Cool Blogs

As most of you know, we just launched GroupWise 2012 this week, and there's a lot to celebrate. We not only have a great product today (one that includes many customer-requested enhancements focused on hot topics like mobility, social collaboration, and end-user productivity); we have a robust roadmap to carry us far into the future. So what's the rub? The fact that media coverage about GroupWise is anything but fair and unbiased.

To begin with, you may have seen this article, offering the sweeping conclusion that "no one cares about GroupWise." Some of you have weighed in to rebut this claim, and we thank you for that! If you haven't seen the article until now, consider it a rallying cry to stand up against this kind of false perpetuation of the "old Novell" story. And in case you're tempted to believe such fatalistic predictions about the demise of GroupWise, consider my response to this article:

First, the points on which we agree. Yes, it's been awhile since our last release. Yes, Novell's past focus on GroupWise has wavered. And yes, like all on-premise email vendors, we face competition from Google and the cloud.

But if you'd like to know the noteworthy facts (versus the tired refrain) of the contemporary Novell GroupWise story, consider this:

• GroupWise still offers the security, reliability, ease of management, and cross-platform flexibility that put it on the map back 20-plus years ago—a big part of the reason that "10,000 customers and 47 of the 50 US state governments" use it.
• GroupWise is enjoying a resurgence of focus and commitment from The Attachmate Group, which acquired Novell in May of 2011. As a proof point, check out what Bob Flynn, Novell President and General Manager, had to say about GroupWise in this video from our recent BrainShare event.
• Novell has increased its engineering staff (based in our Provo, Utah headquarters) for GroupWise by 33% in recent months and has a roadmap featuring much more frequent releases. See what we have planned by visiting our dynamic roadmap application.
• Novell and GroupWise leaders have been hitting the streets over the last several months, contacting hundreds of GroupWise customers around the world. The purpose of these visits? To rekindle relationships, to listen, and to learn what customers need from the product.

These are the facts of the GroupWise story. We invite Mr. Strom to speak with us about any of these developments--or to talk with GroupWise customers and partners who care deeply about this product and its future. Let's stop belaboring the past. It's a new day for GroupWise, and the future is bright.

But is that the only press-related injustice we need to address? Definitely not. There's also the slew of articles on the City of Los Angeles's high-visibility migration from GroupWise to Gmail. Is anyone else growing weary of these unoriginal variations on the same tired theme? I definitely am. And while we certainly don't speak for our customers—or publicly second-guess the wisdom of their decisions—we DO find fault with the media for continually portraying GroupWise as the goat in this story.

The truth is that the City of LA was running an older version of our product—a fact that any amount of due diligence on the part of the press could have uncovered. And what about the age and configuration of the hardware it was running on? Ever seen a single one of these articles dig into THAT extremely relevant fact? Nope. Some of the basic tenets of "investigative reporting" seem to have been missed. The bottom line is that reporting on GroupWise based on its 2003 merits is patently unfair, and we're crying foul. Since when did the press ever write about Windows 95 or Exchange 2003 with such contemporary zeal and vigor? Never. That's when.

And let's not forget that even this older version of GroupWise meets fundamental needs that Google currently can't, which is why it remains in use in certain pockets of the municipality. So, again, why the flat and utterly unimaginative quest to find new ways to portray Novell as old? How about reporting on the facts as they stand TODAY? Better yet, why not report on who Novell IS today, and what that signals for TOMORROW?

These kinds of articles not only do a tremendous disservice to the companies they cover, but to the readers who rely on them for perspective and information-gathering. If you're tired of this kind of GroupWise coverage from the mainstream IT media, pass this post along. Reblog it, tweet it, and share it with others who want the REAL story—the story of Novell's recommitment to its customers, the story of GroupWise's return, and—as time will undoubtedly tell—the story of a company that found its place serving customers again. You don't have to believe me until the proof points are in. But please don't believe what the press feeds you in the meantime.

Kari Woolf, GroupWise Product Marketing Manager

• Cool Blogs: Official Novell Bloggers

Memories of ATT Live 2010 are still fresh in my mind. It was a great event at a great location, The M in Las Vegas, NV. Novell customers and partners alike told us they were very happy with it. The Novell Training team was also extremely pleased with how it turned out. The venue was great, the location was perfect, and let's not forget how effective and beneficial the training was. I am excited to be part of the team again that is putting together ATT Live 2012. Due to the Attachmate acquisition, the heritage Novell/SUSE Training team is now also responsible for NetIQ training, so this is an exciting time for us and even greater opportunity than ever before for you.

The main reason you'll want to attend ATT Live 2012 is: you get 4 days of intense, hands-on training geared specifically for people like you--system administrators, network engineers and IT specialists--who actually do the job of administering Novell, SUSE and NetIQ products. You get the real world, day-to-day administration, usability, troubleshooting, and tips & tricks training you need to succeed on the job.

I blogged a little bit about ATT Live a couple months ago but the planning for the event is more complete now and there's more detailed information to share today that I wanted make you aware of. In addition to the general facts that ATT Live 2012 will be held May 15-18 at The M Resort Spa and Casino in Las Vegas, NV, I wanted to point out several exciting things you'll want to look at today:

• The earlybird price of $1400 is available until March 30 (full price will be $1795 after that)
• Testing and certification is free
• The website, www.novell.com/training/attlive/, has gone live and all the sessions are listed at www.novell.com/training/attlive/sessions.html

This year we are offering nearly 80 unique 2- and 4-hour sessions with:

• 6 tracks dedicated to the Novell products ZEN, OES and GW
• 3 NetIQ tracks focused on ISM, Sentinel, and legacy NetIQ products
• 3 SUSE tracks focused on SLES administration, usability and troubleshooting

At ATT Live 2012 you'll be rubbing shoulders with product managers, subject matter experts, and front & backline support engineers who will be helping the Training team to deliver more learning tracks and unique sessions than ever before.

Once you're at the M Resort you'll find this to be a very affordable training event. The conference room rate is only $120 per night. The food is great (The M has the best buffet in Las Vegas) and breakfast and lunch all 4 days are covered by your conference registration. And you'll only be 10 minutes from the airport and from The Strip with free shuttles to and from both destinations.

If you have questions or suggestions regarding ATT Live 2012, you can check the website or email the team at ATTLive@novell.com.

As for me, I'll be blogging more about ATT Live 2012 in the weeks to come to provide more detailed information about the content of the sessions themselves. This is, after all, a technical training conference and it's the technical stuff that matters most to you so I'll be diving into that so you'll have more of an idea about what you'll be getting in return for your training investment.

Please follow Novell, SUSE, and NetIQ Training on:
http://twitter.com/novell_training
http://www.facebook.com/NovellTraining

• Open Enterprise Server Cool Solutions

We are pleased to announce that GroupWise 2012 is now available!

Press releases were issued Monday!!! Communication activities and a community celebration was held in Long Beach, California in conjunction with the GWAVACon event. The product is available on download.novell.com today and in your Novell Customer Center.

Evaluation Copy too!

GroupWise 2012 marks the beginning of our new commitment to more frequent, customer-focused releases. End-user productivity remains a hot button for today's organizations, and our focus in GroupWise 2012 on 1) simplifying everyday email and calendaring tasks, 2) enhancing mobile collaboration, and 3) bringing social collaboration tools into the GroupWise interface is resonating very well with our customers.

New features to learn and share with customers and end-users include the following:

1. iPad web templates that give users the ability to access their GroupWise data on today's hottest mobile device, and IT a simple way to support them.
2. A complete WebAccess refresh featuring a more current look and feel, recurring appointments, graphical busy search, column sorting, contact photos, cross-client signatures and more.
3. Calendaring enhancements that streamline common scheduling tasks like delegating appointments, editing appointments, setting recurring appointments, and managing multi-user calendars.
4. Integrations with Novell Vibe and Skype that bring external and social collaboration capabilities right into the familiar GroupWise interface
5. Simplified ways to find and share information, including shared folder trees, easier attachment editing, and a new "relevance" sorting engine that presents your most-used contacts, folders and categories first.

Not only do we have a strong release to offer today; we have a robust roadmap (for GroupWise and the products in our collaboration portfolio) that will help us meet customer needs more effectively than ever before. In fact, there's every reason to remember why GroupWise was a solid investment when you made it, and why it remains so today. To assist you, we've produced a collection of resources--including a dynamic roadmap application you can point to and that you can access using the links below.

Web Resources:

• Refreshed Web Site

Collateral and Tools:

• Flyer
• Data Sheet
• Top 10 Reasons to Upgrade
• Community Chat Webcast

Videos and Demos:

• Animated Product Demo
• "Dispersed Information: 2-Minute Demo
• "Cross-Organizational Scheduling" 2-Minute Demo
• "Managing Tasks" 2-Minute Demo
• "Leveraging Contacts" 2-Minute Demo

GroupWise Training Promotion

Train your GroupWise Admins and Get End-User Training FREE!! Check out the new training offerings from Novell and BrainStorm. Novell is offering several dates where you can have hands-on training that gets your administrators and users up to speed on all of the productivity enhancements that are part of GroupWise 2012. Courses include a "Moving to GroupWise 2012" session which is two days and introduces all of the new features. "Novell GroupWise 2012 Advanced Administration" which is great for new email administrators as well as your seasoned professionals. This is a four day course that will prepare your team to move to GroupWise 2012 and get the most out of your investment. We also have a "Getting the Most out of the GroupWise 2012 Client" which is a two hour online course that is perfect for end-users who are not leveraging all of GroupWIse today and is also perfect opportunity to learn what’s new.

There are several upcoming dates and opportunities for your organization to plan their GroupWise 2012 upgrade and be prepared to upgrade, roll out and train!

Check out this link for all of the details.

Interactive Roadmap

I am very excited to introduce you to our latest tool. The Interactive Roadmap application that allows you to stay informed about what products we have delivered, which support packs and hot patches are currently available for your version of the product and most important – what is coming and when! The roadmap application will be your way to see what the engineering and product management teams have in store for GroupWise, Messenger and Mobility. We will add other products later.

