Novell News

Organizational hierarchy, roles and users change constantly. Anyone who has had to provision and de-provision more than just a few users knows that it’s like sorting water, particularly if using manual procedures, which is prone to error, time-consuming, costly and difficult to track.  These limitations expose an organization to risk.  There are different job functions one person should not have; the person collecting money should not be same person depositing money.

With the latest version of Novell Roles Based Provisioning Module, organizations can automate the process and empower business users to control access and authorization. This capability reduces dependence on IT organizations for routine provisioning tasks. By eliminating the complexity of provisioning, security officers and IT directors can spend time and resources on what really matters – growing the business.

Enhancements include:

• A dashboard-based interface that provides role relevant information including a holistic view of tasks, requests and role/ resource assignments.
• Integration with an organization’s existing role systems to create a unified set of enterprise wide roles, enabling consistent business policy across application landscapes.
• Instant information on user access rights including when and how they received the rights, and to which applications thereby simplifying compliance initiatives.
• Integration with existing applications, allowing users to access password self- service, and roles and workflow related functionality from third-party applications such as SAP, all with a single password.

To learn more about Novell Roles Based Provisioning go here.

This fun Novell video puts productivity in perspective.

To transform your e-mail from an isolated tool to an integrated environment that significantly boosts productivity, check out Novell GroupWise 8.

The Linux Foundation’s Brian Proffitt published a wrap-up blog on last week’s, first ever, LinuxCon event in Portland, Ore. If you missed the event, Brian does a nice job of hitting the highlights. You can also register to view the archived keynotes, sessions and presentation materials for a small fee.

Generating lots of interest from press, enthusiasts and attendees, LinuxCon touched on everything from what music best represents Linux to “Is Linux bloated?” – which sparked lots of opinions, including one from Novell’s own Matt Richards.

Did you get what you were hoping to out of this event? Are you looking forward to the second annual LinuxCon? We are!

by Dustin McNabb, Product Marketing Manager, Business Service Management

This year’s itSMF USA Fusion conference in Dallas offered a variety of sessions targeted toward both new and experienced IT service management professionals. Whether you’re working hard on rolling out an existing ITIL project, or wanting to learn about the latest goings on related to ITIL v3, it was all at the event. The buzz at the show was “lean IT” — the latest process maturity model to influence IT organizations. This model — developed out of the manufacturing sector — extends lean manufacturing concepts to focus on the elimination of waste, where waste is work that adds no value to a product or service. Certainly an interesting and hot topic at itSMF…we’ll see how it’s adopted by companies as another year unfolds.

For Novell, the conference gave us a terrific opportunity to highlight the  service-driven data center capabilities of Novell BSM 4.6 which includes a new PlateSpin Recon adapter. Through this and other adapters into IBM Tivoli T/EC, IBM Micromuse Netcool, BMC Remedy, and VMWare’s V-Sphere, we’re able to deliver a complete real-time business service management dashboard for the virtualized data center.

by Matt Richards, Senior Program Manager, SUSE Appliance Program

You might have seen the articles (internetnews, InformationWeek, cnet) reporting that Linux creator Linus Torvalds said the Linux kernel is “bloated”. We think Linus is right.

There are good reasons why Linux has put on the pounds over the years. Linux got big because of it’s tremendous success as a general-purpose operating system that needs to support more and more use cases. Linux is now pervasive – think IBM System Z, x86, cell phones, and my Tivo – but, with that ubiquity comes size. More packages, more drivers, bigger size. And its ease of use also comes with added size. My whole family uses Linux now because it is easy to use, provides a great user experience, and is more cost effective than other options. Yet despite all the bloat, it is still more efficient than any other operating system. If you don’t believe me, just replace Windows with Linux on the same hardware to notice the performance improvement.

The good news is that unlike most other operating systems, it’s very easy to put Linux on a diet. Linux is highly modular, so it’s relatively easy to remove packages, add packages, make changes – essentially do whatever you want. Keep the critical parts, remove the bloat. One of Linux’s great strengths is the ability to customize the OS to address a very specific use case.

