1.1 The Goal: Total Management, Zero Effort

Over the last decade, Novell ZENworks has provided the gold standard for centralized configuration and management of network endpoints in today’s complex, heterogeneous corporate networks. ZENworks Configuration Management is a key implementation of ZENworks technology, enabling policy-based automation of software and patch deployment, asset tracking, endpoint security, OS migration, and many other routine tasks.

With ZENworks Configuration Management, IT staff can synchronize the Windows desktop environment with their company’s business policies, while saving IT time, budget, and resources for strategic projects. All of this focuses on the ZENworks goal to provide total network management while bringing the associated management effort as close to zero as possible.Introduced in the last quarter of 2007, the latest version of ZENworks Configuration Management moves toward that goal by using a completely redesigned architecture to greatly simplify, consolidate, and integrate policy-based management of Windows network endpoints, including systems running Windows 7.

The latest version of ZENworks Configuration Management does the following: