I announced this in October; this month I started the move.

Why move?

Mainly the volume of postings and the amount of traffic at Cool Blogs compared with Cool Solutions.

Cool Blogs started as the first open, unfiltered blog from Novell almost two years ago. Since then I’ve made over 25% of the posts to the blog. That’s too much. I’ve slowed my blogging on Cool Blogs and moved a lot to this site; but still the proportion of posts that are my ZENworks posts is too high.

By posting on Cool Solutions I hope that my posts get a wider readership and I don’t take a too large proportion of the postings.

So I got inundated with email from inside and outside Novell when I posted that ‘ZENworks for Networks’ was still available for download.

For those that don’t have long memories – ZENworks for Networks was released in 2000 as a directory enabled Quality of Service and Firewall solution. Part of it was from a Novell acquisition of Ukiah in mid-1999.

So why don’t you see ZENworks for Networks anymore? Simple – it was end-of-lifed within a few months.

The market for ‘directory enabled QOS’ disappeared rapidly when pretty much every switch and router vendor added support for LDAP directories within their products. Far better to get native LDAP support (and use eDirectory) than to build a product that competes with the switch vendors.

So where can you find ZENworks for Networks? Have a hunt around the Novell Support site. At a meagre 30MB the product is tiny! The documentation is still around too.

Thanks to all those that asked – for me another gentle wander down memory lane.

Written at: Salt Lake City, UT

I have written this series of blog posts using my experience of describing the Next Generation of ZENworks to customers and partners. These are slightly longer posts than normal – I apologise in advance. I hope the content is informative and useful. I look forward to your comments and questions.

Written at: Waltham, MA

The History of ZENworks

Looking back. Product evolution.

As I have been working with customers and partners to describe the future of ZENworks I have found it useful to describe the evolution of ZENworks over the years and to use that context to understand why we are evolving the ZENworks architecture.

As many of you may remember, ZENworks traces its origins back to the days of NetWare 4.11 when the NetWare Application Launcher (NAL) and Workstation Manager were released. Soon these components were expanded, features were added and the first Zero Effort Networking for users – Z.E.N.works 1 – was released in 1998.

The ZENworks product line was expanded in 2000 with the release of ZENworks for Desktops 3 and the first release of ZENworks for Servers. ZENworks for Desktops 3 was a milestone release; it used ConsoleOne for the first time and was cross platform – supporting NetWare as well as Windows NT 4 and Windows 2000 server platforms.

ZENworks for Desktops 4 in 2002 added the Middle Tier server – allowing management across the internet and without requiring the Novell Client32 on managed devices.

ZENworks for Servers continued to evolve adding close integration with ZENworks for Desktops and Tiered Electronic Distribution allowing vast scale for enterprise software distribution.

These architectures are still at the heart of ZENworks today. They have made ZENworks exceptionally successful.

Why so successful?

There are three main threads to the success of ZENworks:

Cross platform support

As I noted, cross platform support started with ZENworks for Desktops 3. Today ZENworks runs on NetWare, Windows, Open Enterprise Server and SLES. It supports a variety of databases. It manages Windows, Linux and Handheld devices.

Cost effective management

Time after time independent study shows that ZENworks costs less. Less to deploy, less to manage. Some of our most vocal reference customers stand up and state they manage tens of thousands of users with a team of a few people. ZENworks runs on your existing infrastructure, without requiring dedicated Windows servers or database servers.
The most telling aspect of the cost effectiveness of ZENworks is that once configured users and workstations will inherit their desired state by virtue of their business role, location or characteristics. ZENworks administrators regularly share that they ‘just create users, ZENworks does the rest’.

Best in class scalability and reliability

ZENworks uses Novell eDirectory as its backbone and store for all of its relationships, actions and objects. ZENworks also uses Tiered Electronic Distribution – part of ZENworks Server Management – to replicate applications and images across a heterogeneous enterprise. ZENworks inherently includes methods for failover, redundancy, load balancing as well as support for roaming and mobile users.
All of these features mean that ZENworks will scale. Typically ZENworks will run in any environment from 250 users to way over 125,000 users. Without breaking a sweat.
Novell shares its own best practices for design and architecture with customers and partners. The ZENMaster framework has been used around the globe as a blueprint for successful deployments. Using these recommendations anyone can deploy ZENworks with confidence that they will succeed.

Why Next Generation?

ZENworks has been wildly successful. There are many, many tens of millions of workstations under management, ZENworks is now the second largest revenue generating product inside Novell, customers are having great success. Why change?

The main reason for change is to meet the expectations of all of our customers in the coming years. Web services, open standards, server consolidation, desktop migration, security pressures, virtualisation, adoption of ITIL, COBIT and other best practices are all on the ‘To-Do List’ for IT organisations. The Next Generation ZENworks is intended to be a platform for the future that delivers on these areas, while continuing to deliver the value and agility that ZENworks has shown for the past eight years.

My next post will dive into the Next Generation architecture and cover why this is a good thing for existing Novell customers and also a good thing for new customers.

Stay tuned.

Written at: Waltham, MA

Here is a handy link – all Novell EULAs in one place:

http://www.novell.com/licensing/eula/

Written at: Boston, MA

I planned the structure of this series while visiting customers in Europe; during that tour I was describing our roadmap, strategy and vision – all under Non-Disclosure. My challenge is to share much of that in a public blog, without requiring every one of you to sign a ‘virtual non-disclosure’, and yet keeping the content interesting and useful.

As we move through the remaining months of 2006 and into early 2007 we will be communicating a lot more about our plans for the Next Generation of ZENworks; BrainShare 2007 will naturally be a focal point for announcements.

So here is my rough plan for the next few posts:

• ZENworks History 101
  • Looking back over the last ten years
  • why has ZENworks been so successful with customers?
  • how did the product evolve?
  • why is there a need for ‘Next Generation’?
• ZENworks Next Generation Architecture
  • a dive into the architectural components of the Next Generation of ZENworks
  • why is this a good thing for existing customers?
  • why is this a good thing for new customers?
• Installation and Deployment
  • Zero to Hero – Deploying your first ZENworks server in ten minutes!
  • Adding managed workstations and servers
  • Expanding your ZENworks infrastructure
• A walk through the ZENworks Control Center
  • Web based management for ZENworks
  • Native integration with your corporate directory
  • Linux and Windows management from a single point
• How to get there from here
  • Some early notes on migrating to ZENworks Next Generation

I’m sure that questions will drive more posts – but for now that seems to cover a lot!

Written at: M�nchen, Germany

The email invitation looked a little like this:

From: openaudio openaudio
To: openaudio openaudio;  Martin Buckley;  Michael Douglas Pearson;  Ted Haeger
Date: 14/Jun/06
Time: 14:00 - 15:00
Subject: ZENworks 7 SP1
Place: Podcast Studio, 8th floor behind the mens room

Prep and Interview

The Novell Open Audio Crew
www.novell.com/openaudio

Behind the mens room? Nice.

I rolled up to Ted Haegers office – you can see him hard at work here:

[Ted used to be a Park Service Ranger - that's why he's in marketing.. I think]

The studio itself is pretty good – nice hardware; sound absorbing foam on some of the walls; no noise from the mens room..

And comfy chairs…

This is Ted’s script. More like a cheat sheet – it’s got the hard questions from listeners and readers on it.

The interview itself was good fun – we managed to give Michael our sound engineer some hard times with a bag of Doritos.

You can listen to the recording on Novell Open Audio – it should be posted this week.