I've been saying it for ages, and they're doing it... It's actually old news, but it was hidden in a rather obscure location.

What they'll be doing is similar to the ZENworks team - building their own dedicated management interface and allowing the system to access any LDAP directory service.

The LDAP DS support is excellent as it allows GroupWise to be deployed in an Active Directory environment, if the customer chooses to do so.

The dedicated management interface is excellent for large environments as it allows the GroupWise administrators to focus on supporting GroupWise without having to know the structure of the LDAP directory service.

As always, we'll have to see whether this actually comes about, and seeing as this is only scheduled for "Monterray" (after "Bonsai", which is the next release) it's still going to be a while.

Whatever they do, I hope they take lessons from the ZENworks guys. They've done all the hard work and learned a lot of lessons here already and it doesn't make sense to go and make the same mistakes all over again.

Tags: groupwise, novell

Software sales has long moved past the days where a box-dropping salesperson can walk into a customer, show off a few flyers and walk out with a sale.

The open source movement is driving an interesting evolution in sale technique which is largely driven by online initial contact, then proceeding down the funnel in a largely automated fashion.

Matt Asay provides an interesting insight into the techniques which have worked for Alfresco, an open source company.

While reading each of these I find myself thinking about how these techniques apply across the board - not just to open source companies.

For instance, if Novell had to re-align their sales organisation around the same technique I have no doubt that they would have a more efficient sales force and would finally be able to make some money. I'm sure that re-aligning in this way would be a massive business process re-engineering and human resource re-structuring process... but it's doable and the results would make it well worth while.

In order to do this any proprietary software vendor, like Novell, would have to do a few things:
1) They'd have to set new expectations with their customers. Their customer base would be used to regular visits, useless gifts, meetings about the latest and greatest, etc. The vendor would need to transition their customers into the new model.
2) They'd have to re-educate their sales force. The sales engineers would need to be focused on delivering repeatable work such as recorded webinars, demonstrations and documentation. The account executives or sales people would need to understand how to help a customer through the sales process without all the junk.
3) They'd have to get used to providing a proper evaluation process. This would be from access to evaluation software, through en evaluation process, through to time-limited access to the support organisation.
4) They'd have to figure out how the sales distribution chain fits into all of this. If the customer now has access to the vendor for the sales process, what value add does the reseller provide? Personally I feel that the reseller should be providing consulting expertise for larger scale deployments and be providing cheaper options for after-sales support (with the vendor providing them discounted support rates).

I'm sure there are many other things that would need to be done - but this would be a start!

Tags: sales

ITWeb posts an article with an interesting challenge: Would 92% of your customers recommend you to others?

While the article itself is pretty much a brag from Rackspace, it does highlight the challenge facing any service business today: People want service! How novel.

Rackspace mentions Fred Reichheld, the author of Loyalty Rules!, and their very simple customer satisfaction questions:

1) How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague? (Scale 0-10)
2) What improvements could we make that would make you more likely to recommend us?

I really like those questions. They're quick and simple. They provide immediate and appropriate feedback.

I recently read Raving Fans which is an anecdotal book which covers the same theme. It's an excellent input into business strategy on a topic which we take very seriously.

Tags: service

Novell still doesn't appear to be managing to rise above its past, but it does appear to be making some progress.

In recent discussions with various people in the local industry there is a rumour that the local office is in for a shake-up and is likely to drop a lot of dead wood. The same rumour is also shared for EMEA as a whole. I will need to see this to believe it.

I truly believe that Novell needs to evaluate their business model carefully.

Open source business requires a low barrier to evaluation (freely available downloads, easily accessible source code, accessible and technically competent sales people), good material to help evaluate the software (on paper and in the lab) and a strong ecosystem of services (development support, technical support, documentation, training) around it.

Proprietary software requires the same sorts of things but traditionally relies on a sales force (internal or channel-based) to 'push' the products to market. I do not believe that Novell would really need to 'push' if they could just focus on applying themselves to the above tasks.

The air cover marketing should showcase thought leadership at multiple levels (technology, consulting, training) and case studies revealing where Novell has added value (real value) to their customers and partners.

Novell's positioning has confused their sales force, their customers and their partners. Their positioning of NetWare has been "it will live on" where they should have been more open with their customers and made it clear from the start that they are transitioning their platform of choice to linux and ensured that their ecosystem was prepared properly for the move. Instead we (as Novell partners) were left to convince the customer of this on our own. Until recently there was also confusion regarding GroupWise vs Netmail. Novell also has not been open about what's going on with the GroupWise Document Management system which many South African customers find a lot of value in, instead Novell opts to position a new (licensed) product (Novell Teaming and Conferencing) in the same space. Novell has adopted and rebranded licensed products (eg: Astaro Security Gateway, Agnitum Outpost Personal Firewall) and then simply dropped them just as soon as their customers started getting comfortable with them. All these positioning mistakes remind me of IBM's positioning mistakes which essentially allowed Microsoft to dominate the desktop market - why has Novell not learned from this history?

Novell's partner strategy has been weak over recent years. Novell partners, in my experience, find it difficult to understand the relevance of Novell's products and typically find the deployment of the technologies too complex and too disjointed. Microsoft's products, at least on the surface, appear to be well positioned and well integrated.

Novell's sales operations have problems. When placing orders on our customer's behalf we have discovered that the distributors do not properly understand the order process - simple orders have taken anywhere up to two months to complete with plenty of back-and-forth between ourselves and the distributor and regular interventions from Novell in order to clarify the process and get the job done.