We want to be as transparent as possible on what our current thinking, priority and expectations are for features, release dates and solutions. Of course, these are plans and plans can change….which is why this application is so useful. Bookmark this link and visit often to see the progress we are making, the latest available patches and when your feature is expected to be delivered!!

Dynamic GroupWise Roadmap Application

GroupWise 2012 Launch Party

If you were unable to attend GWAVACon, Torrance, you missed an awesome party!! We celebrated the release of GroupWise 2012 with a launch party on the Queen Mary for all attendees of GWAVACon! It was a blast!! Bob Flynn gave the keynote, we had fun losing "Novell" money in gambling games, with a Chinese New Year theme and great prizes from our sponsors/partners. We leveraged some of the new technology and features of GroupWise 2012 by having one of our customers in Germany and the VP of Engineering at Novell, Dave Wilkes, Skype into the party and talk to the crowd...live!

There was plenty to eat and drink and it was a great party with a unique community feel. Check out some of the videos and pictures!! Join in the social part of this product by checking out these Twitter and FaceBook accounts!! as well as this fun video of the party, the event and the customers who attended.

GroupWise_Info Twitter Account
FaceBook Account
GWAVACon Video

So enjoy in the fun! Share your story! Tweet when you are planning on upgrading to GroupWise 2012!!

Dean

• End-User Computing

I am pleased to announce "Novell Kanaka for Mac" for all Open Enterprise Server customers. The powerful combination of Novell Kanaka for Mac and Open Enterprise Server deliver the worlds best Mac file sharing solution for Corporate enterprises and Educational institutions.

Kanaka benefits include

- Single Sign-on to OES file shares / homedirectory
- New Group home directory allows easy mounting of group shares
- Mobility - allows users to edit files offline and sync to the network
- Store desktop settings on the network
- Ability to use AFP or CIFS protocols, with cross-protocol file locking

Novell Kanaka for Mac is available at no additional charge for current OES customers on Maintenance. The solution works with OES11, OES2, and can also work with NetWare ( with the agent running on OES).

With the features of the Kanaka client, the native Apple File Protocol Support, and the scalability/performance of users all provided with Open Enterprise Server, there is no better solution in the industry for supporting Mac users on the network. Later this year, you will also see Kanaka integrate with iPrint and the Zenworks Agent for Mac, for a total Single Sign on solution to these services.

Customer Feedback

Here are bits and pieces of some discussion seen on the forums regarding this announcement -

#1
"Novell listened.. it’s now free, it runs on OES Linux, And it now supports both AFP and CIFS - AFP is arguably the best protocol for Mac usage (for a number of reasons, especially the
preservation of Resource forks), and AFP on OES Linux has proven very
stable and performance. I think I'm going to be a very happy bunny. Its GREAT to see Novell
listening and coming up with solutions *now*, this is the kind of responsiveness we need."

#2
I still think that Novell is the best at File services. We have about 3400 Macs connecting to our 2-Node OES2 Cluster at any given time of the day…but compare that 2-Node Cluster to the 5 Open Directory Replica's I need to have [to do a similiar workload] because they can only handle up to 1000 users per replica or you'll most certainly corrupt OD and they are only doing the delivery of mcxsetting/mcxflags until we move that to [Novell] eDirectory! Which then you look at [Novell] eDirectory vs Open Directory and the performance and management tools alone give OD a spanking.

#3
"Kanaka leverages technologies already present in OES (eDirectory attributes with the posixAccount extension, AFP, CIFS) and OS X (the DirectoryServices framework, AFP and CIFS client functionality, a little bit of MCX) to provide a simple-to-configure but relatively rich client experience on OS X. Ultimately that means that it is highly supportable and doesn't try to mangle either the Novell or Apple engineering."

"Between this, iPrint, iFolder, Filr, Vibe, and ESPECIALLY the Zenworks Mac [agent (coming)] we should soon be able to treat Macs as first-class citizens on Novell networks. Congratulations to all involved."

#4
Wow!

Additional Information

Press Release -
http://www.novell.com/news/press/2012/1/novell-ope...

Video - Download the attached file and unzip it. Execute the file to see a video on the overview of the product.

Documentation - http://www.novell.com/documentation/kanaka/

Download - www.novell.com/center.

Enjoy!

AttachmentSize Video - An overview of Novell Kanak for Mac (for playing on Windows)10.48 MB Video - An overview of Novell Kanaka for Mac ( for playing on Mac)13 MB

• Open Enterprise Server Cool Solutions

Many of our customers leverage Operations Center's Data Integrator adapter to pull in data from external databases. This adapter has the ability to connect with several databases such as Microsoft SQL, Oracle, Sybase, postgres, etc. The typical set up is to drag and drop tables and columns and build an integration on the fly with the Data Integrator IDE. One thing typically omitted is that the Data Integrator supports pretty much any SQL related function which can help you clean up the data, translate values to more obvious meaning, etc.

One example is that you are generating a view of all the computers in your environment, the problem is, the way they are entered into the table, they are mixed upper and lowercase. Your preference is to bring them in as all lowercase. If you were running a query with the OEM's native query utility, you could add string functions to flip the values to all lowercase, even parse strings. In the attached flash video, I use the lower() function which is postgres specific, other vendors have the same capability, it is just a different function.

Another example is that you would like to have each alarm or element's date/time update based on the last time the Data Integrator ran. This is helpful to understand how recent your data is. In this case I used the now() postgres function to get the current date/time, Microsoft SQL Server uses the getdate() function for the same type of results. I applied this to the lastUpdated column which in turn stampes the element or alarm with this value.

There are endless possiblities for leveraging functions. I have put full fledge "case" statements in for the severity/condition column in order to evaluate specific data to specific severify/conditions. For example, if the helpdesk ticket has not been updated in the past 5 minutes, mark it green/ok, if it is 20 minutes old with no updates, mark it red/critical. This would require a case statement along with some functions to do math on the tickets last updated column.

The attached flash video shows a couple basic examples of accessing SQL functions to manipulate the results returned from the query. Enjoy!

AttachmentSize dataintegratorsqlfunctions.swf1.04 MB

• Business Service Management Cool Solutions

I wanted to take a moment and update our customers, partners and other interested parties on our current schedules for GroupWise, Vibe, Messenger and DataSynchronizer. We will be launching a new ‘Roadmap Application’ in a few weeks that will allow you to always know what is coming and when to expect it. Watch the GroupWise product page for this new tool that will allow our customers and partners a real-time view into current priorities, roadmaps, delivery expectations and major features that are being implemented for GroupWise and DataSynchronizer.

GroupWise

GroupWise has currently two products versions that the development team is working on. GroupWise 8 and GroupWise 2012. After GroupWise 2012 ships, we will maintain 3 branches of our flagship GroupWise product….one of them will, of course, be an internal development and forward looking line of the Product – the one we call Windermere. So here is how it is looking…

GroupWise 2012 GroupWise 2012 is scheduled to release very soon. As we communicated previously: we are saying Q1. That is still our external communication. However, I will say that we have been having weekly status meetings for several weeks and our meeting last week confirmed that all indications were positive and we were meeting all exit criteria and all future status meetings/updates have been cancelled. You can read into that what you may….I can only say – it will be Q1 :)

We have also scheduled at least one Hot Patch for GroupWise 2012. This is code named ‘Cardiff’ and it will ship several months from now and is completely driven by customer demand and will be used to address any unforeseen quality issues or significant problems reported by our customers who are deploying GroupWise 2012. The earliest that Cardiff would ship is in the summer, but this could push later if there is no compelling demand. There are no new features planned for Cardiff. However, we may choose to expand some platform support.

GroupWise 8.0.x The GroupWise 8 product line is scheduled to release its next support pack early in calendar Q2 of 2012. This will be GroupWise 8.0.3 or GroupWise 8, Support Pack 3. This will be an accumulation of all changes, FTFs, Hot Patches and fixes implemented, shipped and released since we shipped GroupWise 8.0.2 in September of 2010. So, this will obviously include all fixes that can be aggregated together in the entire GroupWise 8 version line…including the current latest Hot Patch, GroupWise 8.0.2 HP3.

We do plan a GroupWise 8.0.4 and may choose to release a Hot Patch or two between GroupWise 8.0.3 and GroupWise 8.0.4. Hot Patches on the GroupWise 8.0.3 line will be cumulative and will be made available, if and only if, we have customer demand that warrants some delivery. GroupWise 8.0.4 is currently scheduled to release in mid 2013. We expect that GroupWise 8.0.4 will be the final release of the GroupWise 8 product/version line. We also expect GroupWise 8.0.4 to contain very few fixes. We want to encourage our customers to move with us to GroupWise 2012 and get not only their issues resolved, but also take advantage of the new functionality, capability, stability and latest platform support that can be found by staying current with your GroupWise deployment.

Note: As part of GroupWise 8.0.3, we will support OES 11. OES 11 is already a supported platform for GroupWise 2012 and we have had very few reports of any issues running GroupWise 8.0.2 HP3 on OES 11. However, we have not completed a QA cycle on this platform yet with the GroupWise 8.0.x product line. Officially, it is supported and we expect it to work, but we are still validating.

GroupWise Windermere The next major release of GroupWise is scheduled for early 2013 and is code named Windermere. This release will concentrate on a new Web Administration model and the product will add support for Active Directory. Of course, we also think it will include a variety of other enhancements, but we are not prepared to commit to any of these changes until engineering has adequately scoped and a project plan is in place to deliver the Web Admin and AD functionality by the planned release schedule. We demonstrated our progress so far with Windermere and we have had a team of engineers concurrently working on Windermere as we finished up the final details of GroupWise 2012.

Novell DataSynchronizer Mobility Pack

In December, we released Novell DataSynchronizer 1.2.1. We expect to release 1.2.2 during Q1, 2012. This update will only include bug fixes reported by our customers. After this update, we will turn our attention to ‘Eenou’. This is scheduled for Q2 and in addition to continued quality improvements; we will also add support for Tasks.

