01.10.09

Do-No-Evil Saturday – Part III: Idle Week with Some GWAVACon and Legacy

Posted in Mail, Novell, SCO, Videos at 5:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

It has been a dry week for Novell’s business. The major news was about a channel chief [1, 2, 3], but there were other more minor things.

Storage

Novell gets some credit from the apparently pro-SCO pseudonym “Paul Murphy”, who remembers Novell’s history in the storage market.

Back in 1977 Dennis Fairclough had a good idea: build something that would allow multiple small computers to share a single disk drive and in 1979, after his investors forced him to hire Ray Noorda to run the business, this became the first Novell product to reach industry standard status.

Today’s replacement for that solution to the costs of sharing and managing storage is called a SAN -and its time is past because we’re all going back to Novell’s original implementation of the shared storage server idea.

Mail

BrainShare was called off [1, 2, 3], but Richard Bliss carries on with GWAVACon, which he advertises using another press release.

100% Discount given for Novell employees to attend GWAVACon, the alternative to BrainShare ’09

Here is the promotional video for the event:

This was also mentioned in an IDG blog.

Are you a Novell GroupWise, ZENworks, or Teaming customer? Are you disappointed that Novell canceled the BrainShare event?

Do you know about GWAVACon? Since 2005, this conference has been focused on the Novell collaboration community. GWAVACon has been held in Dallas, Sydney, San Diego, Munich, and Berlin. This year the U.S. event will be held in Las Vegas: January 25-27.

There are some assorted bits and articles that mention GroupWise here and there. To quote the relevant bits:

On the surface, both phones are touch screens with full internet access, GPS, digital cameras, and other assorted goodies. When it comes to e-mail the Storm supports Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino, and Novell GroupWise.

The Feature Pack allows BlackBerry users to print HTML e-mails or web browser pages to Bluetooth or network printers – or send them via fax. Furthermore, administrators can easily manage network printers, and users can search for these from a BlackBerry smartphone. The new feature pack supports Microsoft Office 2007 formats as well as the mailing system from GroupWise, a Groupware software from Novell.

Another company is paying Microsoft for to ‘privilege’ to access mail or general exchange protocols. It is one among several suckers like Novell that permit this to happen.

Over the past two years, Microsoft has entered into similar agreements with Alpine Electronics Inc., Fuji Xerox Co. Ltd., Kenwood Corp., Kyocera Mita Corp., LG Electronics, NEC Corp., Nikon Corp., Nortel Networks, Novell Inc., Olympus Corp., Onkyo USA Corp., Samsung and Seiko Epson Corp.

Here is some more stuff about E-mail and calendaring. It alludes to Novell just very briefly.

As a platform-agnostic technology provider, Binary Tree empowers its clients to effectively execute their strategic platform transition choices with confidence and at low cost, regardless of the source and target platform choices. CMT for Google Apps joins a growing CMT(TM) solution suite that enables clients to leverage Binary Tree technologies for transitions that involve messaging and collaboration platforms from Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Novell to name a few. Additional Google-focused solutions, which will enable seamless email and calendar runtime coexistence between Lotus Notes and Google Apps during a transition to the Google environment, will be announced in the future.

Identity Management and Virtualisation

A new report on the subject of identity and access management covers Novell’s role, among others’.

*Vendors covered include: BMC, CA, Evidian (Bull), IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, RSA Security (EMC) and Sun Microsystems.

Despite the fact that the Gartner Group puts its analysis (influence) up for sale, this one site, whose owner is California based, quotes a Gartner analyst very extensively. It’s about virtualisation.

Tom Bittman, distinguished analyst at Gartner, said he expects Sun to continue playing the “dark-horse role” in the evolving virtualization market. That market is still dominated by VMware, Bittman observes, with serious competition from the likes of Microsoft, Red Hat, and Novell gaining momentum.

Zenworks

It turns out that some schools out there still choose Novell.

Marion Community Schools recently has implemented the use of Novell Zenworks, a network utility that allows technicians to install and update software on many computers at the same time. This helps MCS keep costs down and allows software applications to be installed in less time and with greater consistency throughout the school district, which includes more than 2,000 computers.

People

Michelle Chandler, a Project Manager at this company that produced a rather bland press release, has a history involving Novell certifications:

Chandler holds a Masters of Business Administration, Advanced Project Management Certification from Stanford University and several technical certifications from Novell and Microsoft.

Nothing major to see here, but it was a quiet week, so there it goes.