Novell has announced the release of Novell Filr, a file sharing solution that provides seamless, anywhere, any-device access to corporate files, while giving IT complete control of all shared files. Novell Filr is the result of Novell’s history as the pioneer of networked file and print services and, unlike cloud-based file sharing solutions like Dropbox, Skydrive or Google Drive, it is built specifically for the enterprise.

Novell Filr leverages an organisation’s existing on-premise infrastructure, eliminating the need to manage third-party services, rebuild access controls, or regulate the use of unapproved file sharing applications. By integrating with existing file systems, Novell Filr essentially mobilises the files users have already created, right where they’re already stored—without the security or compliance risks that come with storing files in a cloud controlled by a third party.

According to a recent Gartner report, file synchronisation and sharing are critical capabilities for organisations with a highly mobile workforce and the need to accommodate today’s BYOD trends. “We expect IT organisations will face increasing demand for these capabilities, with deeper focus on security and compliance by regulated or security-conscious enterprises,” said Gartner Analysts Monica Basso and Jeffrey Mann.

The wild proliferation of mobile devices has created a pressing need not only for mobile device management, but for mobile content management. The ability to let mobile workers access, share and collaborate on files is key to any mobility initiative and a critical component of contemporary business success.  Novell Filr enables all of these capabilities, while keeping files on the corporate server with their access rights, quotas, backup systems, firewalls, disaster recovery protocols and existing policies intact.

“With our 30-year legacy in file and networking services and our commitment to providing security-focused solutions that drive workplace productivity, we are changing the game with Novell Filr – a true enterprise-quality solution for mobile file access and sharing,” said Bob Flynn, Novell President and General Manager. “Unlike any other file sharing solution on the market today, Novell Filr provides the access and collaboration capabilities to keep employees happy and productive, while meeting IT’s need for enhanced security, compliance and the ability to leverage established policies and protocols.”

Novell Filr enables organisations to maintain productivity anytime, anywhere, while taking advantage of existing security policies and procedures for secure file sharing. Some of Novell Filr’s features include:

• On Premise Solution: Avoid abandoning the infrastructure you’ve already built and help keep files secure in accordance with established data security policies and procedures.

• Immediate Access to Files: Novell Filr leverages existing policies and procedures to auto-populate employees’ folders, thus providing immediate access to files across a network.

• Cross-Platform Integration: Enables businesses to leverage existing investments, including NetIQ eDirectory and Microsoft Active Directory.

• Secure File Sharing Internally and Externally: While files can be shared inside and outside the organisation, they remain on existing enterprise file servers, eliminating the need to move or duplicate files.

• Global Search: Search capabilities are granted across organisations based on users’ access rights.

• Offline Access: Users can access files from anywhere, at any time, on any device – whether connected or not – and changes will be synchronised when back online.

• Collaboration: Provides the ability for numerous employees to add commentary and work on a single document simultaneously while keeping the document secure.

Novell Filr is the newest addition to Novell’s rapidly growing mobility portfolio and a response to enterprise demand for secure mobile file access and sharing.

Original article here:

http://biztech2.in.com/news/enterprise-solutions/novell-filr-releases-secure-mobile-file-sharing-for-the-enterprise/157812/0

ZDNet’s J.A.Watson takes a look at the latest release of OpenSuSE…

The leading edge of the deluge of new Linux releases has reached us, in the form of openSuSE 12.3.

The news is good – in fact, it’s very good.

I said when openSuSE 12.2 was released that I really liked it, and I feel even more strongly so now with 12.3. So strongly, in fact, that I already have 12.3 installed as the default boot on all of my computers.

That covers a very wide range of hardware, with CPUs from Intel (Core2Duo, various Atom versions and Core i3/i5) and AMD (C50/C60/C70 and E350/E450); with memory from as little as 1GB to as much as 6GB, graphic controllers from Intel (965) and AMD (various Radeon models); Wi-Fi adapters from Broadcom, Atheros, Intel and Ralink; wired network adapters from Marvell, Broadcom, Realtek and Intel; Bluetooth adapters; audio controllers; and whatever else this variety of notebooks and netbooks have in them.

I haven’t had a single device that didn’t work, and I didn’t have to do any special adjustment, configuration, driver download, compiling or anything else.

A release recap

The release announcement gives a quick look at the highlights, and is well worth the couple of minutes it takes to read it.  The release notes give much more in-depth information about this release, including known bugs, quirks, limitations and workarounds for a few things.