Novell's partner operations have problems. When signing up to be a partner they lost our order - it took approximately two months to get that sorted out. Once that sign-up was complete there were also various integration problems found within their partner portal which did not allow my profile access to material which I should have had access to immediately. Compare this to our experience with Microsoft where we signed up, had access to everything we needed and even had the packages delivered to our door within a week.

Novell's training marketing and operations have problems. They have refocused, quite successfully, on delivering new linux training but have left their CNE's behind. The CNE training is still heavily NetWare based and desperately needs to shed it. Novell announced OES (linux) ages ago, and yet there is still no training to cover it properly - this certainly does not help the ecosystem. Now that they finally have announced a strategy for CNE's to 'modernise' their certification they're renaming the certification to a Novell Certified Engineer (NCE) - this, again, is a positioning mistake that I predict will confuse the ecosystem.

All of the above observations and experiences tell me that Novell really does need to have a shake up. They need to really get themselves in front of the customers and partners they have, and the customers and partners they don't have and get down to the bottom of why they continue to be regarded as irrelevant in the industry.

In my view it's quite simple - they are incapable of executing their strategies cohesively and completely.

Footnotes:
More opinions here, here, here and here.

Update:
Another opinion here.

Tags: novell

In an interesting move, Citrix has announced its intention to acquire XenSource. More information here.

XenSource has gained a lot of media coverage in the last year. It's become the virtualization engine of choice for Novell and is being taken seriously by Microsoft and others.

With this move it makes me wonder how this will affect their relationship with Novell.

That said, I think this is a positive move. If Citrix puts its weight behind making XenSource a more corporate friendly virtualization engine (with training, certification, better management tools, etc) then it can only be good for the industry.

VMWare must be nervous.

Tags: virtualization

After fiddling with XEN for a bit and hitting some hitches, I've decided to fall back to VMware Server in order to actually get some work done without having to hack around so much.

The high-end workstation I'm using has a GB NIC which wouldn't auto-detect the 100/FD switch, so I had to find a script on the 'net to make it work. It's a post-startup script implemented in the sysconfig script for the card.

Then I had a little adventure figuring out how to make the wireless card work. As it turns out the chipset isn't supported by SLES any more, but I found a helpful hint here which resolves the connectivity requirement.

The plan is to have the wireless connect into the DMZ. The Linksys will then have port maps to the box for external to internal access where required. The laptops will connect into the DMZ for simplicity's sake. My other workstation and all the VM's will therefore be behind two firewalls.

So far I have:
- SLES 10 base server install
- Added kernel source, gcc, one of the X libs (can't remember which), and wireless-tools
- VMware Server 1
- VMware Management UI (for web-based access to control VM's, and remote connectivity using management GUI)
- DynDNS to allow remote access to services

I'm currently setting up a SLES10 VM to use as a template. Next I'll be doing a Windows 2003 R2 Standard Server template.

After that I'm going to try out the latest OES2 beta to see how well it installs and how far I can take it for the testing I want to do.

Tags: lab, novell, sles

Technical support of remote sites in today's world is something of an art.

In corporate environments where IP addresses are known and directly reachable there are few problems, but in today's world the corporate WAN is a hybrid of network types and often uses low cost ADSL connectivity with multiple NAT devices between the support engineer and the target desktop.

In the past we've tried multiple techniques to allow remote support but most often the fall back ended up being actually driving/flying to the destination or asking the end-user to come to us. In our books this wasn't good enough.

After some research and a pointer from a friend we came upon LogMeIn. LogMeIn has a free option which allows us to do much of what we'd want to do for basic support to these remote desktops, and we've tested it to work through many, many corporate networks... if the desktop can browse the internet through SSL then we can remote control it and assist the end-user.

This is revolutionising the way we do support and bringing down our turnaround times. If you haven't tried it, do.

Tags: systems management

It's been decades of bickering and finally they've announced a partnership that seems to bring benefits to both sides of the fence.

ArsTechnica, as usual, have a decent summary of the situation. I first got wind of it from Eric Scoble's blog.

Loads of different opinions - let's see what happens.

Tags: microsoft, novell

This is not good.

IE7's release notes state the following:

--start--
If you are on a network that uses a proxy server, and you notice slowness or a problem connecting to websites after upgrading to Internet Explorer 7, it might be due to web proxy auto-detection problems. To fix these problems, follow these steps:

- Open Internet Explorer, click the Tools button, and then click Internet Options.
- Click the Connections tab.
- Under Local Area Networks (LAN) settings, click the LAN Settings button.
- Clear the Automatically detect settings check box.
- Click the Use a proxy server for your LAN check box.
- Type the address and port of your proxy server.
- Click OK twice.

You will now be able to navigate to Internet sites.
--end--

Erm, yeah - and when you go home with your laptop you'll have to unconfigure all this. This is an ok workaround, but not a solution to the problem.

Microsoft, please fix WPAD in IE7.

Update:
We implemented a workaround for this by using ZENworks Desktop Management to deploy the WPAD script to the user's desktop, then implementing both the automatic detection and the reading of the script from the local drive. This allows the automatic detection to take preference, but the local drive script to be second best.
In order to cater for laptop users, the local drive script checked to see whether the desktop was in the corporate network IP address range. If not then direct access would be applied, but if it was, then it would redirect the browser to the local web proxy.

Tags: microsoft, systems management

I wish I could search for users that aren't currently on-line to add them to my workspace.

I wonder if this calls into question the issue of privacy?

Tags: collaboration, collanos