Novell Products

Novell made some further progress on Sentinel 6.

Novell has announced further enhancements to its security information and event management (SEIM) solution, Sentinel 6. The new service pack helps Sentinel 6 gather and correlate security and non-security information from across an organization’s networked infrastructure.

The company has also released a new service pack for Novell Access Manager 3.

According to the company, the Novell Access Manager 3 service pack features the following enhancements: enterprise-mode SSL VPN, which provides secure access to more applications, including File and Print services from Microsoft and Novell; an improved administration interface, which facilitates navigation when managing multiple devices; authentication levels...

Finally, Novell has unveiled a new product: Novell Teaming + Conferencing.

Customers

Novell has a happy customer that uses OES 2, which was recently moved entirely to Linux.

I had a great call with First American Title Holding Co. about Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 the other day. [...]

Kurt Johnston, a lead engineer on the First American migration, wasn’t optimistic. “I did not have high expectations for Xen,” Johnston told me in a call last week. “With Xen being as young as it is, I was expecting it to be very difficult to install and configure a new domU onto dom0.” Johnston and his boss, IT director Dan McDougall, were also wary of performance issues they had read about in trade magazines and had heard from other users throughout the year.

But they were soon pleasantly surprised, and so was I.

[...]

I find all of this interesting because it will mean more choices. More choices means competition, and competition means happier customers. Happier customers are more apt to speak to the press and tell their stories. Whether the technology ultimately makes the customers happy, well, that’s what we’re here to find out.

Here is another Novell costumer whose experience made a press release.

The nation's leading builder of luxury homes, Toll Brothers, has chosen a portfolio of Novell€® solutions to protect confidential client data, standardize its desktops and reduce IT administration costs. A Fortune 500 company, Toll Brothers is using several Novell enterprise management solutions to strengthen security with centralized control of user access to client information and automated desktop management to minimize time spent updating and troubleshooting application software.

India

As you possibly know, Tamil Nadu had SUSE deployed in large quantities. There are more reports about Linux in Tamil Nadu and they also involve Ubuntu Linux, not just SUSE.

He is in the city on an invitation from the Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (ELCOT) to install the Orca open source (Linux) and free software for use by the visually handicapped persons and to educate ELCOT officials. Incidentally, the State’s Rehabilitation Department had given Rs. 5 lakh to the ELCOT for purchase of a computer.

“I have been using proprietary software since 1988 and have moved to non-proprietary software since 2000, as it gave the much needed freedom. The proprietary software is costlier than the costliest laptops. The users are under the mercy of software firms, since they are not allowed to carry out customisation as per their needs. Hence, I started popularising Ubuntu, a community developed operating system on open source,” he said at the inaugural session on Monday.

Here is another article (among a series, it would seem) about Novell's Linux business in India.

Novell's Systems & Resource Management (SRM) Business Unit focuses upon providing solutions to manage, simplify and control mixed-source environments. Joseph Wagner, General Manager, SRM, Novell talks to Abhinav Singh about the challenges of mixed-resource environments and how the SRM division is helping solve them.