Two other releases for DataSynchronizer are planned for 2013. These releases will increase scalability, add new functionality and are designed to coincide with new devices and availability of new capabilities on those devices. This is our most agile development project and it will continue to be.

Novell Messenger

The next release of Novell Messenger is code named ‘Dillon’. Dillon is scheduled for a mid-2012 release and is heavily focused on providing an iPhone and Android IM client. The iPhone app is well under way and good progress is being made. We expect to start on the Android app soon.

The next release after Dillon is code named Eaglewood. Eaglewood will line up fairly closely with the release of Windermere and will include things like support for Active Directory and a web client that will integrate with both GroupWise WebAccess as well as with Novell Vibe. We are also planning a web based administration model for Messenger in this time frame.

Novell Vibe

Novell Vibe released version 3.2 in November. This product line has a couple of releases on the horizon for 2012. The code names for these releases are ‘Granite’ and ‘Hudson’. We are still working on a schedule and scope for each release. There are some fundamental changes that need to be made in order to complete our usability and user-interface designs. We are evaluating priorities across all of our current collaboration solutions and Vibe continues to receive significant attention. There are just so many things we would like to do! Some of the things we are considering for Vibe are peer-to-peer messaging, simple groups or quick teams and some file system integration. We will also continue to heavily focus on usability, quality and performance.

That should give you a pretty good view of what is currently planned for the year.

It is important to understand that all of this is subject to change. We are heavily engaged in meeting with our customers, soliciting their input and feedback and having their voice impact our priorities, schedules and the actual list of enhancements we will implement.

In addition, I have only shared a high-level view for each of these releases and product lines. As we solidify on the details, I will use this blog, the Roadmap Application and other communication methods to share those details with our customers and partners.

See you at GWAVACon!!

Dean

• End-User Computing

If you're an experienced NetWare engineer and need to prepare to migrate your skills and your servers to OES 11 on Linux, this free beta class, being held in Provo Jan 31-Feb 2, is an opportunity you won't want to miss.

Migrating from NetWare to Novell Open Enterprise Server 11, Course 8018, is designed to help experienced NetWare administrators to make the move to Open Enterprise Server 11 for Linux. It's a three-day course that focuses on installing and configuring OES 11 services on Linux and preparing for and completing service migration from NetWare to Linux. You'll learn how to migrate services such as iFolder, NSS, eDirectory, and iPrint (among others). You'll also learn how to implement the new storage and volume management features of OES 11.

In addition to migrating services and servers, you'll migrate your skills by learning what the equivalent NetWare commands are on a Linux server so you can keep doing your regular server management tasks after you move to Linux. Finally, you'll also learn how you manage those OES services you've migrated to Linux (for all intents and purposes, the management tools are the same whether the service is running on NetWare or Linux).

Please use the link below to register for this free class, being held in Provo, Jan 31 - Feb 2.

http://register.novell.com/login/?action=prelogin&...

Please follow Novell Training on:
http://twitter.com/novell_training
http://www.facebook.com/NovellTraining

• Open Enterprise Server Cool Solutions

As always, the ZENworks team has been busy improving our products over the summer. In January, 2012, Novell will release ZENworks Application Virtualization (ZAV) 9.0, a huge step forward in our battle to make life easy for our customers. At a high level, we have improved ZAV in the following areas:

• New automated packaging techniques
• Online template library
• Improved security features
• Improved streaming features

This article will describe what goodies you can expect, but first I want to briefly overview what ZENworks Application Virtualization is for any new-comers.

What is ZENworks Application Virtualization?

Packaging, deploying and testing applications on the various platforms in the enterprise is very complex, requiring significant investment in resources and time. Traditional software delivery methods that embed changes to the Operating System's file-system and registry at install time can cause incompatibilities with other applications and in some cases the operating systems or sub-systems that are deployed on the endpoint. Many applications rely on sub-systems such as Java or .Net, and in some cases different applications require different versions of those sub-systems and need to be accessed at the same time from the same endpoint. All of these permutations need to be modelled and tested by IT to ensure a smooth error-free delivery to the end-user.

ZENworks Application Virtualization enables traditional Windows-based software to be packaged in such a way that it is isolated from the underlying Operating System and other applications, physical or virtual, that may be installed on an endpoint. Each application is delivered as an isolated executable containing the relevant files, DLLs and registry keys required by the application allowing multiple applications to be available with minimal impact on the physical Operating System or hardware.

Figure 1: ZENworks Application Virtualization Overview

With the intro complete, let's now focus on the good stuff and see what's new in ZAV 9.0

Recipes and Harvesting

ZAV 9.0 introduces harvesting, a new method for the automated creation of virtualized applications. In previous versions of ZAV, selecting a template would download all of the code required for the application and build it locally, administrators could then tweak the application before building to ensure the configuration matched requirements. Harvesting works in a slightly differently way, when a template is chosen all that is downloaded by the ZAV Studio is a document referred to as a recipe. The recipe instructs the ZAV Studio how to harvest the application and its configuration from the local system. In order for harvesting to function, the application targeted for virtualization must be installed on the same machine as the ZAV Studio.

So what is a recipe? A recipe is an ingredients lists detailing where all the components of an application and its configuration reside. The important distinction to make with recipes is that the configuration of the application is also harvested during this process. What this allows our customers to do is install their applications, configure them as required and harvest them to a virtual application in a few simple steps.

The list below shows a list of the templates that will be available when ZAV 9.0 ships. This will only get better and better due to innovative way we host recipes via web-services, more on that later

Adobe CS5 Master Collection
Adobe CS5.5 Design Premium
Adobe CS5.5 Web Premium
Adobe Flash Catalyst
Adobe Flash Pro
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe InDesign CS5.5
Adobe Master Collection CS 5.5
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop Elements 9
Adobe Premiere Elements
Adobe Reader 9.4
Adobe Reader X
Gimp 2
Google Talk Beta
LibreOffice 3.3.2
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8
Microsoft Internet Explorer 9
MS Office 2003 Pro (English)
MS Office 2003 Pro Enterprise (English)
MS Office 2007 Enterprise (VLK) (English)
MS Office 2007 Enterprise (VLK) (French)
MS Office 2007 Enterprise (VLK) (German)
MS Office 2007 Enterprise (VLK) (Spanish)
MS Office 2007 Pro (English)
MS Office 2007 Pro (German)
MS Office 2007 Pro (Spanish)
MS Office 2007 Pro Plus (English)
MS Office 2007 Pro Plus (French)
MS Office 2007 Pro Plus (German)
MS Office 2007 Pro Plus (Spanish)
MS Office 2007 Standard (English)
MS Office 2007 Standard (Spanish)
MS Office 2007 Ultimate (English)
MS Office 2007 Ultimate (French)
MS Office 2007 Ultimate (German)
MS Office 2007 Ultimate (Spanish)
MS Office 2010 Home and Business (English) (x64)
MS Office 2010 Home and Business (English) (x86)
MS Office 2010 Pro Plus (English) (x64)
MS Office 2010 Pro Plus (English) (x86)
MS Office 2010 Pro Plus (French) (x64)
MS Office 2010 Pro Plus (French) (x86)
MS Office 2010 Pro Plus (German) (x64)
MS Office 2010 Pro Plus (German) (x86)
MS Office 2010 Pro Plus (Spanish) (x64)
MS Office 2010 Pro Plus (Spanish) (x86)
MS Office 2010 Standard (English) (x64)
MS Office 2010 Standard (English) (x86)
MS Office 2010 Standard (French) (x64)
MS Office 2010 Standard (French) (x86)
MS Office 2010 Standard (German) (x64)
MS Office 2010 Standard (German) (x86)
MS Office 2010 Standard (Spanish) (x64)
MS Office 2010 Standard (Spanish) (x86)
Microsoft Project 2003 Pro (English)
Microsoft Visio 2003 Pro (English)
Mozilla Firefox 2
Mozilla Firefox 3
Mozilla Firefox 3.5
Mozilla Firefox 3.6
Mozilla Firefox 4
Mozilla Firefox 6
Novell GroupWise Client 7.0.3
Novell GroupWise Client 8
Novell GroupWise Client 8 SP1
Novell GroupWise Client 8 SP2
Novell GroupWise Messenger 2.0.4
Novell Messenger 2.2
Novell OpenOffice 2.4.1
Novell OpenOffice 3
Novell OpenOffice 3.1
Novell OpenOffice 3.2.1
Open Office 2
Opera 10
Opera 11
Opera 9
Quicken 2011
Safari 5
SketchUp 8

Desktop scan

Although recipes provide a really easy way to get up and running with application virtualisation very quickly, the Desktop Scan feature in ZAV 9.0 makes it even easier. The Desktop Scan feature in ZAV Studio scans the local machine for locally installed software and matches this to the current recipe list, the result is list of applications you can tick and build in one step. Below is an example of the desktop scan result, in this example clicking next will automatically virtualize all five applications with no input required by the administrator.

Figure 2: Desktop Scan results

Online template library

Harvesting via recipes and Desktop Scan alone represent a major step forward in usability, but ZAV 9.0 takes this one step further through the use of hosted Web Services. In ZAV 9.0, the template list and Desktop Scan matching service are hosted via an online Web Service, this allows the template list and scanning service to be constantly refined and updated. In previous releases of ZAV, if Novell wanted to provide a new template, this would have to wait until the next release of the product. In ZAV 9.0, each time the template list is accessed, the template library is checked online for updates and the template list is updated accordingly.

Figure 3: Online Template library

Security

Portability of applications is a great benefit of application virtualization, but how does IT ensure that applications do not roam to devices not under control by IT? Today ZAV applications can be instructed to check at run-time if the local device is managed by ZENworks and even specify the ZONE the machine must be in. The idea here is to prevent users moving applications via removable media and running them on non-managed devices. ZAV 9.0 takes this one step further by improving security in the following ways:

• Microsoft Active Directory checking
• Custom security shims

Microsoft Active Directory checking

This feature allows applications to be tied to Microsoft Active Directory Users. ZAV applications can check if the current user is a member of a given Microsoft AD Domain and also check for Microsoft Active Directory User Group Membership. This feature is particularly useful for customers who either do not have ZENworks or environments where one ZENworks ZONE is used to manage multiple Microsoft Active Directory Domains.

