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On 31st of May I had the opportunity to meet Lawrence Pitt and Martin Buckley at the Dansk Design Center in Copenhagen, Denmark. The event was for partners only and was pretty crowded with 40+ partners represented from Norway, Sweden and of course, Denmark.

The topics for the day were an introduction to the ZENworks Orchestator and a technical seminar on the new ZENworks Configuration Management. First Lawrence had his session on the Orchestrator. This is a pretty neat product for customers with large virtualized environments that uses VMware ESX or the XEN technologies.

After lunch Martin showed some of the features from the upcoming ZENworks Configuration Management 10. I saw a presentation during the fall at the GWAVAcon conference in Munich, but much has happened since then and the product is now in the final stages before the release. At the time of this writing, it's actually available as a public beta. With the new Configuration Management all ties to eDirectory have been removed and the product now stands on its own. This will, of course, make it easier to deploy for customers with other directories like Microsoft Active Directory.

The product has been totally redesigned for this purpose and shows promising new features and also better support for SLED, which is one of the most common questions I get from customers when comes to alternatives to Microsoft Windows. One other nice feature is the command line tool zman, which is for handling tasks at the command line rather clicking your arm off in the graphical environment. With this tool you can do just about all of the tasks that are available in the graphical environment. For a consultant this is great! Martin also spoke about the upcoming SDK for developing extensions to ZENworks, which I have long awaited. It should be released later this year or early next year.

Overall the two products show real promise and I'm looking forward to working with them at our customers' sites.

About the Blogger

Mikael Rydberg
Network Consultant
Pulsen Integration AB
Sweden
Email: mikael.rydberg@TAKETHISOUTpulsen.se
www.pulsen.se
"Network by knowledge"

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