Novell News

HP has just announced the ProBook, a new line of low-cost business notebooks. In keeping with HP’s tagline of “the computer is personal again”, this new laptop line offers a number of options from color choice to processor choice. However, to us the most interesting choice is operating system, because the ProBook, expected in June, will offer SUSE Linux Enterprise 11.

This announcement marks the first time HP has pre-loaded Linux on a business notebook. It’s also the first pre-loaded HP device to include the recently released SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, which garnered praise from Network World this week for its slick design. With the option to select Linux, business users will get the functionality of a Windows machine at a fraction of the cost. As Novell CMO, John Dragoon, notes a marriage of both form and function.

With SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 available on a HP ProBook, it looks like the toughest decision you’ll have to make will be whether to choose either “noir” or “merlot.” We’ll drink to that.

This week the Linux Foundation announced the speakers for the LinuxCon technical conference which will be held September 21-23 in Portland, Oregon. Among the industry luminaries like IBM’s Bob Sutor, HP’s Bdale Garbee, and Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth will be Novell’s Joe Zonker Brockmeier, openSUSE community manager.

LinuxCon brings together members from all aspects of the Linux community, including core developers, administrators, end users, community managers and industry experts. As the conference for “all matters Linux”, this event promises to be informative and educational for a wide range of attendees. So maybe you should think about pushing your vacation out to September and visiting Portland this year?

Are you planning to go?

The RSA show in San Francisco is well underway, and our identity and security management teams have been busy.

Earlier this week we made two important announcements with Novell partners SAP and McAfee. Both involve Novell Sentinel, our security management solution which provides a real-time, holistic view of security and policy compliance activities across the entire IT environment.

With SAP, we’ve announced that Novell® Sentinel™ 6.1 security information event management (SIEM) product has achieved SAP-certified integration with the SAP NetWeaver® technology platform. This is good news for SAP customers because the integration significantly reduces risk and cuts the costs of managing security. SIEM technologies analyze security event data in real time to identify threats, produce reports and log data for compliance monitoring. Novell Sentinel 6.1 simplifies security monitoring by enabling administrators to manage information and alerts with an associated knowledge of the identity of the user who triggered the alert.

With McAfee, we announced a partnership that will significantly enhance McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator® (ePO™) giving customers the ability to pinpoint a response to potential threats and provide administrators the much-needed ability to automatically enforce security and identity access-related policies. By linking security threats to identity, we’re making it much easier and faster to demonstrate compliance and ensure trusted access.

Novell can deliver exceptional identity and security management solutions on a grand scale. Case in point: we’ve just announced that the U.S. Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command (NCDOC) has selected Novell® Sentinel™ to automate and centralize security monitoring across hundreds of diverse locations worldwide. With more than 700,000 users worldwide, NCDOC is one of several military cyber defense teams in the Department of Defense (DOD) and is responsible for around-the-clock protection of the Navy’s computer networks. You can read more about this at CIO magazine.

Guest blogger: David Corlette, GRC Solution Architect for Novell

At Novell, we are always trying to make our products easier to use and to drive value for our customers. Our security tools built around the Novell Sentinel security information event management (SIEM) platform are designed to make detecting and preventing security and compliance policy violations simpler and more effective. At RSA Conference 2009, we will be demonstrating new, advanced log management capabilities designed from the ground up to provide easy integration with the devices in your enterprise, auto-detection of a wide variety of event sources, and simple policy-driven retention and deletion policies. We’ve worked very hard to make log management be driven by business, not technical needs.

On a longer timescale, Novell is looking to change the game when it comes to enterprise visibility of activity. Today’s world consists of a mishmash of proprietary, opaque logging and auditing technologies, and companies are spending too much money dealing with technical complexity instead of paying for value. To help solve this, we are pushing hard to build the next generation of event standards which will provide greatly simplified, cross-platform, human-comprehensible activity information that can easily be used to detect policy violations and generate alerts and reports. You can read more about this issue from Dan Blum at Burton Group here. I’ll be joining Dan at RSA Conference to discuss this critical issue on a panel with Microsoft, Oracle and Qualys. I hope you can join us.

Event Details:
Common Event and Log Standards: Leveling IT’s Tower of Babel (HOST-304)
Date/Time: Thursday, April 23
Time: 02:10 – 03:00 PM
Room: Purple 304

Novell Support Advisor (NSA) is a new automated self-help tool used to support and diagnose SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server, Open Enterprise Server (Linux) and associated products.