Custom Security Shims

Checking for ZENworks management or Microsoft Active Directory membership are performed by application shims that we embed into our offering. ZAV 9.0 allows for a custom shims to be created an embedded into any application. The custom shim is a DLL that performs whatever checks the developer needs and returns a positive or negative state, therefore controlling whether the application is allowed to run. Details on the requirements of a custom shim will be documented in the ZAV User Guide. Finally, shim chaining is also supported in ZAV 9.0, allowing ZENworks, Microsoft Active Directory and a custom shim to all be included in a single virtualized application.

Figure 4: Improved security settings

Intelligent Streaming

ZAV allows applications to be profiled, modelled and published to a file-share or web-page for intelligent streaming with no need for a managed presence on the endpoint. Intelligent streaming uses machine-learning technology to dynamically modify the stream delivery path in real time based upon observed behaviour as the user progresses through the application. Other streaming systems depend on linear, non-adaptive transmission resulting in high-latency page-level network round-trips and dramatically reducing performance the moment users deviate from a predefined execution path. In ZAV 9.0 we have improved streaming in the following areas:

• Offline support application support
• Juke-boxing support

Offline streaming

In ZAV 9.0, when an virtual application is registered with the endpoint and has fully cached, the streamed application can be executed offline via the registered icon or automatically through an association. If the stream source is updated, the next time the endpoint can connect to the source, the application is automatically streamed down to the device.

Juke-boxing support

The term 'Juke-boxing' refers to the ability to launch multiple applications from a single virtualized instance. This is required for large suite applications such as Microsoft Office where the entire suite is virtualized as a single executable but entry points are needed for Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and others. In ZAV 9.0, a single intelligent stream source can be used to provide multiple access points. Taking Microsoft Office as an example, a single stream source can be created with launch points for each sub-application, the result is quicker access to the individual applications without any duplication of source stream data.

Wrapping up...

The focus of ZAV 9.0 is to make life easier for administrators but to also provide a product that will self-improve as time goes on. Today virtualizing applications using templates requires administrators to subsequently inject customizations to make sure the application is configured exactly as required. Typically an IT environment will maintain a test environment, in many customers maintain a model office environment mimicking a production environment. Running ZAV 9.0 Studio on a model office machine will allow IT to detect, harvest and build virtual applications and their configuration in a single step, drastically reducing the time it takes to get applications virtualized and users productive.

Reading this you can start to see how Novell's approach to application virtualization with this new release not only reduces the time it takes to virtualize applications but also allows us to constantly improve the template library for our customers. To help us get there, Novell needs your help. Please use visit the ZAV Community page, forums and/or e-mail aphilp@novell.com to tell Novell what applications should have recipes.

For more information on ZENworks Application Virtualization, please visit the product pages here.

Enjoy!

• Cool Blogs: Official Novell Bloggers

What do you get when you purchase GroupWise?

When you purchase GroupWise, you are entitled to a variety of other products and related technologies. It does not matter if you login using the Novell Customer Center or go directly to download.novell.com and login. Your credentials should eventually get you to the exact same download page where you can access all of the software and entitlements for GroupWise.

The four products you get when you purchase GroupWise and Maintenance include eDirectory, Novell Messenger, SLES and Novell Data Synchronizer Mobility Pack. Here is a brief description of each and some of the legalese related to some of these technologies.

• GroupWise Messenger: Novell Messenger is a corporate, cross-platform instant messaging product that is based on Novell eDirectory. Your Messenger system can be set up on Linux or Windows.
• Novell eDirectory:

  Novell eDirectory is a highly scalable, high-performing, secure directory service. It can store and manage millions of objects, such as users, applications, network devices, and data, as well as GroupWise objects, such as domains, post offices, and agents. Novell eDirectory provides a secure identity management solution that runs on Linux or and Windows.

  In the EULA: The quantity of licenses for the Novell eDirectory software included with your lawfully acquired licenses of the Novell GroupWise Software is equal to the greater of (1) the quantity of licenses you have lawfully acquired for the Novell GroupWise 8 Software, or (2) 250,000 Users per company/entity.

  The foregoing Novell eDirectory licenses are not upgradeable and are otherwise subject to the license agreement accompanying the Novell eDirectory software. The foregoing Novell eDirectory licenses are not upgradeable and are otherwise subject to the license agreement accompanying the Novell eDirectory software.

• Novell Data Synchronizer Mobility Pack: Novell Data Synchronizer allows personal information management (PIM) data such as e-mail, appointments, tasks, and contacts to synchronize between enterprise e-mail and collaboration applications such as Novell GroupWise and collaboration applications. The Data Synchronizer Mobility Pack replaces GroupWise Mobile Server in providing synchronization between GroupWise mailboxes and mobile devices. The Mobility Pack includes Data Synchronizer, the GroupWise Connector, and the Mobility Connector.
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server:

  SUSE Linux Enterprise Server delivers UNIX-like server performance and reliability for significantly less cost. Selecting SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as your platform gives you access to Novell product support and services, ensuring that your GroupWise system runs securely and without interruption.

  Notwithstanding the license rights in the license agreement accompanying the copy of Novell SUSE®. In the EULA, if provides the following text and agreement:

  Linux Enterprise Server product (SLES) You received with the Software, You agree to use SLES solely for the purpose of running the GroupWise 8.0 Software.

This is also true for Novell Data Synchronizer Mobility Pack. You also have entitlement for SLES to run your Mobility server. You are entitled to as many licenses that are needed to support your GroupWise / Mobility infrastructure.

Of course, if you purchase GroupWise through the NOWS buying program, you will not only be entitled to all of these products, but you will also be entitled to Novell Open Enterprise Server, Novell Vibe, ZENworks Configuration Management, ZENworks Endpoint Security Management, ZENworks Linux Management, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and LibreOffice.

Most of these products are user licensed. Meaning that when you purchase a certain number of GroupWise licenses, you are also entitled to the same number of eDir and Messenger licenses. Mobility licenses are to mobilize any user in your GroupWise system, so essentially it is also licensed per user. SLES, on the other hand is license for each server required to run your GroupWise system.

In addition, because these products are part of a 'bundle', maintenance for GroupWise entitles you to updates/patches for each entitled product in the bundle

So - get the most out of your GroupWise investment by deploying the other technologies that come as part of your GroupWise license/maintenance

Let me know if you have questions or if there are other points that I can clarify....

Dean

• Data Synchronizer Cool Solutions

Past

2011 represents Novell Service Desk  first full year as a contender in the service desk market space (That's not to say that Novell Service Desk has only been in existence for that time - our OEM manufacturer LiveTime has been in business for several years).

Over the past year we have worked closely with LiveTime to enable asset import from Novell ZENworks Configuration Management so that our customers can quickly build of list items that they will be providing support for.  We've expanded integration to provide Novell Service Desk technicians with the ability to make configuration changes to managed desktops, laptops, servers by using the power of Novell ZENworks Configuration Management bundles.

Our customers now have an additional deployment option with a virtual appliance that  includes an embedded database and further improves the already impressive 'time to value' i.e the length of time before the solution starts delivering to your requirements.

Under the hood, LiveTime have embraced the next generation of web standards with HTML5.  This has resulted in Novell Service Desk being entirely based upon HTML5 which blurs the line between desktop and web applications.  Novell Service Desk continues to support open standards and does not require any plugins, just a modern browser. The change to HTML5 means that the next major release will see significant changes across the entire UI and will bring even more dynamic changes.

Future

Looking torwards the New Year, Novell Service Desk will have some exciting new features and a host of new UI enhancements that we know you're going to find extremely valuable.

Remote Management

Since day one , remote management has featured in Novell ZENworks Configuration Management. With Novell Service Desk 6.5.4 , this feature will be available to technicians so that they can get their eyes onto what the customer is experiencing. This will provide a vastly reduced time to resolution making customers even happier as their incidents and service requests get resolved even more quickly ( BTW , you can measure user opinion with Novell Service Desk surveys ). With this capability, you do not need Novell ZENworks Configuration Management web console. We securely authenicate the Service Desk Technician to Novell ZENworks Configuraiton Management and utilise its security model for remote management.

Relationship Impact Map

LiveTime has introduced a new multi-level relationship map so Technicians can readily see the impact of an outage and related infrastructure directly within the CMDB or the request itself. As the information is dynamically updated by third party monitoring tools Technicians will see a view of the entire business and it’s related services.

ITSM Relationship Map

Multisource LDAP

Multiple LDAP connections allows organizations with different authentication servers in various locations and timezones to synchronize with LiveTime, providing a federated source of Service Desk Customers and Technicians in a single database.

Line Manager Approvals

The introduction of line manager approvals for Service and Change Requests. By associating line managers with Customers, when a Request is logged that requires management approval prior to processing, the Request can be automatically routed to the appropriate manager for approval. For service organizations that propose changes and updates to their customers’ environments, customers will have the ability to approve or reject work proposed by the service provider.

Workflow Map

Another big change relates to the workflow editor which is more interactive and fully animated allowing technicians and customers to see exactly where they are in the entire process and the next steps available.

Workflow Map

Scheduled Reporting

The ability to configure scheduled reports across User Groups. Within the Administrator Portal, out-of-the-box and custom-built reports can be selected and scheduled for automatic emailing to Supervisor, Manager, Technician, Finance and Administrator Users, ensuring User relevant data is sent on a regular basis. The Custom Report Builder also includes functional enhancements.

Process Switching

For Service Desks with Request Fulfillment and Incident Management, requests that are generated as an Incident can be readily toggled to a Service Request, and vice versa, while maintaining one identification number. This means customer correspondence will be more easily managed and the request’s history available within a single audit trail.

Knowledge Import

The capability to import Knowledge Base Articles using a .CSV file, providing service organizations with the convenience of importing large amounts of information stored in external sources with a single file.

