07.12.08

^{Gemini version available ♊︎}

Do-No-Evil Saturday – Part II: Quiet Week in Utah Valley

Posted in GNU/Linux, IBM, Identity Management, Microsoft, Novell, Security, SLES/SLED at 6:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

It has been a quiet week because some people embark on their vacations and companies make very few announcements. Here are the few things we picked up. They fit a single post for a change.

SUSE (SLES/SLED)

Novell and Sun Microsystems are both cited as companies that debunk the myth about lack of support for Free software. This appeared in europa.eu, whose reputation is fairly decent.

Sun Microsystems and Novell, two IT services firms promoting Open Source, are telling government CIOs there is plenty of support for this kind of software, the IT news site Zdnet reports.

[...]

Support for the Open Source operating system GNU/Linux rivals that of proprietary systems, Zdnet last April quoted Paul Kangro, applied technology strategist for Novell. He suggests fears over support are spread by companies that feel threatened by this kind of software.

This isn’t the right day to express our concerns about this, but the fact that several companies choose Xandros and SLED for their laptops is a total dilution of Free software values. And that’s just what Microsoft would want. Maybe IBM, too.

In any case, here is an article about the HP Mini-Note, which can come with SLED 10.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) SP1 was the installed operating system as delivered on our test unit. Novell has recently released SP2 for SLED, and we went through the update process to give it a spin as well. HP markets this unit to the educational market which would seem to point toward college students. The unit is great for surfing the web, checking e-mail or instant messaging although the battery life with the standard 3-cell battery will be a drawback.

Virtualisation

The big news this week was about VMWare, but here’s a belated article about Novell’s PlateSpin, which has a new product. The Virtualiation Blog at ZDNet caught up.

PlateSpin, a recent acquisition of Novell recently announced PowerConvert 7.0, The company was quick to point out that this is the first product launch since the acquistion. Why would they go to such great lengths to mention that? They want to convince the market that PlatSpin will continue to be an innovative supplier and that becoming part of Novell’s portfolio didn’t change that.

A Microsoft guy (MVP) compares VMWare to Novell’s Netware, wishing them both death in a sense. Premature and wishful thinking? Probably.

identity Management

Not much to see here this week. except for this brief mention of Novell.

An ambitious open source project hopes to provide a unified directory and authentication server, but needs more interoperability work to become a viable competitor for Novell Identity Manager or Microsoft Active Directory.

Security

Ouch.

Moonwalk, a Novell partner, had this press release.

Moonwalk Inc., the Australian developer of all-inclusive data management and protection software, continued on its roadmap of success during the first half of 2008, highlighted by the expansion of its customer base and reseller network in the U.S., more industry awards and the availability of Moonwalk 6.0 across Novell’s NetWare and Linux platforms.

People

A former (apparently now contracted) Novell employee decided that she prefers working from home. There’s an article about the business that was built around it.

Kristi Hilbert owns Visioncorp., a company that provides technical writing and documentation to high-tech firms across the state. She began her career at Novell and expected to give it up to become a stay-at-home mom, but then she found a way to stay home and keep her career.

[...]

Kristi began her career as a technical writer at Novell. She said she intended to be a full-time mom after working for the company, but Novell still needed her writing skills. So she started doing contract work from home and, through word of mouth, found herself more clients than she could handle. “So then I started contracting and looking for other writers, and it’s just gradually grown over the years,” Kristi said.

Occasionally you find people who used to work at Novell but have moved on since. Here is another one of them.

Prior to Sanera, Harr ran worldwide marketing at CacheFlow and was the GM of Novell’s Internet and Security Services Group.

Here is a somewhat depressing new article about Utah Valley.

Slowing commercial and residential real estate markets, sluggish tourism levels and transportation troubles are some of the issues facing Utah Valley, as well as much of the state.

[...]

The experts agreed that Utah Valley is experiencing many of the same slowdowns that the rest of the state is experiencing. Unique to the area, however, is its entrepreneurial spirit. Utah Valley has a history of innovation; Novell and WordPerfect are just two of the many notable companies that got their start in the area.

Miscellany

We take note of this connection between Xenocode and Novell.

…applications deployed with Xenocode have essentially the same performance characteristics as native executables. “Xenocoded” applications require no setup, configuration, clients, or device drivers, are isolated from external DLL and dependency conflicts, and run properly on Windows Vista and locked-down desktops. Xenocode-virtualized applications can be easily deployed on USB devices, corporate intranets, the Internet, or existing desktop management infrastructure software such as Microsoft SMS, LANDesk Management Suite, BMC Configuration Management and Novell ZENworks.

Here is another event that Novell will attend.

The ‘CIO Finance Summit’ is nearing and gaining clout as the leading business gathering for top leaders in the financial services IT industry. The delegates, participants, sponsors and attendees are ranging from companies such as Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Scotiabank, EMA, Wachovia, IDC, JP Morgan, IBM and Novell and more. The summit will launch September 22nd-25th, 2008, at the Four Seasons Resort, Scottsdale at Troon North and is the financial services IT business event not to be missed.

That’s all for this week. Have a nice weekend. █

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