Even if you’re familiar with installing Linux in general or openSuSE in particular, it’s worthwhile at least scanning through these notes. On the downloads page you can get either KDE or Gnome 3 Live ISO images, and a complete DVD Installer image.  Oh, and the Rescue image on that page is actually an Xfce Live image as well.

If you prefer the cinnamon or MATE desktops, those can be added to the Gnome 3 version after installation, via the GUI add/remove software utility or directly from the CLI using zypper.

The Live images are smaller and thus faster to download than the DVD image (Duh), and faster and easier to copy to a USB stick or burn to a disk, so if you don’t specifically need something from the DVD I recommend using the live media.

If you already have a running Linux system, you can dd the ISO image to a USB stick and be ready to install in just a couple of minutes.

Also, the DVD ISO is not a live image, it is only an installer, so you can’t boot it to try out the operating system, and you can’t jump out of the installation procedure and run some other program during installation.

The DVD image can also be used to upgrade and existing openSuSE installation, which the Live images can not do.

Installation is exceptionally easy – those who are unhappy with Fedora’s latest anaconda installer might be happy with the openSuSE installer, as it is clear and easy to use, and doesn’t try to do any of the fancy footwork that anaconda does (personally I like the new anaconda, but that’s not important right now).

I was very surprised, pleased and impressed to find that the openSuSE installer handles UEFI, including Secure Boot, with no trouble at all, including detecting and mounting the EFI boot partition.

There is one catch, though, which is mentioned in the release notes — even when it detects UEFI boot and gets the disk configuration right, when you get to the final summary screen it will have the wrong bootloader selected – it tries to install normal (non-EFI) Grub2.

You have to select the boot configuration item from the summary list and change that selection to grub2-efi.  This is also where you can specify that you want Secure Boot support.

Of course, if you are not installing on a UEFI BIOS system, you don’t need to worry about any of this, the installation will be the same as it always has been.

In either case, installation on all of my systems has taken less than 15 minutes. The first boot after the installation has completed will perform an ‘automatic configuration’, for which the Network Manager is disabled. If you’re installing on a system with a wired network connection, you might not even notice the difference — but if you have wireless connection, you are likely to see that the Network Manager icon is missing from the panel, and even if you manage to find and click it there will be no wireless networks listed and it will inform you that Network Manager is not running.

No worries, don’t panic, just reboot one more time and all will be well.

So, once you have it installed, what makes it so great that I was raving about it at the beginning of this post?

What makes 12.3 a winner?

First, it works without any extra effort or special installation on all of the systems I have tried so far – every network adapter, every graphic controller, and every other device I’ve tried.

This is in large part because it is running Linux kernel 3.7, and there has been a lot of activity over the past couple of kernel releases in keeping up with new device drivers.

It also has the latest release of KDE (4.10); LibreOffice 3.6 including Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation and Database; Mozilla Firefox 19.0.2 and Konqueror 4.10 for web browsing; Amarok 2.7, GIMP 2.8.2  and digiKam 3.0.

I’m particularly pleased with that last one, because I really like digiKam and I use it a lot, so I like to keep up with the latest versions.

All of the kipi utilities are included for photo processing – one of my favorites in this group is hugin for stitching multiple images into a panorama.  Of course, there is a lot more included, even in the Live versions, but if one of your favorites isn’t there, you can always add it after installation.

I did this with kMyMoney, which I use quite a lot, and although the FOSS Radeon graphic display drivers work very well for ordinary use, I decided to try out the proprietary AMD Catalyst drivers as well.

The openSuSE Wiki has a page about the AMD Catalyst package, with an overview of supported hardware, links and instructions for 1-click install, GUI/Yast install and command line/zypper install. I used 1-click install, and it worked perfectly and couldn’t have been easier.

Another positive aspect of this release is that the laptop Fn-keys work on every system I have tried so far, too, at least for volume up/down/mute, brightness up/down and touchpad off/on. Wi-Fi off/on and Suspend/Sleep work on some systems but not on others, but that is typical of those keys anyway.  Multiple monitor support works well, just use the KDE Display control to set up the screens the way you want.

One last note, again about EFI Boot systems. The openSuSE 12.3 grub is capable of booting other operating systems, including Windows as well as other Linux distributions, either by directly loading their kernel or by chainloading their EFI boot image.

