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Novell News Summary - Part III: SCO Scandals Revisited, GWAVACon Comes to the UK, and Tech Data Expands Partnership with Novell

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Summary: Leftover of news relating to Novell

IT has been quiet, very quiet. Scraping the bottom of the news barrel, we have:

SCO



Groklaw looks back at one of the last stages in the SCO story. Darl McBride's analogy with trees and branches is being torn to pieces.



My reason is this: at the July 27th hearing, when describing SCO's prospects for rehabilitation, SCO's lawyer clearly indicated that SCO wishes to resume suing new people over SCOsource, should it prevail in its appeal, followed by prevailing in a jury trial, over who owns the UNIX copyrights.


Then, the scandals come back.

The Pelican Briefs - You're the fraudster! No, *you* are!



The first answer has been filed in the litigation Pelican Equity recently initiated against Robert Brazell, Stephen Norris, Talos Partners, Rama Ramachandran, Darl McBride, and Bryan Cave. The other answers were due on the 19th or in one case on the 17th, but this is the first one to show up on PACER. Pelican Equity is essentially Mark Robbins, from the perspective of us SCO watchers. At the July 27th hearing, his name came up. Remember the guy Darl McBride testified he'd loaned $200,000 to and never got paid back in full? Same guy.


For some background, have a look at:



SCO's agonising story is becoming wilder and wilder as the days go by. Here is another unimportant bill. As Jones puts it, "They never give up, these SCOfolk. Absolutely never."

Netware



Looking at Novell's older products, there is almost nothing within sight. Here is one quick mention.

Not every memory is a fond one; I never warmed to Novell Netware and I never found Visual C++ to be particularly visual. I didn't take to Lisp and I wish death upon Microsoft Access.


A person who dabbles in Vista 7 mentions his dependency on Novell, which stands in the way of a migration. Here is part one.

I delayed putting Vista on my school computer because it did not support Novell which is used at Dawson College where I teach. Today I upgraded my school computer and I am fully integrated into the Novell structure.


A bit of a workaround was needed to make an upgrade to Vista 7. From part two:

The upgrade of my school computer also went quite smoothly. That machine is an older Pentium D 3.4 GHz machine and was running Vista 32 bit. The upgrade to Windows 7 32 bit took a little over 3 hours whereas on my faster home computer it took an hour and a half. The only software that exhibited a problem was my Novell Client. I have come to the conclusion that software that uses the network interface for its work must be re-installed after an upgrade. I re-installed the Novell Client 2 for Vista/Windows 2008 and my connectivity to the college Novell based network was restored.


What are the benefits of moving to Vista 7? Nobody knows. Well, it's newer and "it's not as bad as Vista". Does it necessarily make it better than the competition?

Virtualisation



There are two articles we were able to find on this, but none is specifically about Novell. Here is a quick mention of Novell.

The Apptio tools current support VMware's ESX Server 4.0 hypervisor in the current vSphere 4.0 stack, and Day says the company is working on weaving in support for Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor as well the several commercialized versions of the Xen hypervisor that are out there from Citrix Systems, Oracle, Novell, and a handful of others. The software hooks into VMware's vCenter chargeback features, too, and in doing so can enable IT managers to track the real-time costs of a VM as it moves from platform to platform using VMotion.


PlateSpin is mentioned here.

Novell -Tech Data's AIS Division is expanding its virtualization solutions practice with the addition of Novell's PlateSpin products. With PlateSpin, resellers can offer customers powerful tools to better manage virtual environments.


Mail



Attempts are still being made to reverse a decision to dump GroupWise in Los Angeles. Now the police weighs in:

The move is set to save the city council about $8.31 million over five years, after abandoning the need for license fees from Microsoft and Novell.


GWAVA turns out to be coming to Britain. GWAVACon usually takes place in the United States, but not this time.

GWAVA is pleased to announce that GWAVACon, the independent Novell Technology conference, will be coming to the UK. Because many companies are experiencing tighter travel budgets, GWAVA is providing a special free one-day GWAVACon on Tour for its customers and partners in the United Kingdom focused on a combination of technical training and executive business issues.


Privately, Jeff Jaffe promotes Teaming using the whole 'cloud' buzz.

People



From BrainShare 2000 comes this new video of "Eric Schmidt (Current Google CEO), Doug Knight, and Bobby Discuss[ing] TUCOWS DigitalMe announcement in Salt Lake City. A good exchange with humor about a cool deal. "



Other former Novellers in motion: "Webroot Names Dick Williams President and CEO"

Williams' executive leadership experience began at IBM, where he spent 22 years in a variety of sales, marketing, product and business management roles, including vice president for the company's Data Systems and General Products divisions. He then served as president and CEO of Digital Research, which he turned around and later sold to Novell. At Novell Williams served as executive vice president of sales and support, and general manager of Novell's Digital Research Systems Group.


Here is Novell quoted in an unrelated 'article'.

Jim Parker (News - Alert), director of worldwide commissions at Novell, said that SPM is “highly beneficial, yet complex to understand,” noting that it’s difficult to improve sales performance without the correct knowledge and information.


The above is just a cheap derivative of the press release which says:

"SPM is highly beneficial, yet complex to understand," said Jim Parker, director of worldwide commissions, at Novell.


Partners



Tech Data was mentioned a month ago by The Var Guy because of its potential relationship with Novell. This seems to be confirmed now.

It has announced new distribution agreements with Absolute Software Corp., Elgato Systems, Infonic and Quattro BPO Solutions, as well as expanded partnerships with Novell and Samsung.


Novell's relationships with two other companies were also mentioned here and here.

Marketing



A little new campaign seems to have just been launched to encourage people to take a Novell survey.

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