?

Well, I'm just a simple support guy but let me give you my € 0.02 on this (and remember that's more value then $ 0,02).

We all know the long story about a network operating system many of us love so much, yes I'm talking about NetWare. NetWare is what made Novell “the networking company”, at some point however the IT industry wanted more then just file and print services. Additional products where added to the price list and Novell evolved and now provides a wide range of products focused to the enterprise customer. Many of these products where initially tight to the NetWare platform, at some point these products became more platform independent and would for example also work within a complete Microsoft environment.

OK, but why do I think that Novell ZENworks is such a key product for Novell?

Well, a few years ago Novell made a move, we entered the Linux business, a world with some serious competition with the many many Linux distributions available. What makes Novell so special that we can make a difference within this Linux arena? Linux is just an operating system just like NetWare, but within an enterprise environment you need more. Within an enterprise environment you'll need to manage the users Identity, you'll need a scalable collaboration solution, and.... the environment needs to be managed. ZENworks plays a key role in enabling enterprise environments to make the move to a Linux based infrastructure as it provides the management product that allow you to manage desktops and servers in such an environment.

Something to be passionate about?