This means that if you want a boot selection process that is more user-friendly than sitting pressing F-whatever over and over again, and better looking than a plain text list, you can substitute openSuSE for Windows in the initial boot sequence. Of course, I would still choose to install the wonderful rEFInd boot manager, but that’s another issue.

Read the original article here:

http://www.zdnet.com/opensuse-12-3-in-depth-and-hands-on-7000012698/

Vanity Fair’s article looks inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant…

Analyzing one of American corporate history’s greatest mysteries—the lost decade of Microsoft—two-time George Polk Award winner (and V.F.’s newest contributing editor) Kurt Eichenwald traces the “astonishinglyfoolish management  decisions” at the company that “could serve as a business-school case study on the pitfalls of success.” Relying on dozens of interviews and internal corporate records—including e-mails between executives at the company’s highest ranks—Eichenwald offers an unprecedented view of life inside Microsoft during the reign of its current chief executive, Steve Ballmer, in the August issue. Today, a single Apple product—the iPhone—generates more revenue than all of Microsoft’s wares combined.

Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

When Eichenwald asks Brian Cody, a former Microsoft engineer, whether a review of him was ever based on the quality of his work, Cody says, “It was always much less about how I could become a better engineer and much more about my need to improve my visibility among other managers.” Ed McCahill, who worked at Microsoft as a marketing manager for 16 years, says, “You look at the Windows Phone and you can’t help but wonder, How did Microsoft squander the lead they had with the Windows CE devices? They had a great lead, they were years ahead. And they completely blew it. And they completely blew it because of the bureaucracy.”

According to Eichenwald, Microsoft had a prototype e-reader ready to go in 1998, but when the technology group presented it to Bill Gates he promptly gave it a thumbs-down, saying it wasn’t right for Microsoft. “He didn’t like the user interface, because it didn’t look like Windows,” a programmer involved in the project recalls.

“The group working on the initiative was removed from a reporting line to Gates and folded into the major-product group dedicated to software for Office,” Eichenwald reports. “Immediately, the technology unit was reclassified from one charged with dreaming up and producing new ideas to one required to report profits and losses right away.” “Our entire plan had to be moved forward three to four years from 2003–04, and we had to ship a product in 1999,” says Steve Stone, a founder of the technology group. “We couldn’t be focused anymore on developing technology that was effective for consumers. Instead, all of a sudden we had to look at this and say, ‘How are we going to use this to make money?’”

A former official in Microsoft’s Office division tells Eichenwald that the death of the e-reader effort was not simply the consequence of a desire for immediate profits. The real problem for his colleagues was the touch screen: “Office is designed to inputting with a keyboard, not a stylus or a finger,” the official says. “There were all kinds of personal prejudices at work.” According to Microsoft executives, the company’s loyalty to Windows and Office repeatedly kept them from jumping on emerging technologies. “Windows was the god—everything had to work with Windows,” Stone tells Eichenwald. “Ideas about mobile computing with a user experience that was cleaner than with a P.C. were deemed unimportant by a few powerful people in that division, and they managed to kill the effort.”

When one of the young developers of MSN Messenger noticed college kids giving status updates on AOL’s AIM, he saw what Microsoft’s product lacked. “That was the beginning of the trend toward Facebook, people having somewhere to put their thoughts, a continuous stream of consciousness,” he tells Eichenwald. “The main purpose of AIM wasn’t to chat, but to give you the chance to log in at any time and check out what your friends were doing.” When he pointed out to his boss that Messenger lacked a short-message feature, the older man dismissed his concerns; he couldn’t see why young people would care about putting up a few words. “He didn’t get it,” the developer says. “And because he didn’t know or didn’t believe how young people were using messenger programs, we didn’t do anything.”

“I see Microsoft as technology’s answer to Sears,” said Kurt Massey, a former senior marketing manager. “In the 40s, 50s, and 60s, Sears had it nailed. It was top-notch, but now it’s just a barren wasteland. And that’s Microsoft. The company just isn’t cool anymore.”

“They used to point their finger at IBM and laugh,” said Bill Hill, a former Microsoft manager. “Now they’ve become the thing they despised.”

