As a last quick post, consider this aggregation of news from the past week. It excludes SUSE, which was covered just moments ago.

Mail and Collaboration

Quite a few press releases have mentioned GroupWise recently. Here is another one.

Future versions will leverage Lotus Notes, Novell GroupWise and other leading groupware platforms.

Novell is typically listed and considered third after Exchange and Lotus. Here is a new example.

Smarsh(R), a leading managed service provider of innovative, secure and reliable email archiving and compliance solutions, has been named to the Inc. 500 for 2008, Inc. magazine's 27th annual list of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States.

[...]

Smarsh email archiving solutions can integrate with any messaging platform (Microsoft Exchange, Lotus, Novell, for example)...

Linux.com has reviewed CECore, which was recently renamed Kablink

Kablink (formerly ICECore) recognizes that centralization and accessibility are major components to successful project collaboration, and its latest offering is worth a project leader's second look.

[...]

Kablink, its installer, and its source code are available as free downloads. Organizations can optionally purchase support from Novell Teaming.

Virtualisation

ZENWorks is mentioned in this article about virtualisation.

Novell's ZENworks, for example, includes asset-, configuration- and patch-management components. Life-cycle points during production include licensing; access controls; patch-, configuration- and change-management; security (settings, default services and ports, antimalware, firewalls and so forth); service-level thresholds for physical machines, virtual machines and applications; and allocation.

Dan K. is typically coughing out a lot of names of virtualisation vendors. This new post is no exception. He binds together Novell and PlateSpin, which Novell acquired.

As it enters the market for orchestrating and automating virtualized environments, it faces a number of innovative competitors including suppliers such as Cassatt, Novell/PlateSpin, Racemi, Scalent Systems, Surgient, VMlogix and others. Platform hopes that its long years of success in the high performance/grid computing world will give it a leg up on the competition.

The exclusion tricks, courtesy of Microsoft and Novell, were mentioned very recently and this article from The Register suggests that Microsoft takes it further by lowering entry barriers. It's means of preventing companies like Red Hat from having access to some datacentres.

Today the firm announced it will lift those cumbersome limitations on 1 September. It also plans to cough up support for businesses that run its software inside rival virtualisation platforms such as VMware, Citrix and Novell, as well as of course its own hypervisor, Hyper-V.

People

A former Novell vice president received some attention from the press early in the week.

Wayne has over 20 years of leadership experience in business development, sales and marketing, most recently driving the progression of OATSystems (a recognised RFID framework leader). Prior to joining OATSystems, he served as vice-president of Global Alliances for Novell, where he played a crucial role in implementing the partner strategies around the company’s resurgence as a major player in the open source marketplace. Before joining Novell, Wayne was vice-president of global business development for web services-oriented application development leader SilverStream, and was instrumental in its 2002 acquisition by Novell. At SilverStream, he led the effort to build a European channel operation.

Partners

Novell turns out to be a technology partner with Dolphin Digital Media.

At the heart of Dolphin Digital Media's high-tech security platform are the solutions of its technology partners: Novell Corporation, Rackspace, Fujitsu, and 123ID, all integrated through an exclusive worldwide license with Weblock International. Working with its technology partners, Dolphin Digital Media is able to offer a proprietary platform of identity management and database solutions.

ComSuper, which is missing a CIO, does some business with Novell too.

In March 2007, ComSuper went to tender for new back-office servers, with current contractors including Novell and Sun Microsystems.

Marketing

Some of these bizarre SUSE lizard videos have shown up in YouTube. It's all rather mysterious.

Video 1



Video 2

Other

New designation: Novell Certified Administrator Enterprise Services

Novell has announced the release of a Novell Certified Administrator Enterprise Services (NCA ES) designation. This certification adds administration skills such as file and print, user management, and network infrastructure to the existing NCA designation.

That's all for this week. ⬆