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Business in the Cloud – BSM Brings Value Back into the Data Center
Business going to the Cloud can be the Catalyst for IT to Measure and Communicate Value!
How many of us have heard what a road block IT is, how costly / what a mystery IT is and IT cannot communicate value to the business leaving frustration in the organization. It's sort of like the Mars and Venus thing and "if they only understood me better" debate. It's OK to laugh, we all suffer these discussions, I too am guilt – the makings of a good Dilbert cartoon no doubt ending with Catbert reigning down his wrath of mandates. However, with all sourcing decisions, it is about creating change in an environment where change is difficult and should be embraced. IT has the opportunity to do just that and be the hero in the end. This is a good sourcing option as it creates the change that will drive down costs that are difficult for in-house IT to drive.
Moving from technology silos to managing and communicating in terms of services is easier than one thinks. It does require different management approaches and technology, measuring in terms of service and yes, sometimes the right investment can save money in the end while creating value. A recent Network World Article (http://bit.ly/aTL0Gy) has a good quote from a good friend of mine and Forrester analyst, Glenn O'Donnell, "invest in analysis, not monitoring". The monitoring data is required, but means nothing when not related to other bits of techno data and turned into information by which to perform useful analysis about services and the value delivered to the business. This becomes ever more challenging when in a mixed environment, physical, virtual, cloud, and when many management tools exist as well.
CIO also published an article yesterday "Why IT Costs Must Come Out of the Black Box — Now" (http://bit.ly/b62xpA) describing similar requirements for service measuring and service transparency. The lack of transparency drives the business to seek alternatives where they contract for a service and know the cost. What is often left out is the definition of good service levels, which is a topic for a separate blog. The new service appears cheaper and why is that? Economies of scale is one piece, shared service, ……the second piece is they are very standard, non custom, no configuration, minimal choices, if any, services. Standardization that is difficult to impose from in-house without the cost transparency, service measurements and links to business priorities. This is not a fair apples to apples comparison of services, however, a standardization many IT organizations have difficulty implementing as an in-house provider without the measuring of services and transparency, but possible moving forward.
Instead of challenging the business in moving to a cloud provider, I suggest embracing it and offer that history will repeat itself with many of these start up providers bringing the service back in-house and providing the opportunity to be the hero, improve service quality, reduce costs and communicate value. Many will fail due to lack of good service level agreements, lack of the business asking for them and collapse or dissatisfaction of the business with a single costly service impacting event.
Embrace the opportunity to do a few things in the meantime:
1. Standardize, drive down costs for services and technologies that do not require customization
2. Measure the provider, start to deliver service levels and views of transparency of in and outsourced services
3. Develop and Implement the service view and transparency into the "black box" of IT
4. Invest in the analytic measuring and viewing technology, less on the commodity monitoring – explore open source
When Outsourcing Creates Good Change – Embrace the Cloud Providers – Consolidate Tools and Invest in becoming a Service Measuring Organization Communicating Value!
Check out Novell's unique approach with WorkloadIQ and Measuring! (http://bit.ly/bJ0bJh) and Novell Operations Center
Novell Announces WorkloadIQ (http://bit.ly/9O7KqK) – Measuring with Novell Operations Center
New Version of Novell Conferencing
Apple iTunes 10.0.0.68
Apple released iTunes 10.0.0.68, for both Windows x86 as well as Windows x64. What's new is:
- Introducing Ping. Use Ping to follow your favorite artists and friends or connect with the world's most passionate music fans. Discover the music everyone is talking about, listening to, and downloading.
- Rent HD TV episodes for just 99¢ each. Watch them on your Mac or PC, on-the-go with iPhone or iPod touch, or in your living room with the all new Apple TV.
- Play your favorites on the all new iPod touch, iPod nano, iPod shuffle, and Apple TV.
- Play music wirelessly with AirPlay on AirPlay-enabled speakers, home theater receivers, and iPod accessories.
- Explore many look-and-feel improvements throughout iTunes.
- Enjoy performance improvements which make iTunes faster and more responsive.
- Additional voice support with VoiceOver Kit for iPod.
2011 Novell Knowledge Partner nominations are now open!
Nominations for 2011 Novell Knowledge Partners are now open! Wouldn't it be a shame if someone helpful in the forums, in the beta program, in Cool Solutions was denied an opportunity to become a Novell Knowledge Partner because nobody they helped took the time to nominate them? Is there someone you have seen that loves to share their knowledge and experience and takes the time out of THEIR busy day to help you? Do YOU take time out of your busy day to help others in the Novell communities? Nominations are being taken until the end of October for next year's Novell Knowledge Partners. If you have a favorite NKP that you feel should continue in the program, or know someone that would make a good candidate for admission to the program, please take a few minutes and nominate them. It would be appreciated. Go to http://support.novell.com/community/nkp.html to read more and submit a nomination. Thanks for taking the time to help us identify the people that help you the most.
