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If you've got ideas about how we can make our products work better for you, don't keep them to yourself. Novell's product teams are always looking for ways to enhance our products, and many good ideas come from product users like you.

There's a place you can go enter these suggestions. Just go to the Novell Requirements Portal (http://www.novell.com/rms) and follow the instructions.

Don't be shy! This is a great way to make your wishes known.

What to Expect
Novell sincerely appreciates product feedback and ideas. Please note that most Novell product development lifecycles often last 6 - 18 months. Features and functions are often locked down well in advance. At the same time, Novell uses an iterative approach to development in many product areas. For these reasons, the timeframe for status updates to requests submitted to Novell will vary.

Use the New button to submit items. Use My Product Requests to see a list and high level status of submitted items. Use My Requirement Subscriptions to manage e-mail subscriptions for updates.

Please refer to content guidelines for examples on creating effective request submissions.

Content Guidelines
Please use ENGLISH when entering requests.

Capturing adequate detail in a requirement request is very important for Novell's product management teams. The typical content of a good request would include the description of functionality in the context of a particular role for the purpose of achieving a benefit.

Often, the best way to write that requirement is to define it the form of a user story. Here is an example framework that is simple but yet effective.

As a {describe the role} I would like {describe the feature/enhancement} so that I can {describe the business or technical goal}...

Another approach might be to create a service-oriented problem statement. Here is an example:

Our enterprise environment consists of 1500 servers deployed throughout our organization worldwide. Our IT staff is centrally located at our corporate headquarters and must be able to securely monitor and manage all corporate servers without direct access to the server console.

Business considerations used in our decision include but are not limited to interoperability with our existing system management solution, workstation platforms used by administrators, access control and role enablement, and latency for remote locations in emerging markets.

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.