Planned Outages Map

Users will also notice the capability to create Planned Outages for Multiple Items. Users will be able to easily traverse the relationship map to see all infrastructure that is to be related to the Planned Outage and apply the improved notifications to update Customers accordingly.

Janus?

If you've got this far, then you may be asking yourself why Janus? In ancient Roman religion and mythology, Janus is the god of beginnings and transitions, thence also of gates, doors, doorways, endings and time. He is usually a two-faced god since he looks to the future and the past.
That's why

Happy Winter solstice

• Novell Service Desk Cool Solutions

Novell Data Synchronizer Connector for Vibe

Novell Data Synchronizer Connector for Vibe will release FCS this week – passed first article and should be available by the end of the week. (FCS = First Customer Ship. Bascially means when the product will be publicly available for download and deployment.)

This is our 1.0 debut for the Vibe Connector, which synchronizes tasks and calendars from Vibe to GroupWise. Our internal rollout for the connector is servicing more than 500 users. This connector has been under development for some time and further integrates our collaboration solutions together. You can now have Team calendars and Tasks in Novell Vibe and interact with those items from within the familiar GroupWise interface/habitat.

Although this technology is predominately uni-directional, there are a couple of areas that allow for a bi-directional synchronization model. For example, if you have Team task in a team workspace in Vibe and that task is synchronized to GroupWise, the GroupWise user can mark that task complete or set the % complete information for that task and that information will be synchronized back to the Vibe workspace.

To be a bit more specific, here is the a summary description from the Vibe Connector documentation that provides the details and functionality for this technology.

Calendar Synchronization

• All Vibe calendar folders that contain calendar appointments in your personal workspace synchronize to GroupWise.
• All Vibe calendar folders that contain calendar appoitments in team workspaces where you are a team member synchronize to GroupWise.
• Vibe Calendar folders synchronize as sub-calendars under your main GroupWise Calendar.
• Additions, modifications, and deletions on the synchronized Vibe calendars are reflected in GroupWise.
• Calendars deleted in Vibe are deleted from GroupWise.

Task Synchronization

• Tasks and calendar appointments that are assigned explicitly to you, to a team you are a member of, or to a group you are a member of (regardless of the team where the assignment originated).
• Additions, deletions, and modifications made to tasks that are assigned to you, to a team you are a member of, or to a group you are a member of in Vibe are reflected in GroupWise.
• If you modify the % Complete or Completed fields of a task in GroupWise, that status information synchronizes back to the Vibe task. (These fields are the only fields that support bidirectional synchronization.)

Additional Synchronization Behavior for Tasks and Calendars

• Vibe tasks located in Calendar folders synchronize to GroupWise calendars. Vibe calendar entries in Task folders synchronize to GroupWise in the corresponding sub-calendars.
• The GroupWise sub-calendar called Other Vibe is created by the Vibe Connector to store tasks and calendar appointments that meet the synchronization criteria but are either located in folders where you do not have access rights to the parent workspace or folder, or that are located in a folder that is not a Tasks folder or Calendar folder. For example, it is possible in Vibe to create a task in any type of folder, such as a Blog folder.
• Synchronized Calendar and Tasks folders reflect the name of the team or personal workspace where the folder is located, with the name of the folder itself in parenthesis. If the calendar or task entry does not pertain to a team that you are a member of, the folder name in GroupWise assumes the name of the Vibe folder that contains the calendar or task entry that is being synchronized.

This Vibe Connector works using the Data Synchronizer engine, the GroupWise Connector and the new Vibe Connector. You must install the Vibe Connector software on a server where Data Synchornizer and the GroupWise connector have already been installed.

See the documentation here.

Novell Data Synchronizer Mobility Pack 1.2.1

Novell Data Synchronizer Mobility Pack 1.2.1 will also release 'FCS' this week. We haven't released Mobility since the 1.2 release in early August. So we are very excited, and so are our customers, about this update

Mobility 1.2.1 will be available both via the NCC patch channel and Patch Finder. It includes all of the work engineering performed and delivered after feedback we heard at BrainShare and delivered in a patch. This update also provides fixes for ~50 customer-reported defects and ~100 QA-reported defects. Customers will see improved reliability, especially with attachments and appointments. We'll continue to address customer-reported defects via regular, frequent updates in an effort to maintain customer confidence. This will be engineerings focus for some time and then they will turn their attention to the feature set communicated previously through the code name: Eenou.

We encourage all of our customers to download and install this update as it level sets all of our customers on very stable, well tested and reliable functionality.

Novell Vibe Desktop and Novell Vibe Add-In for MS Office

Novell Vibe Desktop and Novell Vibe Add-In for MS Office did release Beta 2 on Monday 12/12/2011. Vibe Desktop provides a local, synchronized file store for Vibe files, allowing users to work on Vibe files in offline mode. The Add-In allows users to work on Vibe files without ever leaving their familiar Office apps.

Novell Vibe Desktop Details:

You can synchronize your Novell Vibe files with your computer, then modify the files without accessing the Vibe site directly. Additions and modifications are synchronized between Vibe and your computer. You cannot delete Vibe files from your desktop. If you do delete a Vibe file from your desktop, it is not deleted in Vibe, and is synchronized back to your desktop at the next synchronization.

Synchronization occurs at an interval designated by your Vibe administrator. The default is every 15 minutes.

You can manually synchronize files if you do not want to wait for the scheduled synchronization. For more information, see Manually Synchronizing Files.

Which Folders Are Synchronized?

Only files in Files folders and Photo Album folders within your personal workspace are synchronized by default.

You can easily configure files in Files folders and Photo Album folders within your teams or followed places to be synchronized, as described in Synchronizing Your Teams and Favorite Places.

What Actions Are Supported?

When you perform any of the following actions on documents, the action is synchronized between your computer’s file system and the Vibe server:

• Create documents
• Modify documents

In order to prevent you from inadvertently making changes on the Vibe server that you do not want to make, the following actions are not synchronized between your computer’s file system and the Vibe server:

• Delete documents
• Delete folders
• Create folders

Novell Vibe Add-In Details:

The Novell Vibe Add-In for Microsoft Office enables you to work with documents on the Vibe site without ever leaving Microsoft Office. You can easily browse to a document that is located on the Vibe site, open the document, edit it, then save it back to the Vibe site, directly from Microsoft Office.

You can work directly from Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint documents.

MS Office Requirements

The Novell Vibe Add-In for Microsoft Office is supported with the following versions of Microsoft Office:

• Microsoft Office 2010, with the latest support pack
• Microsoft Office 2007, with the latest support pack

Note: The Beta 2 distribution is limited to our Firestone beta testers. Beta 3 / Public Preview will give the world a peek at these cool features and will be made available in the coming weeks. Engineering is on track for an early-February FCS.

If you don’t have Novell Vibe – its time to check it out!! This is a fantastic collaboration tool that expands your collaboration capabilities and gives your end-users easy options for teams, documents, projects and workflows. For those who don’t know….the NOWS buying program was recently updated to include Novell Vibe in the bundle at no extra cost. So if you are purchasing GroupWise through NOWS, you already own it!!! Its time to deploy it!

Dean

• Data Synchronizer Cool Solutions

Open Enterprise Server (OES) took a major step forward today with the release of OES 11. OES2 skipped some version numbers to "11" to coincide with the platform it runs on, which is Suse Linux Enterprise Server 11 ( SP1). The real geeks out there will also remind me what 11 stands for in binary.

Some of the benefits you will see with OES11 are benefits from SLES11 itself, as well as new innovations with OES coming now and in the future. Novell is taking some aggressive steps forward to provide additional value to our customer base.

Current Benefits with OES11:
- Patch up to 100 times faster
- Power Savings - Tickless idle shuts down processors not in use
- Latest Hardware and Software Certification Support
- MAC 10.7 DHX2 support
- Novell Remote Manager - email reports, clear file locks
- Novell Linux Volume Manager - support for >2TB partitions, pool moves, posix partition creation in NSSMU, seamless integration of Posix and NSS partitions on the same disk and more

One of my goals is to provide our customers additional value for the OES product line. Moving forward Novell is planning both an OES11Sp1 as well as "Feature Updates". Feature Updates, will give customers new features more frequently and in a more easily consumed manner, by delivering them into an optional "Feature Channel". Stay tuned for more information on Domain Services for Windows and Mobile iPrint. These and other components will be delivered in the feature update channel in 2012.

In addition - Novell Filr is being developed for OES customers as well as for the broad market. Some are calling Filr, the "Dropbox for the enterprise", but it does much more than just file backup and synchronization with security and compliance. It allows you to use the file systems and files you already have in your corporate data center, and doesn't care if those files are on NetWare, OES, Windows or a Netapp appliance. It allows you to use some newer file sharing features, such as sharing file links ( with time expiration ) or putting notes on files as you share them with others. It also allows you to sync files to android, IOS and other mobile devices.

In a nutshell the future looks bright for OES. OES11 is here and more value is coming with OES11SP1, Feature Updates and Novell Filr.

• Open Enterprise Server Cool Solutions

GroupWise 2012 Schedule Update!

I know that many of you are anticipating and watching for the final release and general availability announcement for GroupWise 2012. Although the product is coming along nicely, we are not ready to release the final version to the public. We did expect to release by the end of the year, but within the last few days, that schedule has changed. The engineering, beta sites and product business leaders are working very hard to make sure this product is as good as it can possibly be when it hits the streets in the coming weeks. We do not anticipate this being a long delay, but we do believe that the additional time will be worth it!

As many of you know, the WebAccess component for GroupWise 2012 has gone through fairly aggressive changes over the last year. The GWINTER agent is no longer part of the network topology for GroupWise 2012. With that shift in technology, the WebAccess client, features and capability need just a bit more bake time before we are comfortable deploying in a robust set of production environments. In the end, with our commitment to quality and Engineering Excellence, we have erred on the side of making sure the product is solid, scalable and reliable at the expense of a small schedule change. The advice from our beta sites has also been clear. Although not all environments are experiencing or reporting the same types of issues with WebAccess, they all recommended that it is better to be late with a solid product, then to ship the product before its time.

I will say that the exit criteria for this release has been more strict. As we have met the criteria for the majority of the components like the POA, MTA, GWIA and Windows Client, the WebAccess components are still seeing a small gap in the pass rates for the QA test runs. We want all components to meet all of our exit criteria before we ship. That is our commitment to you, as our loyal customers, and we know this attitude builds confidence in our solutions and our company. So please be patient with us a bit longer and we believe the extra effort will pay off for everyone.

In the mean time, please check out the product web site and see all of the colleteral and material that has been prepared to promote, talk about and train customers about GroupWise. Things like Flyers, Data Sheets, GroupWise 2012 BrainShare Demo, Technical details, Product Documentation and Training Videos.

GWAVACon, Torrance - January 22- 24, 2012

I also want to take this opportunity to invite all of you to GWAVACon in Torrance, CA. It is sure to be a great event! Several members of the Product Management, Marketing, Sales and Engineering teams will be attending from Novell. It is a great place to not only hear the very latest updates on all three of the major product lines…OES, GroupWise, Vibe and ZenWorks, but it is also a unique opportunity to meet in smaller groups or one on one with representatives from Novell and Attachmate. This year, we are very pleased and excited to have Bob Flynn, President and General Manager for Novell, deliver the Novell keynote address.

Check out the GWAVACon web site for all of the details.

Here are the Collaboration sessions that will be presented:

• What's New in the GroupWise 2012 Windows Client
• What's New in GroupWise 2012 WebAccess (including iPad Support)
• Novell Collaboration Overview/Futures
• The Future of GroupWise Administration
• The Novell Mobility Story (GW, Messenger, Vibe)
• Vibe Overview/Futures and Use Cases
• Integrating Vibe in Your Existing Infrastructure

Also – during GWAVACon, we will be presenting and participating in a live ‘Validation Event’. We did this same activity at GWAVACon Berlin in October and it was a huge success. This is where we distribute hand held voting machines to the audience and have them interactively participate in shaping the priorities, features and new capabilities we are planning for future releases of our Collaboration Solutions. Make sure your vote is counted by coming to GWAVACon, meeting Bob Flynn and participating in this extremely empowering exercise.

So…hang with us just a bit longer to get your hands on the very latest version of GroupWise…..GroupWise 2012! Come to GWAVACon and find out what else we are doing!!

Dean

• End-User Computing

Introduction

A service level agreement is a business contract that specifies service level expectations around critical infrastructure and business services. Typically, they refer to restoration targets that the Service Desk needs to meet.

OLAs & UCs

Operational level agreements (OLAs) are similar to SLAs, except they communicate internal team-based expectations within specific stages of the Workflow process. Similarly, the obligations of external service providers are specified using Underpinning Contracts (UCs). Unlike an OLA where an appropriate Team Technician is assigned responsibility for servicing a request, it is the responsibility of a Service Level Manager to monitor the performance of the external service provider in relation to the business's expectations as defined in UC Workflow States.

Workflows and Workflow States

Workflows define the sequence of steps that Service Desk staff are required to follow when managing customer requests. With the system, any number of Workflows can be personalized for the Incident, Problem, Change, Release and Service Request Management processes. Each step, or Workflow State, defines the activity, and if relevant the OLA, with Default Team, or UC contract required to successfully process the request at that step. Only after the nominated Team Technician has successfully concluded the activity does the request get routed to the next appropriate Workflow State. The Workflow is deemed complete once the request enters an Exit Workflow State.

Escalation

When a request enters a Workflow State, an appropriate Team is assigned to service the request. Within the Team, escalation layers are configured. Escalation layers manage the request’s flow by automatically guiding the request through a pre-defined escalation pathway. During its journey, the escalation engine monitors the request's priority level and responds to . It also reacts if too many business hours elapse without contact with the Customer or if the request uses up the total time allotted to it for resolution.

SLAs and Workflow

The Service Level Management module allows service level expectations to be mapped to end-to-end business processes. In so doing, the system performs the following Service Level Management validation:

SLA resolution time >= Sum (Workflow States (OLA or UC resolution times)

When validating Workflows, the system disallows adding States to a Workflow that will force the sum of the Workflow State resolution timers for OLAs and UCs to breach the SLAs resolution timers. In such situations, the system will warn the service level manager to either increase the SLA resolution timers (targets) or select a more appropriate UC or OLA that will fall within the SLA targets.

Configuring SLM in the system

Before requests can be processed using SLM, a Supervisor typically needs to perform the following sequence of configuration steps:

1. Define Technicians. Set Roles & Process permissions

2. Define service level managers (Users > Users) To become a service level manager a User must be assigned the Service Level Management Process

3. Establish business SLAs

a. Specify service level manager

b.Availability %

c. Warning and breach notifications

d. Set priority targets

e. Specify blackout periods

4. Setup OLAs

a. Specify service level manager

b. Set service targets

5. Setup Underpinning Contracts (UCs)

a. Specify service level manager

b. Specify Vendor

c. Set service targets

6. Define ITIL process Workflows

a. Name the process and associate it with one of the ITIL processes

b. Optionally set default open and close states { you might need to come back to this once all states have been defined}

c. Specify SLA for the Workflow from Step 3.

d. For each Workflow State, specify:

i. Is the Workflow State active?

ii. Is the State an entry or exit state?

iii. The Contract Type: None / OLA / UC

• Specify an OLA if the OLA Contract Type is set.

• Select a default Team, that has been assigned the OLA.

• Specify a UC, if the UC contract type has been selected.

iv. Should the SLA timer continue counting time when the request has entered this State?

v. Should the State be used to measure SLA restoration or resolution time (for reporting purposes only)

vi. Specify relevant next / previous States to define the end-to-end Workflow.

• To prevent the SLA target from being breached, the contract time will be calculated when an OLA or UC is assigned to a State.

e. Update 6b) if required.

7. Define the service Teams

a. Specify Technicians

b. Specify OLAs

c. Specify Workflows

d. Define escalation layers or work groups

8. Make any modifications to the Workflow State

a. Specify a default Team to provide support for this State {review 6diii 1a)

Applying SLM to the process of raising an Incident

After SLAs, Workflows and Teams have been defined, the Service Desk is able to use the system to efficiently process Incident, Problem, RFC and Service Requests according to organizational standards and procedures.

The following steps outline the process of raising and managing an Incident in the system:

1. Within the Operations > Incident tab select the New button:

a. Assign a Customer

b. Select a Configuration Item (CI), which include Services within Service Catalog

c. If prompted by the system, assign an SLA to the Incident as:

i. No Customer SLA exists or

ii. No Org Unit SLA exists or

iii. No CI SLA exists

d. Profile the Incident

i. Select a Classification

ii. Enter Description of the Incident

iii. Complete any custom fields

e. If the proactive analysis option is enabled, proposed solutions will be available within the Analysis Tab. If a relevant Solution is proposed, apply the Solution to close the Incident. Otherwise, click ‘Next’ to move to the Summary tab of the Incident screen.

2. In the Incident Summary screen, confirm:

a. SLA

b. Workflow

i. A list of Workflows options is derived based on the SLA selected

ii. If a Workflow has not been assigned to the SLA, then the system default Workflow is assigned to the Incident

c. Team

i. A list of Team options will be derived based on the Workflow selected

ii. If a Team has not been assigned to the Workflow, then the CI’s default Team is assigned to manage the Incident

d.Technician

e. Incident Urgency / Impact / Priority

f. Notifications

g. Workflow State (= Incident Status)

h. Add Note(s), and apply private/public visibility and Customer email distribution options

i. Upload attachments

j. Access Audit trail details

k. Access Impact information (i.e., Service Targets, SLA breaches, Item Relationships, Planned Outages, Contract Monitor)

3. Perform analysis within the Analysis tab

a.Allows the system to recommend a proposed Workaround or Solution

b. Search Workarounds / Solutions

c. Raise new Workaround / Solution

d. Raise a new Problem and link it to the Incident

e. Raise a new RFC and link it to the Incident

f. If the Incident is related to other Incidents, Problems, Change or Service Requests, view all related requests within the Incident > Related tab.

4. Save the Incident

5. Group similar or related Incidents within an Incident Group and manage the collective from the Incident Group tab.

• Novell Service Desk Cool Solutions

The Public Holidays functionality allows the system to be configured to automatically account for non-service days of the Service Desk, irrespective of its location. This forms part of the Technician assignment facility, as the system logic considers public holidays in relation to service level requirements and Technician availability. For example, where the Service Desk has a global customer base and office locations in multiple countries, the observed public holidays for the different countries and states can be configured by the Administrator. Then when a request is logged by a customer in one country where the service desk has a public holiday, it assigns the new request to a Technician in a region that does not have the holiday.

The system also adjusts the SLA timers in relation to breaches and escalations, where relevant. This means that once a public holiday starts (i.e., at midnight in the location where the holiday falls), the due dates of all requests are moved forward for the period of time that the public holiday is in effect.

Accessing Public Holidays functionality

Public Holidays functionality is enabled and configured by the Administrator User.

Public Holidays System Logic

The Public Holiday logic is applied to SLAs on a per SLA basis. This allows for the system to include SLAs that observe the public holidays and others that do not.

For Public Holidays to be considered in relation to an SLA, the Pause on Holiday option needs to be enabled for the specific SLA. This option is only visible within the SLA Editor screen after the Administrator has activated the Public Holidays option within the Setup>Privileges>User tab.

Things to note when Pausing on holidays

• When a public holiday occurs for a Technician, their assigned requests only have their SLA timers adjusted if the SLA option Pause on Holiday check-box is ticked. Any requests that have an SLA that do not have this option set, continue as normal.
• The amount of time a request is paused relies on the SLA open hours, which may be defined as 24 hours or specific hours of operation. For example, where the SLA open hours are defined as 9:00am to 5:00pm weekdays, the base time of 8 hours is applied to pause the SLA.
• If the Service Desk is opened for part of the day that is declared as a public holiday, the Open Hours set for the public holiday will be deducted from the SLA open hours. For example, if the public holiday was observed from 12:00pm, where the SLA open hours are defined from 9:00am to 5:00pm, the base time would be reduced by 3 hours and the SLA paused for 5 hours.
• If the Due Date falls on a Public Holiday and the hours applied to pause the SLA do not push the Due Date to normal operating hours then:

• For 24x7 support - the system pushes the due date to midnight, or the beginning of the next service day.
• For configured support hours or "normal support" - the due date is pushes to the start time of the next "open" day. For example, if a public holiday falls on a Friday for a support operation that works 9:00am to 5:00pm Monday to Friday, and an Incident's due date is 2:00pm on the Friday, then the due date is pushed to 9:00am the following Monday.

• If the request is in a Workflow State where an OLA applies, the OLA is adjusted by the same amount that the SLA is paused.

• When the Pause on Holiday option is enabled for a new request that is logged with the system during Public Holiday hours, if the system cannot find an available Technician for request assignment, it assigns the request to a Technician in the first layer of escalation, based on the Technician Assignment logic. This scenario generally applies to organizations where the service desk Team is based in one location.(If all Technicians have their On Vacation status marked to Yes, the request is assigned to the Team Lead.)
• If a Technician is not available to work on the request, and the new request is assigned an SLA with the Pause on Holiday flag enabled, then the due date is calculated based on the time the request is created plus the number of hours left of the public holiday. For example, where the SLA open hours are paused for 24 hours (i.e., a full day), for a request created at 8:00pm the due date is calculated using the target of the SLA Priority plus 4 hours (as there are 4 hours remaining of the public holiday).

• Novell Service Desk Cool Solutions

Several organizations leverage Visio to document their environment. They use Visio to show network schematics, large application deployments, even documenting the hardware in racks. With Novell Operations Center 5.0 we have made it even easier to bring in Visio drawings and lighting them up with elements being managed to show health and availability.

In the flash video attached to this blog, I recorded an example of bringing in a visio drawing and then linking elements to different things on the computer racks. Below are the highlevel steps to do this yourself.

1) You must first save the visio drawing out of Visio as an SVG file.

2) Once saved, within the Operations Center java console, go to the view you wish to have the drawing on, go into edit mode and clear the drawing. This will remove the current drawing.

3) Next from the File menu, choose "Open" and select the SVG version of the visio drawing. This will bring in the drawing and show it in the layout view.

4) The next steps is to turn on the flatten tool, this is required in order to have the drag and drop highlight the different areas within the visio drawing and allow you to control where within the drawing you want the element linked.

After you are done with the dragging and dropping, you can then save the drawing and you are done. This visio drawing is then usable in the java console or the dashboard.

Have fun!
- Tobin

AttachmentSize visiolayoutexample.swf3.47 MB

• Business Service Management Cool Solutions

I have been reading a bunch of competitive information today and reviewing several recent reports from industry analysts about email and collaboration. Many of these ideas I have felt for a very long time and it is great to see some of these ideas being shared by industry experts.

Just as I was researching a few trends and seeing what was happening in the industry, our Marketing department sent me a link to this CIO Magazine article which is being distributed widely throughout out customer base and which I am including here for you to download, read and put on your CIO's desk.

I don't want to spoil the content, but here is a quote that seems to summarize the conclusions of this article quite well.

"Together, Novell GroupWise and Novell Vibe create an environment that combines the ubiquity and reliability of email with the latest team collaboration tools to maximize information sharing and idea exchange. This combination boosts productivity and sparks innovation without introducing higher costs, complexity, or risk. It also provides a way to break down barriers to idea sharing while meeting security and compliance requirements, reducing travel costs, and preserving corporate knowledge."

Download your copy here.

The fact that we just shipped Novell Vibe 3.2 and are about to ship Novell GroupWise 2012 plays so well into this message, our future and the direction of our technologies.

I wanted to complement this article with several quotes from Gartner and other analysts regarding the email space, cloud computing and our strategic direction.

First of all, the statement that "E-mail is a Commodity" is a fairly tale. As stated by the Gartner report by Matt Cain, Feb 2011. His key findings are:

• E-mail is far from a commodity for most organizations — user demands are rapidly increasing, leading to custom deployments that cannot always be matched by cloud suppliers.
• A well-run, feature-rich e-mail system can add significant value to an organization via better uptime, resiliency, security and content control.

Gartner, in another report, dated Nov 2011, states that the email market is growing at a compounded annual growth rate of 11%. The CIO Magazine also states that 'there are today 2.9 billion active email accounts, and by 2014, that figure is predicted to reach 3.8 billion.

So - first conclusion - Email is not going away! Email will also not be replaced by other forms of collaboration. In fact, Gartner also states: "The prevailing school of thought at Gartner holds that the email user interface (UI) is likely to expand to encompass multiple communication modalities, so that email becomes the launch pad and aggregation point for most collaboration interactions."

Email in the Cloud

Gartner also lists 10 broad categories of email services which generally demonstrate that email in a customized form may not be available from cloud suppliers. Customers should closely evaluate each of these categories to make sure that their current and future needs are being met.

• Security
• Integration
• Routing
• Uptime
• RTO/RPO
• Mobility
• Storage
• Compliance
• Topology
• Management

Gartner states: "In many ways a "commodity" e-mail service from a cloud supplier offers lowest common denominator e-mail services. Most organizations, however, don't run a commodity e-mail service —making cloud e-mail a misfit for many organizations."

Now Gartner is very pro-cloud services and expects this segment of the industry to grow rapidly. They are predicting significant growth compared to where Cloud Services are today. That rapid growth translates to only a small portion of the overall market even 4-5 years from now. In other words, 85% of all email will still be in on-premise enterprise email systems in 2014 according to Gartner. I have watched these predictions over the last couple of years. I remember that originally 20% of all mailboxes would be in the Cloud or hosted by 2012. Now they are not even that aggressive 4 years further into the future with their current predictions.

Sounds to me like the magic 8 ball is not working particularly well. I think it is important to watch and be aware of everything that is happening in your industry. I can only imagine what the next 5 years will bring to the market. How many of us would have accurately predicted the success of things like the iPhone, Kindle, iPad, Mobile Apps, FaceBook, Twitter and others. Seems to me that usually the future presents something we were not entirely expecting....

One thing I think is very clear and I quote:

".... a well-run, feature-rich e-mail system can add significant value to an organization. And e-mail is far from a commodity for most organizations —internal demands are rapidly increasing, leading to custom deployments"

Thoughts?

Dean

Reference: Email is a Commodity and other Fairy Tales, Gartner, Feb 2011
Reference: Market Trends: The Enterprise Email and Calendaring Market Is Being Revitalized by Cloud Services, Gartner, Nov 2011

• Data Synchronizer Cool Solutions

Introduction

Over the last decade, Novell ZENworks has developed a reputation as one of the industry's most complete and capable solutions for centrally configuring and managing endpoints in complex and heterogeneous networking environments. With Novell ZENworks, thousands of organizations ( See http://www.novell.com/success ) have discovered the benefits of using a policy and user-based approach to simplify and automate software and patch deployment, asset tracking, endpoint security, OS migration and a long list of other routine endpoint management tasks. Novell ZENworks allows IT organizations to perfectly align their desktop environments with established business policies and shift more time, money and resources away from mundane, repetitive tasks and toward strategic IT initiatives.Novell ZENworks 11 represents another major step toward completely automated and nearly effortless endpoint management—by bringing the family of ZENworks products together under a single integrated platform and then extending all those capabilities to a wider range of Windows, Linux and Apple Mac platforms and devices.

Novell ZENworks 11 includes:

• An architecture that adapts to your environment with flexible choices for the platform OS, database, directory services and range of supported devices for management.
• A new identity-based, heterogeneous endpoint management platform that consists of a unified ZENworks Control Center console, a single ZENworks Adaptive Agent and ZENworks server software
• Integrated configuration, asset, patch and endpoint security management for Windows, Linux and Apple Mac endpoints.
• Optional Full Disk Encryption for Windows devices
• Managed device location awareness capabilities that add a new dimension to ZENworks Configuration Management, ZENworks Asset Management, ZENworks Patch Management and ZENworks Endpoint Security Management 11's identity-based approach.
• Power management and reporting for Green IT initiatives
• The use of standards-based protocols
• Network consumption control when rolling out new applications or installing updates
• Full manageability over the Internet using secure communication channels
• Simple and speedy installation, deployment and updates
• The ability to integrate seamlessly with your choice of user directory and database platforms
• Support for 64-bit hardware and operating systems
• Rapid installation with an appliance on VMware ESX(i) Hypervisor

Choosing the Best Management Paradigm for Your Business

Every feature found in Novell ZENworks 11 flows from the Novell vision of the Open Enterprise, which embraces the value of creating a simple, secure, productive and integrated IT environment that works across heterogeneous systems. Novell ZENworks 11 empowers IT organizations to manage systems in ways that support real users—with all their various security, location, device and other needs—while still maintaining simple, centralized control over the entire end user environment. As an essential corollary to this philosophy, Novell ZENworks 11 also gives IT departments the freedom to manage their systems according to the paradigm that best reflects their organization’s business policies—and the IT staff’s preferred working style.
With Novell ZENworks 11, IT departments can choose to manage systems tactically (on a device-by-device basis) or strategically (in synchronization with business policies) using any combination of four distinct management paradigms: management by exception, management by location, device-based management and finally user-based management.

Management by exception

When you evaluate any configuration management solution or paradigm, you should carefully consider two important criteria. First, how well does the management paradigm scale? And second, how large a burden does it place on your IT staff as they continually update the solution to accommodate changing business policies? Novell ZENworks 11 can provide the right answers to both of these questions. Novell pioneered the “management by exception” paradigm, and ZENworks 11 continues to offer it as a powerful tool for continuously adapting to changing business policies and practices with minimal IT effort.

In most situations, management by exception serves as a complement to policy-driven management paradigms. It allows for the strict, high-level enforcement of general configuration management rules across user or device groups, while still permitting exceptions at a more granular level to accommodate specialized needs.

