Novell News

Novell identity management solutions continue to rack up frequent flyer miles, this time heading to China and Taiwan to help institutes of higher learning streamline user provisioning, simplify password management and consolidate their IT infrastructures. Read more about how the National Northern University in China and the National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan are using Novell’s identity and security management solutions.

Even if you didn’t make it to GWAVACon in San Diego this week, there’s good news for you. You can catch Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian’s keynote this afternoon at 1 p.m. PT online. And if you miss that, his address will be available in GWAVA’s archive next week.

OpenID has been getting a lot of press lately, with the news of Yahoo becoming an OpenID provider and Google announcing that Blogger URLs can now be used as OpenID identities. While developers have been working on Internet identity services for years, this news means that user-centric technologies are finally taking off in mainstream environments. User-centric groups, like the Novell-led Bandit Project, aim to change the way online identities are handled by eliminating the need for users to have different user names and passwords for each Website they visit.

We’ve been talking about Novell’s two-pronged strategy around enterprise Linux and enterprise management services for some time. But it’s not always easy for people to understand how these two pieces tie together in practice. This new success story just up about the Municipality of the Hague is a good example. The Hague has used Novell technology for some time. It uses GroupWise for its employee email, and ZENworks to manage employee desktops. Fairly “traditional” stuff. As the Hague has moved to offer more services and applications via the Web, both for internal employee use and citizen services, they’ve turned to SUSE Linux Enterprise as the platform and Novell Identity Manager and Novell Access Manager for security and access control. Because of tight integration between the products, they’ve been able to deploy and manage the technology using relatively limited in house resources.

The Hague provides a good example of what Novell offers. We provide a state of the art, open platform, with a series of management tools that make it easy to administer, secure and integrate mixed IT environments. It used to be “Novell = NetWare.” Over the last several years, many have seen us as purely a Linux company. That’s not right, either. As the Hague illustrates, we provide a full range of infrastructure software. That’s always been our sweet spot, and it still is.

As you may recall, a few months ago Lenovo and Novell announced ThinkPads preloaded with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop were in the works, and now they are here.

The ThinkPad T61 and R61 14″ widescreen models (with additional 14″ widescreen T and R Series models and select T61 15″ widescreens coming SLED-preloaded in February) are great for typical business users, but they are also available for purchase by individual customers. For enterprise customers, it has never been easier to buy a Linux PC, deploy it into an existing environment and have it work seamlessly with current technologies. And don’t forget the support provided by both hardware and software vendor, making this a great story for Linux customers all around.

Motion pictures are big business and stolen digital content can cost a Hollywood studio real dollars. That’s why Technicolor, the pre-eminent worldwide provider of services to the media, entertainment and communications industries, needed a solution to prevent unauthorized access and secure the hundreds of terabytes of intellectual property with which they work.

To find out how Novell ZENworks Endpoint Security Management helped Technicolor get control of their ports and stop data thieves from spoiling the ending of that next blockbuster, go here.

The ODF Alliance, which promotes the use of OpenDocument Format in governments, has just published its annual report for 2007. You can read the press release, which highlights some of the key developments of the year, here. The annual report itself is here. There’s no question that there is growing momentum behind the idea of open formats in government. The Alliance highlights as proof points decisions by the Netherlands, Norway, and South Africa to embrace ODF, increased applications support for ODF, progress on accessibility issues, and the growth of the alliance itself, which is now approaching 500 members (Novell is one) .

The OpenOffice.org office productivity suite, for which ODF is the default word processing file format, continues to be one of the great successes in open source. It’s got great features, it supports all the leading file formats, it runs on multiple platforms, and it’s easy to use (my 80-year old mother is a user). Oh yeah, and it’s free. What’s not to like?