More:

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/07/microsoft-downfall-emails-steve-ballmer

I’m off to London next week to do Microsoft’s 4 day course on Implementing Forefront Identity Manager 2010 (M50382), intended they say for Systems Engineers, Developers, Architects, and Project Leaders who need to gain a good understanding of how Forefront Identity Manager 2010 can be applied to manage identity information across a number of directories or databases. We will learn how to:

• Understand FIM concepts and components.
• Identify appropriate FIM scenarios.
• Manage users, groups, and passwords using FIM.
• Synchronize identity data across systems, such as Active Directory and HR.
• Understand the issues involved in loading data (initial load, backup, and disaster recovery).
• Configure security for different levels of user.
• Manage password self-service reset and synchronization.
• Automate run cycles.
• Handle sets, simple workflows, and management policy rules (MPRs)

I’m doing the training with QA at their apparently state of the art purpose built training centre near Tower Bridge. I negotiated a good rate for the course and accomodation at The Tower A Guoman Hotel next to Tower Bridge, a 4-star hotel with apparently lovely London and The River Thames. So I should be comfy! I’ll catch the train as I simply can’t stand trying to negotiate the London traffic in a car.

FIM is effectively Microsoft’s equivalent of Novell Identity Manager, with which I am already familiar. So the plan is to do some self-study/revision over Xmas and sit the exam in January.

To top up the knowledge from the course materials I’ve also purchased what appears to be just about the only book available on FIM – “Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager 2010 R2 Handbook” by Kent Nordstrom. It’s had positive reviews so should give me a slightly different slant on the subject.

This is to prepare me to pass Exam 70-158 which will gaine me the cert Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS): Forefront Identity Manager 2010, Configuration. It should be interesting and will add a string to my bow when it comes to Identity Management work.

Leeds City Council’s ICT department is stepping up its efforts to help save the council money in the medium to long term. This will include the introduction of new IT asset management software and potential further development of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) options for employees and council members.

A series of decisions are due to be made over the coming months as part of ICT Invest to Save and Cost Avoidance initiatives, which are intended to deliver services more efficiently and save money in the long term. In terms of these overall efficiencies, this year Leeds has to find £55m of savings on top of £90m last year and further significant savings are expected to be made over the next four years.

The council has already made a strategic commitment to Microsoft’s technology platform and is now considering whether Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) will deliver a sufficiently robust asset management capability in addition to undertaking software patching and software distribution.

Dave Maidment, head of ICT strategy and commissioning, explained: “It’s about consolidation of applications and services, and this is just one example of where a single software solution can potentially solve a number of operational challenges and save money.”

On its BYOD plans, Leeds will shortly be examining how council employees and members may be able to adopt a “Bring Your Own Computer” approach, extending the council’s BYOD current efforts beyond smartphones to laptops and tablets. Over 6,000 council employees are currently supplied with corporately owned mobile phones, 800 of which are using smartphones running on Windows and Android operating systems.

In addition, over 200 BYOD devices in the shape of personal smartphones and tablet devices are being securely managed by the MobileIron MDM product.

MobileIron is being deployed to manage the corporate smartphone estate as well, says Maidment: “It’s another example of where we are looking to use a single solution, in this case to manage corporate and personal devices. As more people elect to use their own devices, the council saves money.”

Another key plank of Leeds’ ICT approach is connectivity. The council is currently assisting with the due diligence phase on the Yorkshire & Humberside Partnership Management Board’s plans for Public Services Network connectivity, with Virgin Media Business as its selected supplier.

This regional PSN initiative has been led and driven by Leeds. The Board approved Virgin’s appointment last month and has now instructed Yorkshire & Humberside PSN’s project office to commence due diligence with a plan for the contract to be completed by October 2012.

Leeds is also starting to look at cloud service options both as a consumer and potentially as a provider and is already running some key applications out of the cloud. As Maidment explained: “When contracts come towards expiry and applications need to be replaced, the cloud is now a clear option if best value can be demonstrated. However we need to be mindful of the connectivity, security and integration challenges. This will get better as the market matures.”

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/18/leeds_city_council_byod_plans/

SALT LAKE CITY — Jurors in the billion-dollar Novell-Microsoft antitrust case are apparently wrestling with a number of questions, including what a “hung jury” means.

The seven-woman, seven-man jury was expected to continue deliberations Friday. Jurors have asked the court for several clarifications since receiving the case Wednesday morning. Twice it asked about the term hung jury, possibly signaling that might be on their minds as they weigh two months of complex testimony and hundreds of documents.

Attorneys for both sides wrapped up their cases Tuesday with closing arguments in U.S. District Court.