New version of Novell Conferencing!
I have invited Nick McCleery, Product Manager for Novell Conferencing, to be a guest on my blog. Nick will introduce himself, announce the update to Novell Conferencing and give details about the release of Novell Conferencing - which is NOW available!
Good news for Novell Conferencing Users, our new features are now live!
Hello all, my name is Nick McCleery the newest member of the Product Management Team working primarily with Novell Conferencing, our exciting new collaboration tool. It’s wonderful to be part of a team with so many cutting edge products.
Novell Conferencing if you have not heard is our online 100% browser based Conferencing application enabling teams from around the world to collaborate, creating meetings almost instantly. Best of all it requires no application downloads to start a meeting and share documents; all at about a fourth the cost of our competitors. Too good to be true? Check out our new line up of features.
Screen Share – we’ve always had the ability to show our desktop but now have expanded the capability to share a scalable region if you wish; or even a single application running on your desktop enabling you to keep sensitive information private at the touch of a button.
File Share – You can now upload documents before you begin a meeting and store them for later use with a 2GB storage capacity. And best of all you can share the URL to the file with your attendees and they can download the file directly to their computer. File share was limited to PDF and MS PowerPoint only. With the new release you can now share any Microsoft Office application in addition to the standard PDF.
Web Content – Web Content is a great way to share video and streaming media from the web. You can simply copy and paste the embed code to a video you would like to share and store it in your web content manager to use in future meetings. Of course you can add content on the fly in a meeting and manage your media streams from an easy to use manager. The great part of this feature is that your media will stream directly from the internet to your attendees removing annoying lag time and choppy videos you get with common screen share applications.
White Board – The white board now works better than ever with quicker reaction time and new zoom controls for better collaboration.
Polls – Polls are brand new to the lineup. You can create polls from your dashboard before a meeting begins and present them later, or create them on the fly while a meeting is running. You can also store the data to re-present the polls in future meetings and compare results in a convenient graphical display.
Chat – Of course Novell Conferencing has a public chat window to communicate with your entire audience, but you also have the option to chat privately with attendees, and if you wish you can enable private chat between participants.
Recording – From the click of a button you can begin recording your Novell Conferencing meetings. The recording will be made available to the presenter once the meeting has ended and can be viewed via a URL or downloaded directly from the server. The chat window will be provided in separate transcript.
Audio Video – previously we provided two cameras with the option to use four microphones, this feature is now expanded to incorporate four web cams with integrated audio, giving you the ability to video conference from around the globe.
GW 8.0.2 integration – I’ve saved the best for last! With our new release we built 3 great new integrations. You can now schedule a conference through your GW 8.0.2 home page. Simple hit “new appointment” and you can use the new “conference” tab allowing you to set meeting keys and make adjustments to your conferencing preferences all while scheduling a new appointment in your calendar. The beauty here is the URL and any credentials necessary to join the meeting will be automatically included in the appointment and you have access to your normal contacts.
Novell Messenger Integration – I personally love our integration with Novell Messenger as the most convenient way to start a meeting and invite colleagues to join. From the “actions” section located at the bottom of Novell Messenger simply hit “start a meeting” and select whom you wish to have attend. As soon as you hit “ok” the browser will open with the meeting running and an instant message will be sent to every one you selected with a simple invite to the meeting. If they hit “join” their browser will open with the meeting running and you can literally be meeting in a matter of seconds.
Teaming Integration – From teaming you will be able to spawn meetings and invite colleagues from your teams all from your team’s profiles; yet another great way to start collaborating with your team members.
Try it out today -- you can get a free 30-day trial here.
*The product is fully localized in French and German. Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese Simplified will be provided over the next few weeks.
VMworld Live Online Streaming Video Interview with Novell SVP Joe Wagner
Novell Senior Vice President and Global Alliances General Manager Joe Wagner was interviewed during a session at VMworld today. Wagner responded to questions regarding Novell and VMware’s recent expansion of partnership and new agreement terms.
VMworld features various sessions during the week-long event, often holding presentations, panels, interviews and demonstrations. David Vallante, Co-Founder of The Wikibom Project, conducted the interview with Joe Wagner on Wednesday, Sept. 1, at 1:00 PM. Wagner answered questions such as:
- What news do you have to share from VMworld?
- Why did Novell and VMware make this agreement?
- What value will VMware customers get from this?
- How can one get more information about this new partnership offering?
