08.02.08
Do-No-Evil Saturday – Part I: Quiet Week Ahead of LinuxWorld’s Novell Press Releases
Novell probably has a pile of announcements lined up for next week (starting Money in in San Francisco). The past week has been quiet, but a few items are worth going through very quickly.
SCO
Progress was minor, but Groklaw kept an eye on the little there was to cover.
SCO and Novell have jointly filed an intriguing document, Joint Motion for Extension Regarding Deadlines for Proposed Final Judgment and Pre-Judgment Interest Submission [PDF], and we find out what’s been going on since the trial ended early in May.
Legacy
Novell’s business is at stake in Australia. Queensland is looking at Microsoft products that potentially overshadow Novell.
The departments and agencies whose users will be migrated onto the centralised email platform are already using Exchange, but some installations of IBM’s Lotus Notes/Domino and Novell’s Groupwise platforms remain throughout the state government.
The future of those installations, which constitute almost a further 80,000 users, would require additional analysis, CITEC said in tender documents, and those users were not immediately included in the scope of the centralisation project. However, eventually the agency said the email project should be able to handle up to 200,000 accounts.
A similar situation exists with the identity management side of the project, with much of the government already using Microsoft’s Active Directory solution, but other parts using Novell eDirectory or LDAP. It is unclear whether the state has chosen a standard directory platform yet, although the tender documents mention Active Directory in a number of places.
In many people’s eyes, Novell is somewhat of a legacy, a history almost. Journalists continually suggest so. This new article is no exception.
As governments and businesses continue to store data in a paperless system, the question still remains of where to store it.
[...]
“It’s the IT department’s job to be the custodian of the data, and best practices say you do a nightly backup of that data,” Harwell said. “Years ago, things operated mainly in Novell operating system, but then different operating systems cropped up and we had to install new applications, which took time away from our other proprietary tasks related to city government.”
Here is some more of that iPhone hype which was mentioned a week ago. It treats the iPhone as though it’s the cutting edge of mobile Web browsers.
And Novell Inc.’s ZENworks software can already be rudimentarily managed via the iPhone’s browser, according to a company spokeswoman.
Identity Management and Security
There is very little to tell, but the scarcity is contrasted by the following press release which talks about Sentinel.
The 30-minute presentation, conducted in cooperation with Novell, focused on the basics of PCI-DSS compliance…
[...]
Verry went on to explain that a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution, such as Novell Sentinel, can considerably reduce the encumbrance to the IT staff to monitor logs and prove compliance with PCI. “In the simplest terms, SIEM solutions automate the compliance process relating to logs. They normalize and store event data, correlate it, help produce reports, issue alerts, and assist in forensic analysis,” Verry said.
He also elaborated on Novell’s unique ability to integrate its Identity Management (IDM) solution with Sentinel to further simplify compliance and provide the ability to detect and react to anomalous data access in real-time.
On the security front, SUSE has had some new advisories, such as this one.
People
PlateSpin recently became a part of Novell. The following article is focused on one of the main people involved.
As creative director for PlateSpin Ltd., a Novell Company based in Toronto, he oversees a staff of nine and will be away during the company’s premier trade show of the year. “If you’re a key person and you’ve done your homework and say well in advance, ‘I will be away’, people tend to respect that,” Mr. Kalogiros says. “If you leave people high and dry, that’s when I believe you come back to a mess.”
Bastian, a senior who used to be at Novell, appears in the following article.
Until the mid-1990s, Bastian was chairman of WordPerfect, a software company he founded with Alan Ashton, his faculty adviser, after he graduated from BYU. Since merging the company with Novell in 1994, he’s spent much of his time working with arts groups in Utah and for gay rights.
Miscellaneous Connections
A lot less importantly, there’s this connection between Novell and Bomgar.
Bomgar(TM) Corporation, the leading provider of appliance-based remote support software, today announced it closed another successful quarter, capping a record first half 2008. In addition to continuing year-over-year growth of more than 90 percent, Bomgar participated in a number of awareness programs highlighting strategic customers such as Novell, The Salvation Army, and MIT.
The nearby ANS Group turns out to have some connections with Novell too.
ANS Group, the Manchester Science Park-based software firm, saw its pre-tax profits more than double in the year ended March after the group added new customers.
[...]
Following the end of the financial year, ANS was named as a gold partner, making it the only reseller to have attained top accreditations with Cisco, Microsoft, Novell and VMware.
There are other isolated connections such as this one:
Earlier, she toiled for Sydney agency Hill and Knowlton, with clients including McAfee, Novell and Canon BISG. She has also held roles with Text 100, Porter Novelli and 2iC Integrated Communications. Hinchliffe has a degree in public relations and organisational communication from Charles Sturt University, at Bathurst.
Most of the interesting developments come in the next post, which is about SUSE. █