For example, normal business policies may allow employees to remotely access the corporate network. However, applying this policy across the board to all desktops—including PCs in the finance and legal departments—could expose the company to regulatory penalties and corporate spies. Exception-based management allows IT departments to create and automatically enforce general access policies across the whole company, and then apply more restrictive policies to PCs and users in specific groups or departments. In this case, the additional stricter policy would restrict access to normal business hours, on-site, by authorized users. Exception-based management allows for complete flexibility, without requiring IT to manage separate policy silos for each type of user and machine.

Management by location

According to research from major analyst firms such as Gartner, IDC etc.. the number of traditional static desktops within our organizations is becoming smaller. Observational evidence confirms this as we see the number of laptops growing almost on a daily basis. Laptops have provided many benefits to todays modern workforce but they present I.T management challenges. Take the example of an application rollout. A laptop could be connected in an office, airport, hotel , home office or even across a 3G connection using a cell phone link, all of which have different conection characteristics which may not be suitable for distribution activities.

Our desktops are not immune from location based management challenges. We clearly do not want them reaching out over Wide Area Network links to communicate with our management system. As far as possible , all management activities using the network should occur locally; anything which needs touch the central site should only happen when network loading is low.
But it is not just management activities we wish to control based on device location. We also want to adjust the security posture. Many organizations take the view that devices inside the office network perimeter are reasonalbly safe but when outside they are at risk. Therefore items like firewall configuration, allowed plugable devices , encryption, wireless settings etc.. should be adjusted based on location.

The unique ability to use information about location adds a whole new dimension for management. You can create policies that reflect business requirements for any given location that a device may be in.

Device-based management

Many organizations base their configuration management practices on the devices they manage. In fact, this is the default method used by most competing configuration management products on the market today. In the absence of user-based and exception-based policy management, products that only target specific device configurations typically end up treating actual business policies and the needs of users as an afterthought because they essentially link a specific user to a specific device. By tying applications, policies and other configuration parameters to a specific managed device or set of managed devices, this approach often forces users into rigid roles instead of supporting them as dynamic participants in ever-evolving business processes. Because of these limitations, Novell ZENworks 11 places more emphasis on user-based management than device-based management.

However, to keep the solution as flexible as possible, Novell ZENworks 11 does offer device-based management capabilities that can be used in conjunction with other management paradigms to fill specialized needs. For example, call centers where multiple users share a single PC in shifts, manufacturing-floor PCs and public kiosks can all create situations where device-based management may be more appropriate than user-based management. In addition, companies that normally rely on user-based management may need the ability to quickly set up a device for ad hoc, tactical purposes. For example, quickly configuring a device to auto-run a presentation in a conference center might make more sense than creating a new “user” for that single instance.

With the Novell ZENworks 11 architecture, you have the option of using device-based management whenever it suits your specific needs. Because device-based management is very familiar to most IT professionals, and because it offers the fastest way to configure a machine before you create long-term user-based policies, device-based management is presented as the default management paradigm when you first install ZENworks 11.

User-based management

User-based systems management—which leverages user identities, group roles and business policies—is the gold standard for automation, security and IT control. User- based management has always been a Novell specialty. And even though the underlying architecture of Novell ZENworks 11 has been dramatically enhanced, the full power and complete range of Novell ZENworks 11 user-based management capabilities has been preserved.

True user-based configuration management disassociates users from the specific devices they use. This makes it possible to treat users as the company’s most valuable managed asset and relegate devices to their proper role as tools that must serve the needs of users. Allowing people—rather than machines—to be managed as first-class configured entities means that policies, applications and other configuration details can “follow” users from machine to machine. User-based management also ties IT policies directly to business policies, which increases responsiveness to changing business conditions. Finally, a user- based approach leverages identity stores and business systems across the enterprise to eliminate errors, increase security, standardize workflows, document regulatory compliance and support effective decision-making.

The user-based paradigm represents a truly strategic approach to systems management, while device-based management is almost purely tactical. With Novell ZENworks 11, you can mix and match both approaches—based on your changing business and IT requirements—by using the management by exception paradigm. For example, Novell ZENworks 11 allows you to apply a policy to a specific device and then selectively override that policy based on the identity information of the user who is currently logged on. Conversely, you could choose to override a general user- and role-based policy based on a specific machine and its context, such as when a mobile device attempts to access the network from outside the firewall.

Conclusion

Novell ZENworks can offer your business a long list of unique benefits and advantages. It is based on the proven Novell ZENworks 11 platform that combines and integrates configuration, asset, patch, and endpoint security management for Windows, Linux and Apple Mac devices. It offers a single, modular architecture that maximizes flexibility and scalability, simplifies and speeds management throughout the device lifecycle, minimizes processing demands on managed clients, reduces bandwidth consumption for management processes and uses standards-based protocols to seamlessly integrate with your choice of user directory and object database. It lets you manage systems based on users identities, roles, groups and locations, so I.T can work hand-in-glove with the company’s business priorities and policies. Finally, it gives you a secure, web-based console for unified control over all your management tasks—from virtually anywhere.

• End-User Computing

When using Operations Center with different management tools, sometimes naming conventions do not line up. One example of that is setting up a performance chart to chart specific metrics such as CPU and Memory. While one management system may have the metric stored under one name and differently in another, you can leverage a new feature made available in the Operations Center 5.0 Patch Bundle 1 (AKA: PB1) to use expression based matching rules. For some tools the prefix on the metic name is associated to a Job collecting the metric and not specific to the actual metric name, using the regex feature will allow you to wildcard the begining of the metric name to ignore the Job ID.

When setting up a chart for the first time, you must still add a starting element to get the main configuration set up. In many cases you may have the performance chart update based on the element selected (clicked on) in the Navigator portlet. When you set up the chart, you must enter a Profile (Typically "ElementProfile" for adapters that have performance data natively in it like Patrol or AppManager, or named differently if you set up profiles in Operations Center to store series metric data). Next, based on the profile and the selected element, you can click on Expression and pick the specific (one or more metrics) to chart. These specific metrics will be charted for this element or an element clicked on in the Navigation portlet. You can also use the Charting Options dialog when looking at metrics to change the date/time range as well as the metrics being charted.

The picture below shows an example of AppManager metrics that could be charted from my demo system.

If you have several metrics you would like to chart and would like to leverage the new feature of specifing the metrics to chart via regex, use the new checkbox. This will make it easier to select multiples and/or provide different options (IE: chart metrics A & B or chart C & D).

The example below shows that I entered .*Cpu.* as the regex and when I click on the "Expression" link, it shows me the metrics that would match based on the element we are using.

For the next example, I entered .*Cpu.*|.*Mem.* in order to get any metric that has Cpu or Mem in the name. When I click on the Expression link this time, it shows the metrics that would match for this regex.

With the regex feature, you will have several options for setting up charts. Hopefully simple regular expressions will work for you, but if you need to use complex expressions, have fun :)

- Tobin
Have fun and play nice

• Business Service Management Cool Solutions

Available immediately, the latest release of our team workspace solution has been officially released.

Check out the latest features and functionality that compliments our GroupWise solution with added collaboration, document management and work flow with Novell Vibe.

Version 3.2 has just been released!

Download the eval/starter pack from here.

Or you can order the product or update your version using the 'Customer Center'.

Novell Vibe Product page:

Novell Vibe 3.2 makes team collaboration even easier and more efficient with new mobile apps that make it seamless to connect from your favorite device, enhancements that give you better control, and overall performance improvements that tighten the flow of your experience. From a high level, here are the top areas of focus for this new release:

• File management
• Improvements with workflows and surveys
• Expanded capabilities with landing pages and task management
• New mobile apps for iPhone and Android devices
• Performance, usability and quality improvements

Here is a link to the product page for more details.

Novell Vibe SandBox

Not sure what Novell Vibe can do for you and your organization? Check out the Novell Vibe Sandbox, where you can setup your own account, see use case videos, try out the work flows and see where personal productivity meets team collaboration.

Novell Vibe makes it easy for users and teams to contribute, share and find the knowledge they need, while preserving that knowledge long after its original contributors have either left the organization

Also note, Novell Vibe, formerly known as Novell Teaming, has been under development for several years. Novell acquired this technology about 3 years ago and has since made very focused and regular improvements. If it has been a while since you looked at Novell Vibe, you are in for an awesome surprise. Not only has the engineering team spent significant efforts in adding new functionality, but they have also significantly improved the user interface, added integrations with GroupWise that are compelling and provided out-of-the box solutions with 'Forms and Work Flows'.

GroupWise Integrations

I want to specifically highlight the integration pieces that are available between GroupWise and Vibe. First of all, once the administrator links the two systems together, the end-user will see all of their Vibe workspaces/folders in their GroupWise folder tree. As they navigate these folders, they will be able to access Vibe content without ever leaving GroupWise. End-users can also easily drag/drop content from their GroupWise inbox to their integrated Vibe folder and have that content automatically copied to the Vibe repository/workspace. Of course, you can also send content directly to Vibe by sending an email to the Vibe workspace folder email address.

In addition, if you do a 'Find' in GroupWise, you will get hits in both GroupWise and Vibe and the query results dialog will easily present all of the results. Finally, new for GroupWise 2012 is the Vibe mail message icon indicator. All messages and notifications that are sent to your GroupWise email account from Vibe will have a special icon that will allow you to easily identify messages and content from Vibe. When you open/read those messages, they are no longer static message bodies, but actually load the content in real-time from Vibe as you open/read the messages/notifications.

So in summary:

• Integrated Vibe workspaces in the GroupWise folder tree
• Access live Vibe content without leaving your GroupWise habitat
• Easily drag/drop or email content from GroupWise to Vibe
• Search in GroupWise facilitates query results from Vibe as well
• New Vibe icon indicators with any message from Vibe.

We will also soon release the Novell DataSynchronizer Vibe Connector which further expands the integration to include team task/appointment synchronization between GroupWise and Vibe.

We are very excited about the growing and robust set of collaboration solutions that are now available from Novell. They include: Novell GroupWise, Novell Vibe, Novell Messenger and Novell DataSynchronizer.

Dean

• End-User Computing