Novell and VMware have a long-standing relationship in further developing infrastructure technology. Their recent agreement enables VMware to distribute and support the SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server operating system. Under the agreement, VMware intends to standardize its virtual appliance-based product offerings on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. You may read the release here: http://www.novell.com/news/press/vmware-and-novell-deliver-suse-linux-enterprise-server-for-vmware
Joe Wagner serves as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Global Alliances at Novell. He is responsible for driving strategic objectives and establishing major partnership ecosystems on which to build market relevance and growth businesses at Novell. This encompasses building strategic global partnerships with leading technology companies including VMware.
Novell is an infrastructure software company that is leading the intelligent workload management market with its differentiated approach, WorkloadIQ. Novell helps organizations securely deliver and manage computing services across physical, virtual and cloud computing environments with its solutions for identity and security, systems management, collaboration and Linux based operating platforms.
Viewers may watch the interview and follow up on other VMworld events through VMware’s Social Media and Blogger Lounge, found at http://www.vmworld.com/blogs/vmworld/2010/08/28/social-media-blogger-lounge-with-live-video-coverage.
Teaming Use Case: Mobile Workforce
With today's ever-progressing wireless technologies, it's
easier for people to work away from the office. Not only can they receive
and send e-mail with mobile devices, they can also use Internet
access and powerful mobile devices to work away from the office
for longer periods of time.
In spite of the constant advances in wireless technologies, receiving,
accessing, and modifying the latest information is still a major
challenge for the mobile workforce. As information changes, people
need the newest versions, whether they are in the office or not.
And they need to be able to access the newest information using
laptops, remote desktops, and mobile phones
When working remotely it's difficult to securely search through
large quantities of information in all of its available formats
and locations. Simply viewing files important to your work can be
difficult. If you don't have the files stored locally on your mobile
device, they might be in a location that is remotely inaccessible.
Mobile phones and computers outside the organization's firewall
might have problems connecting to internal information storage areas.
This can be a significant challenge for mobile workers that might need
access to company information, including knowledge stores, project
data, customer information, company policies and training materials.
Even if your mobile workforce can access the files they need,
depending on file format and the capabilities of their mobile device,
the files might not even be viewable. When they are able to view
those files, they also need to be able to modify them or provide
feedback on them back to their team members or others in the organization.
Consequently, the major challenge in supporting the mobile workforce
is in effectively providing the the type of access your mobile workers
need, no matter where they happen to be located.
Novell Teaming is a next-generation, Web-based collaborative
application that allows users to view information from any device
that has access to the Internet. Since it is browser-based, Novell
Teaming allows information to be accessed through any Web-enabled device,
including Web-enabled mobile phones. Additionally, Novell Teaming
doesn't require any client software on your mobile devices.
Novell Teaming also provides a lightweight, secure and easy
to use mobile user interface that incorporates most of the functionality
available in the standard Novell Teaming interface. Tailored to
the needs of mobile users, it presents a specialized view of Novell
Teaming workspaces, including a starting home page with quick links
to the most commonly used aspects of Teaming, such as workspaces,
favorites, search, teams and what’s new. The mobile UI enforces
the same security and access controls as does the regular Novell
Teaming interface. While optimized for iPhone and Blackberry devices,
the new interface works with any mobile device with an HTTP/HTML-based
interface that supports HTML 4 and JavaScript. So, as long as you
have a connection to the Internet, you can access the information you
need, even files from your mobile device.
To address the problem of limited document support in some
mobile phones, Novell Teaming also has a document rendering engine
that presents mobile users an HTML view of most file types (over
400 formats supported). Although this rendered HTML view does not
allow file editing from a mobile phone, Novell Teaming does allows
comments to be posted on the file or on other information in the
Novell Teaming workspace.
The ability to assign e-mail addresses to each of your Novell
Teaming folders can also be a help to your mobile workforce. This
lets users simply e-mail information to those folders while being
mobile. Once the folders receive the e-mail, its information will
be incorporated into the Novell Teaming system, making it completely
searchable and accessible while on the road.
Also, any time information changes in Novell Teaming, it's updated
in real time across the entire system. If a change is made by anybody
at any location, the change instantly becomes visible to everyone
else who has access to the information. This ensures that even mobile
users that access Novell Teaming from their mobile devices will always
have access to the most current information that they need.
Whether they're using a laptop or mobile phone, Novell Teaming
enables mobile users to access any information they need to do
their job while away from the organization. Mobile users can easily
view and manage documents in Novell Teaming even if they don't have
the same application the document was created in. Mobile users can easily
and securely enjoy the same level of access to company information
that they have when in the office. Novell Teaming updates information
in real time, always presenting the most recent version. Mobile
users can also easily contribute information to their organization's knowledge
base via e-mail without ever logging in to Teaming. Whether in the
office or mobile, users can always take advantage of the powerful
search options in Novell Teaming to quickly find the information
they need. Novell Teaming empowers mobile users to be more efficient
and effective by providing them constant access to the information
they need.
