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Ramblings of James Gosling, a Novell enthusiast, Network Engineer and IT consultant specializing in Novell products. An Open Enterprise Server enthusiast on Novell Netware & SUSE Linux, a strong Novell advocate. He uses an array of Novell products and shares his thoughts and experiences.

Archive for the 'Novell' Category

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

 




At first there was a period of uncertainty surrounding the Attachmate Group’s acquisition of Novell last year, but Attachmate Group chairman and CEO, Jeff Hawn, says it worked out in the end.
When speaking about the uncertainty, Hawn is referring to concerns about the future of Novell when Attachmate was going to acquire it in April 2011.

“That period of uncertainty is always a difficult period for a company and its customers,” he said.

What Attachmate would eventually decide to do is take the identity, and security and datacentre management assets of Novell and put them with NetIQ.

“NetIQ is a good brand name for systems and security management, so that was a good fit there,” Hawn said.

Attachmate also took SUSE Linux out of the organisation and made it its own business unit on par with the others.

“With respect to Novell, it was about the collaboration and asset management capabilities,” Hawn said.

“We felt that it would be the business unit that would focus on mobility, which was beginning to emerge and is now a strong trend within our governmental and commercial enterprises.”

The end result of the acquisition would be the Attachmate Group consisting of four business units, Attachmate, NetIQ, SUSE, and Novell.

Hawn said the transition has “gone very well considering business is hard.”

“SUSE, while it was in a good growth market, was shrinking when we acquired it,” he said.

SUSE was down 15 per cent when Attachmate acquired them, but Hawn said the business unit would go up 15 per cent after the acquisition.

“We essentially had the elusive V-shaped recovery that economies and companies are looking for,” he said.

Hawn adds that the first objective following the acquisition was to stabilise the customer base, and he says the company has accomplished that.

No separation anxiety

As for what Attachmate’s leadership has brought the individual business units, Novell president and general manager, Bob Flynn, says there is now a degree of specialisation where there was not before.

“When you look at the development of the software, all I work on are the products in Novell,” he said.

“In the former Novell world, the engineers worked on SUSE Linux and NetIQ products.”

As a result of that, Flynn says “something gets undervalued and underinvested.”

“In the SUSE case, the specialisation resulted in the V-shaped growth,” he said.

While Novell products may have been underserved in the past, Flynn says with the benefit of specialisation Novell has able to overcome that and reinitiate some business with customers.

From a local reseller perspective, Attachmate Group Asia Pacific vice-president and general manager, Boris Ivancic, highlights the skill sets are different between the different product groups.

“In that sense, we have a slightly different relationship between different resellers across the business units,” he said.

“We have very few resellers that carry all four, and I’d be hard pressed to find any that carry two over their portfolios.”

Read more here: http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/tech-industry/3411960/acquisition-brought-focus-novell-says-attachmate/




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

 




Now that Attachmate owns Novell, what does the formerly obscure company plan to do with its $2.2-billion operating system and networking prize? Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at ZDNet interviewed Attachmate via e-mail CEO Jeff Hawn and this is what he told me.

Before launching into the interview, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols noted that most of Novell’s senior executive staff won’t be hanging around. Ron Hovsepian; President and CEO; Dana Russell, CFO; John Dragoon,  CMO; and Markus Rex, SVP and General Manager of open platforms and long time SUSE leader have all left. So it is that Attachmate is starting with a clean management slate.

SJVN: What’s the plan for Novell’s offerings?

JH: Business will operate as usual at Novell. We intend to operate the company as an individual business unit, meaning that there is a direct line of sight between sales, marketing, technical and professional services, product management and engineering. Novell will operate autonomously and now has the ability to focus and dedicate resources on the needs of their customers.

Current Novell and SUSE product roadmaps will remain in place. The Attachmate Group does not end-of-life products and we do not force customers to move to/from any products – we are focused on meeting the needs of our customers and that is our first priority.

SJVN: What’s the plan for SUSE’s offering?

JH: We are bringing together the products and people associated with the Novell OPS [Open Platform Solutions] business and forming a new dedicated business unit under the SUSE brand. The fundamentals remain the same: a passionate commitment to quality engineering and excellent customer service. But, this new BU structure will enable the focus, agility and adaptability required to aggressively pursue the rapidly growing enterprise Linux market opportunity. Customers, service providers and industry partners are ready for the technical performance, business value and world-class service SUSE can offer as a focused business unit.

SJVN: Why split Novell and SUSE?

JH: SUSE was acquired by Novell some time ago, and we see tremendous potential in this technology. Our hope is to bring prominence to it by giving it individual branding as a separate business unit. By separating both Novell and SUSE, we can give each of these brands the focus they need to meet the needs of their specific customers and ensure that they are successful.

SJVN: Who will manage them? I’m presuming they’ll have separate management teams? Will SUSE be headed out of Germany again?

JH: Novell and SUSE will each be run by a President and General Manager, and both ultimately report to me. Novell will be headquartered in Provo, Utah and managed by President and General manager Bob Flynn. SUSE will be headquartered in Nuremburg, Germany and will be run by Nils Brauckmann, President and General Manager.

SJVN: What plans does Attachmate for Novell/SUSE’s open-source offerings? E.g. openSUSE and Mono.

JH: SUSE sponsorship and participation in key open-source projects is a fundamental element of the business. This commitment is driven by a desire to contribute to and collaborate with the community in a way that fosters the success of open source technologies overall and creates the greatest value for our customers. The openSUSE project is a great example of vibrant and healthy collaboration. SUSE sponsorship and participation in projects like openSUSE creates great value for the community and also for SUSE customers who benefit from the innovations and advancements we create together.

SJVN: What will Attachmate’s acquisition mean for Novell/SUSE’s partnerships with Microsoft? With its VARs?

JH: Microsoft and our partners will continue to play an important role for all of The Attachmate Group business units. There are no changes to our existing partners and channels.

SJVN: Will Novell/SUSE continue its membership with the Open Invention Network [an open-source patent protection group]? The Linux Foundation?

JH:: We will continue our membership in the Open Invention Network as well as The Linux Foundation.

So, what does all this mean? Well, for customers, partners and developers it sounds like business as usual. Still, with such a clean management slate we’re going to have to wait and see how things really come out in the next few months. For the moment, if I were working with Novell I’d be cautiously optimistic.

Read the original article here:

Attachmate reveals Novell, SUSE, & Linux Plans (ZDNet)




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