Novell alleges Microsoft violated antitrust laws during the development of Windows 95, putting the Provo-based company’s newly acquired WordPerfect word processing software at a competitive disadvantage and allowing Microsoft to gain a monopoly in the computer operating systems market.

Microsoft contends Novell bought a dying company in WordPerfect and was slow to recognize the emergence of Windows. It argued that delays in development of Novell’s spread sheet application slowed the release of its software for Windows 95.

Novell seeks as much as $1.3 billion in compensation. Microsoft says the Provo-based company deserves nothing…

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705395917/Jurors-in-Novell-Microsoft-case-ask-court-about-meaning-of-hung-jury.html

SALT LAKE CITY — Jurors deliberating Wednesday in a Utah company’s $1 billion federal antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft Corp. appeared confused, sending at least five questions to the judge, one of which couldn’t be answered.

Novell Inc. sued Microsoft in 2004, claiming the Redmond, Wash.-based technology giant duped it into developing a version of its WordPerfect writing program for Windows 95 only to pull the plug so Microsoft could gain market share with its own word program.

Jurors started deliberating at about 8:45 a.m. Wednesday and didn’t go home until about 7:45 p.m., the Salt Lake Tribune reported. They’ll resume their discussions Thursday…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/15/novell-microsoft-suit-jury_n_1150657.html

THE JURY is still deliberating to reach a verdict in an antitrust lawsuit filed by Novell against Microsoft, with a decision possibly due later today.

The lawsuit centres on allegations by Novell that Microsoft acted anti-competitively by asking it to develop a version of its word processor Wordperfect for the Windows 95 operating system and then making it impossible for Novell to meet that request to boost the market share of Microsoft Word.

Until the mid 1990s Novell’s Wordperfect application was the dominant word processor, so it’s not surprising that it is a little miffed that it lost out on the basis that Word had better integration with Windows 95. Microsoft, however, claims that Novell simply acted too late to develop a compatible version of Wordperfect and that was ultimately the cause of Novell’s loss of market share, which fell from around 50 per cent to less than 10 per cent…

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2133053/jury-deliberates-novell-microsoft-lawsuit

Now that Attachmate has finished up its acquisition of Novell, the private equity-backed conglomerate of midrange software companies has set about breaking the company into two different halves.

For those of you who run SUSE Linux on your iSeries, System i, or Power Systems logical partitions, SUSE is now a separate division of Attachmate, much as Attachmate (with the Attachmate and WRQ products) was separate from the NetIQ security products. With the break, the SUSE Linux business and its related openSUSE development project are now separated from the burden of trying to save Novell and its NetWare and GroupWise from the revenue and profit slide it has endured for the past fifteen years. SUSE Linux, the SUSE Manager provisioning and patching tool (a clone of Red Hat Network), and SUSE Development Studio (an online software appliance packaging tool for SLES) will now be improved in a way that is best for the SUSE Linux community and leads to products that customers use and will pay for.

That’s what Nils Brauckmann, the new president and general manager of the SUSE division of Attachmate, told me last week. Brauckmann said that some of the Novell people who were doing back-office functions will be eliminated now that Attachmate has taken over, and the company has laid off the employees who worked on the Mono Project, which had created an open source reverse-engineered implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) for running C# programs. SUSE will continue to support customers who bought the commercialized version of Mono, of course.

SUSE Linux AG was founded in Germany, and with the Attachmate acquisition, the unit’s headquarters is moving back to Nuremburg. Most of the engineering, support, and sales people who worked for Novell’s Open Platform Solutions unit are still with the new SUSE company. Marcus Rex, who managed the OPS unit for years and who was chief technology officer for the SUSE Linux distro for many years, left the company in the wake of the Attachmate acquisition. Ralf Flaxa has been named vice president of engineering in his stead and will be working from Nuremburg, where the majority of SUSE developers still work, although SUSE has labs in Utah, China, and India and has tech support operations in Utah and the Czech Republic. Michael Miller has been tapped to work under Brauckmann as vice president of global alliances, marketing, and product management for SUSE and will work from Attachmate’s Seattle offices; Brauckmann will be in Nuremburg. Ronald de Jong has been named vice president of EMEA sales, working from the Netherlands, and Terri Hall is vice president of North American sales, working from California.

Read More:

Attachmate Busts Apart SUSE from Novell, Puts Own People in Charge