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About a month ago, I put out an open invitation on Cool Solutions: Let me tag along with you for a day, and I will bring you donuts, take you to lunch, and promise not to try to sell you anything.

Johnnie Odom, of Escambria County Schools, took me up on my offer. I had an amazing day with Johnnie and his district team, seeing our products working first hand in their environment. I'd never visited with an ISD before, and I was astonished by the unique complexities they face in their particular kind of distributed environment. I was impressed by their sophisticated usage of Open Enterprise Server (and yes, NetWare still), GroupWise, Identity Manager and ZENworks, especially with so few professionals for dozens of sites and tens-of-thousands of users.

But the biggest revelation I had after my day with Johnnie was when I asked him about who is his #1 "client": teachers? administrators? parents? students? Johnnie took a moment and had a thoughtful answer: "the entire educational process," and then he proceeded to tell me about Pensacola, FL, their economy and society. See, when I met Johnnie, I thought I was meeting the network manager, but when I left Johnnie, I realized that I had spent time with a guy who takes very seriously his real job of helping to educate the kids of Escambia County, who can then go on to improve the State of Florida.

I was blown away. Johnnie and his very capable colleagues, use our products to help to educate students and improve economies. It's not just file & print & network access. It's creating opportunity for kids in NW Florida. THAT is cool.

If you use our stuff to do cool things, drop me a line. I'd like to know about it.

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.