This tool gives customers a streamlined way to perform both pro-active and reactive system diagnostic tasks typically provided by Novell Technical Services, but in a local, secure and automated fashion. When a health-check is executed on a system, it will gather the needed configuration and log files from the system to be analyzed by the NSA Client. Based upon the installed products and the type of health checks being performed, the Novell Support Advisor uses a set of Novell Support Diagnostic Patterns (SDPs) to determine the current health state and provide recommended solutions for repairing potential issues.

Our support team has created a short video showing how NSA can speed the resolution of support issues – and help avoid them. You can download NSA here.

As you may recall, last year, Societe Generale, the second-largest bank in France, announced that it had been the victim of a US$7 billion crime. In announcements reported around the world, bank officials revealed that, over the course of several years, a rogue trader executed fraudulent transactions that cost the bank billions of dollars. According to company executives, it was the trader’s knowledge of internal policies and process controls that had allowed him to hide the fraud for so long.

Does the next infamous security thief work for you? Join Nick Nikols, Novell vice president of product management, at next week’s RSA Conference for an informative presentation on how Novell’s Identity and Security solutions can help prevent your company from becoming the next victim.  Learn how to identify and remediate security risks as they occur, not months after the fact, but before the damage is done.

Session details:
Does the $7 Billion Man Work for You? (SPO-106).
Date: Tuesday, April 21
Time: 3:00 – 3:50 p.m.
Room: Orange 130

Click here for more information.

Grab your video camera, or your friend’s if you don’t have one, and get ready to answer the question: “What do you do with Linux?” Then channel your inner Tarantino and submit a 1-minute video entry that answers the question in a creative, entertaining or unique way. Luke Skywalker using the force of Linux? Butch Cassidy and the Linux Kid? Or maybe an instructional video on how to use Banshee to play music?

Your video not only helps to promote the endless capabilities of Linux, but you could win $2,000, an HP mini notebook or a flip video camera. And if you are one of the first 10 to get your video up on YouTube, you could also get a Leatherman pocket tool and a SUSE Linux Enterprise tee-shirt (a must on the red carpet this year!) You can see and vote on some of the competition here.

Check out the website for information on how to enter, what the judges are looking for as well as some fun tools to help you promote your video and increase your chance of winning. Don’t forget to tweet about your masterpiece and tell your Facebook friends to check out the contest.

Submit your video on YouTube to win. Contest ends June 30.

Fin.

SC Magazine has just published a five-star review of ZENworks Endpoint Security Management. The review gives the ZENworks solution top marks for features, performance, support, value and documentation. Scoring the highest overall ratings possible, ZENworks offers “a well-rounded solution with good bang for the buck.”

Check out the review here and get more information about ZENworks Endpoint Security Management here.

Microsoft mainstream support for Windows XP and Office 2003 ends tomorrow. While customers wait for Windows 7, they have to decide if it’s worth keeping their XP on life support by purchasing a “one-off” hotfix agreement or consider an alternative. The cost for extended support, which can run into the thousands of dollars to sign up, as well as thousands of dollars for each non-security fix, should be enough to make any budget-conscious IT manager take a look around.

One alternative we’d suggest is SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. Linux offers a lower total cost of ownership and a solid alternative to Windows. In fact, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop has been recently highlighted as a “true Windows replacement.”

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop gives customers real flexibility and a solid operating system for their enterprise computing needs. Compared with the end of XP mainstream support, a standard or priority subscription for both SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and OpenOffice.org Novell Edition gives customers security and bug fixes at a significantly lower cost, all backed by Novell’s award-winning technical support. Customer can even request new features through a support call if they wish.

Tomorrow none of this will be available for Windows XP customers. With the cost, support and flexibility advantages that Linux offers, the end of Windows XP mainstream support is another reason that it is the time to consider a Linux desktop.

Can your business really afford not to?

A couple of weeks ago Novell released some videos highlighting the Linux desktop in preparation for the launch of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11. However, in our rush to get the videos out we didn’t include closed captioning to allow deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences to share in our excitement of this launch. The community reminded us that this is an important audience, and we have corrected the problem. The five videos with closed captions are now available at our virtual press kit. Check out videos on the Linux desktop market, our partners, the community and the others here and here. Also, check out this new ode to Linux.

Novell has been involved in activities to help Linux become the an accessible computing platform for all audiences. In fact, we have helped companies like Viable, a company that provides next-generation video relay services for deaf and hard-of-hearing persons, to grow their business and make communication available to their customers wherever there is Internet or wireless connectivity.

We are glad that we can have this dialog with users and for their input which helps us to meet their needs