Novell News

- by Baber Amin, Senior Product Manager, Identity and Security Solutions at Novell

In September 2008, Novell SecureLogin was positioned in the leaders quadrant of Gartner, Inc.’s, Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Single Sign-On by Gregg Kreizman. The company’s enterprise single sign-on solution (ESSO) enables a user to access all permitted computers and systems without the need to enter multiple passwords. The benefits deliver significant reductions in helpdesk requests and better compliance with regulations that require detailed tracking of “who has access to what.”

Since 2001, Novell offered an OEM version of ActivIdentity SecureLogin with added functionality. Last week, Novell acquired a perpetual source code license to the SecureLogin code. The result? We now fully manage the future development and road map for Novell SecureLogin (NSL). Our customers can look forward to even better integration and faster response to your requirements in future generations of the product. A few enhancements in the pipeline include:

• Better integration between Desktop Automation Service (DAS) and NSL via wizards, allowing a UI based wizard to configure DAS.
• A next generation UI based wizard for application on boarding across Windows application, web applications, and JAVA applications.
• Seamless integration with Novell Access Manager using SAML assertions.
• Support for 64 bit Windows Vista and XP desktop platforms.
• Out-of-box reporting capability for password compliance using Novell Sentinel.
• Support for Kerberos tickets across trusted domains between Novell eDirectory and Microsoft Active Directory.

I’d like to hear about your success with Novell SecureLogin, or suggestions on what we can do to provide more value. Please post your thoughts, comments and suggestions.

Yesterday, Ellen Messmer at NetworkWorld reported alarming statistics about attitudes and behavior of terminated employees. According to the story:

- 79% of those who did admit to taking information without permission offered various reasons why they did it, including “everyone else does,” the information may be useful in the future and “the company can’t trace the information back to me.”

- 24% of these former employees responding to the survey said they still had access to their former employer’s computer systems after they left, with over 50% citing between one day to a week, but 20% more than a week.

What if the employee happens to be a privileged user with access to the company’s most sensitive data? A recent incident at Fannie Mae underscores the importance of tighter control and better visibility of privileged user activities. According to this reports from the Associated Press and ZDnet.com:

A contract worker for the financial giant has been charged with planting a rogue script designed to destroy all data on the company’s 4,000 computer servers nationwide after the contractor was terminated, but his server privileges were not.

Makwana worked at Fannie Mae’s data center in Urbana, MD as a Unix engineer as a contractor with a firm called OmniTech. He had root access to all Fannie Mae servers.

In this case, the script was found through fortuitous intervention, but the incident demonstrates the need to provide tighter controls for privileged users. Last week, Novell acquired the technology assets of Fortefi and introduces Novell Privileged User Manager – a new product that allows granular access control (including immediate termination capability) and auditing of “super” or “root” users across multiple systems including Unix and Linux environments.

Novell Privileged User Manager minimizes exposure to unauthorized transactions and information access so you won’t hear, “the company can’t trace the information back to me,” or “ everyone else does it,” in the cubicle corridors at your company.

Novell Privileged User Manager will be available in the first half of 2009. Click here for more information.

Internet.com just announced the winners of its Developer.com Product of the Year Awards for 2009. Mono 2.0, from the Novell sponsored Mono project, took the top spot for .NET tool/Add-in of the Year. Congrats to the Mono team!

- by Michele Casey, Product Manager, Open Platform Solutions at Novell

Recently, we’ve been involved in many discussions around challenges customers face when planning for migrations to new service packs. At Novell we recognize it takes a considerable amount of time and investment for our customers to implement upgrades in the data center. They must design, validate and test before finally executing on a migration strategy. Service pack updates are a necessary part of maintaining the data center, as they not only address security vulnerabilities and critical defect fixes, but also provide new features for hardware enablement and enhancements. Enterprises are faced with finding a balance between applying required maintenance to servers and the time, cost and risk associated with such changes in the data center.

Enterprises require time to prepare for change and as such, Novell is offering solutions and programs designed to optimize and complement our customers’ data center strategy. We were the first Linux distributor to formally offer (as part of your subscription) a 6 month migration policy, allowing our customers up to 6 months to move from a previous service pack to the latest released version. In addition, our service pack release cycles occur once every 12-18 months, saving time and money. But even with all these options, some customers may still need more time. For these customers we provide what is known as the Long Term Service Pack Support program.

With the Long Term Service Pack Support program, customers receive a minimum of 12 additional months to plan, test and deploy service pack updates in your data center. This provides at least 18 months to implement a migration strategy. During this time, Novell continues to provide the critical support needed for issues that may arise during this transition period.

Customers of any size may participate in the Long Term Service Pack Support program. The only requirement is a current SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscription.

A recent report from IDC forecasts that spending on IT cloud computing services will triple in the next 5 years, reaching a staggering $42 billion by 2012. They also predict that the current economic turmoil won’t hinder this growth because a major benefit of cloud computing is increased IT efficiency and lowered costs.

Novell is actively making cloud computing a reality. This week, IBM announced an extended agreement with Amazon to deliver a wide variety of solutions on a “pay-as-you-go” model, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. The solutions will be provided through the Amazon Elastic Cloud, giving businesses new ways to quickly build, deploy and take advantage of the tremendous flexibility that cloud computing environments can bring.

A while back Novell created a YouTube channel to collect and share some of the great videos that we create showing Novell solutions at work around the globe from Copenhagen to Cape Town. Check out the fun ads and videos here.

We are still getting the channel populated so check back often for updates and new videos.

Following GWAVACon last week, Michael Osterman, a leading messaging and collaboration industry analyst, published a blog titled “The demise of GroupWise … will have to be put on hold,” which discusses Novell’s long-standing messaging and collaboration solution and its continued position and growth in the collaboration marketplace.

With the recent release of GroupWise 8, we continue to improve on and see a bright future for this solution. In addition to the blog posting, we also found readers’ comments interesting.

Here are just a few of the positive comments we’ve seen from GroupWise fans:

“Mr. Osterman, thank you for your positive article on GroupWise. I am continually amazed that more people haven’t discovered this product. It’s a breeze to administer and simple yet powerful for our users.”

“GroupWise is stable, efficient, and easy to administer.”

“We host GroupWise for many locations around the world, supporting multiple languages. We depend on the ability to share documents via the shared folder functionality. When vendors ask why we don’t use Sharepoint, we tell them that GroupWise meets all of our collaboration needs for our organization.”

Check out the blog and some GroupWise users’ thoughts here.