To see the full list of use cases click here.
MiniSUSE – Loads from a CD/DVD or USB drive
GWAVACon new pages
Hi everybody,
As usual, during this week I updated event pages on www.gwava.com and www.gwava.mobi. The webinar pages have been updated. Now all recorded webinars are directly hosted on GWAVA website and a player have been added on that page.
A link to the GWAVA store add been added on all pages of the GWAVA website.Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin accounts were added on the website.
All the contact forms on the website were switched to Powermail and a Captcha was added to each of them to reduce the amount of spam received.
A bunch of new GWAVACon pages for GWAVACon torrance were created.
Cloud Archiving Market Update | August 2010
With industry noise about email archiving, and hosted archiving in general, getting louder and louder, it can be difficult to find all the information you need to make a decision. To help you easily gather information, Sonian compiles relevant content together for you in the Cloud Archiving Monthly Market Update.
The Sonian Cloud Archiving Market Update:- Network World: Forrester's Four Cloud Giants Compete for Your Cloud Email Business
- Webinar: What You Need to Know Before Moving your Company Data to the Cloud
- Deloitte: Companies Ill Equiped to Handle Social Media E-Discovery
- GoMez Cloud Computing and Web Application Performance: The Risks of Adopting The Cloud
- Gartner Research Document: Building an E-mail Retention Strategy
- In The News: Zurich Insurance fined £2.27m for Loss of Customer Data
Have you entered the “Disters” contest?
In the next installment of our Novell podcast series, Liz Padula, senior marketing manager at Novell, talks with Peter Bowen, architect for the SUSE Appliance Program, about Novell’s first annual “Disters” awards.
For those of you who don’t know Dister, he is the mascot for SUSE Studio, a free, web-based appliance building tool that is a key technology component of our SUSE Appliance Program. For appliances built in SUSE Studio and published in SUSE Gallery, we will be awarding $10,000 to the creators of the most inventive software appliances in two categories: “Community Use” and “Commercial Use”. Judges include Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, Markus Rex, senior vice president and general manager of Open Platform Solutions at Novell, and other industry influencers.
“It’s a great way to show off what you can do and win some money at the same time,” says Bowen.
Anyone using SUSE Studio today is eligible to win, so start building or vote for your favorite appliance today!
CA Buys Arcot: Filling a Hole with Too Little Too Late
by Jay Roxe, Director, ISM Product Marketing
CA certainly has been on a buying spree recently to try to move itself into the Cloud space. With the space predicted to grow at more than a 15% CAGR, it's little wonder as to why. However, this recent acquisition smacks of putting a square peg in a round hole.
Arcot has a nice solution for strong authentication but as an authentication play, it's not that interesting. It's about time that CA patched that hole in their SiteMinder portfolio. Other providers (Novell included) offer token-less strong authentication. I'm left scratching my head and wondering if this is truly a cloud security play or merely paying a lot for a technology labeled "cloud."
The second part of the Arcot acquisition is a solution for providing single-sign on for cloud applications. I think it's missing in a couple of fundamental aspects:
- It's only hosted by Arcot. Other state-of-the-art players, such as Novell and Ping Identity, are working with cloud providers to offer this to their existing customers instead of trying to build a new channel. If you're an enterprise in the middle of the move to the cloud do you really want to have to deal with yet another vendor?
- It misses the fact that single-sign on in the cloud is about a lot more than just sign-on. Providers need to provide auditing, logging, and the foundational technology needed to ensure compliance.
Identity and Security in the Cloud are on everybody's mind these days — particularly with the VMWare conference this week — but this was an big acquisition by CA that will require a lot of integration work and cause yet more churn.
Adobe Shockwave 11.5.8.612
Adobe has released Adobe Shockwave 11.5.8.612, because critical vulnerabilities have been identified in Adobe Shockwave Player 11.5.7.609 and earlier versions. The vulnerabilities (more info here and here) could allow an attacker, who successfully exploits the vulnerabilities, to run malicious code on the affected system. Adobe has provided a solution for the reported vulnerabilities. It is recommended that users update their installations to the latest version using the instructions provided below.
At the "Shockwave Player Download Center" you can find a legacy setup by default. But, and this isn't mentioned at all at the download page, if you apply for a 'Adobe Shockwave Player Distribution License' you can get a Windows Installer package instead.
The Radicati Group Releases “On-Premises E-mail Archiving – Market Quadrant 2010”
On-Premises E-Mail Archiving – Market Quadrant 2010
Same Exchange, but with a lot more gadgets.
News-By-Mail August 20th, 2010 ~ August 26th, 2010
Unified Communications Market Update Web Conference
July
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