You can make these changes using tools that make it fast and easy to create your own fully supported, mass customized Linux. See SUSE Studio for a great example of this capability.

At Novell we think this is the future of Linux. We expect to see more and more customization of the OS for specific platforms, applications, or use cases. SUSE Studio gives users the ability to create their own software appliances in a matter of minutes, test them, then deploy. This level of flexibility will further drive Linux adoption across the board, from cell phones to data centers, to the cloud. And it’s a great diet plan.

Guest blog from Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier

The openSUSE Project drew more than 225 people to its first-ever conference last week in Nuremberg, Germany. Contributors from all over the world and press from all around Europe came to meet and talk about the openSUSE Project, distribution development, and the technologies that make up the openSUSE distribution.

Sessions for the conference were divided into planned talks and an “unconference” track arranged BarCamp style. Attendees had plenty of time to get to know one another face-to-face during and after hours. Thursday night B1 Systems sponsored food and drink for the conference welcome party, with about 150 people in attendance and partying late into the evening.

The conference was kicked off by Lenz Grimmer of MySQL, who gave the opening keynote on working in virtual communities. The GNOME and KDE communities held workshops and bug triage sessions during the conference, an “RPM Summit” was held with upstream RPM developers and openSUSE contributors, and there were several sessions with the openSUSE board and on openSUSE governance. The Sunday closing keynote was delivered by Gianugo Rabellino of the Apache Software Foundation.

All in all, the conference was very productive and we’re hoping to plan a similar event along-side BrainShare in Europe in 2010. Check out photos from the show here.

This week Novell released MonoTouch, the industry’s first solution for building iPhone and iPod applications using .NET and C#. MonoTouch is important because it allows developers, for the first time, to use higher level programming languages like C# and the .NET framework to write enterprise applications for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. By enabling a whole new segment of developers to more productively develop applications for these mobile devices, MonoTouch is expanding the availability of iPhone and iPod applications.

MonoTouch has been well received by the press (see InfoWorld, InternetNews, Ars Technica, eWeek). You can try MonoTouch now by downloading an evaluation version here.

Yesterday, Novell announced the latest version of its team productivity solution, Novell Teaming 2. As Fierce Content Management said, “Teaming 2 looks to have all of the capabilities an enterprise environment would be looking for in an Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform giving easy access to information.”

Novell Teaming brings people, projects and processes together in a single location to increase efficiency, foster innovation, and allow employees to generate, act on and preserve ideas. To learn more about how to boost productivity and capture innovation, check out these videos from Novell Director of Solution and Product Marketing, End-User Computing, Wendy Steinle. Wendy discusses why collaboration is critical for business this first video; then stay tuned as she walks through some of the new features, including enhanced workflows, relevance dashboards and branded workspaces, in this brief Novell Teaming demo.

Want to see more? Watch these videos to see how customers, Kempinski Hotels and the Louisiana Department of Social Services, are improving productivity and lowering costs with Novell Teaming.

Novell Open Audio host, Erin Quill, recently sat down with Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier to get a preview of next week’s first annual LinuxCon event in Portland, Oregon. Zonker gives some details on his keynote, “A musical guide to the future of Linux,” and offers a glimpse of what attendees can expect from LinuxCon.

Go here to hear the whole interview.

Did you know that Oktoberfest begins in September? The start of the world’s largest fair just happens to coincide with the first-ever openSUSE conference happening just “down the road” in Nuremberg, Sept. 17 – 20.

The openSUSE conference is free and open to anyone. The interactive event aims to bring the openSUSE contributor community together to share ideas, experience, learn, hack and help to guide the direction of the project. Presentations, tutorials, birds of a feather and panel sessions will focus on four main areas: System and Toolchain, Desktop, Server, and Community – there will even be a chance to work on the openSUSE 11.2 release and the openSUSE KDE team will be holding a full program of contributor workshops during the conference.

Check out the full schedule here and make sure to leave time for some beer.