Dear all,

 

Last day of another great week at BrainShare, starting with another keynote and ending with the tear down of the conference. Here's the last BrainShare update of this year.

 

*** Cool news: the GroupWise Powerguide really takes off! ***
As I've mentioned earlier this week, this weekend we've finished the work on the GroupWise Powerguide, a GroupWiseR project in which people from all over the world cooperated to create the ultimate book for everyone that wants to take GroupWise to the max: the poweruser as well as the helpdesk, but even GroupWise administrators will be amazed by some of the trips and tricks in the book. I know they will be amazed, because while compiling all the material into the book even I was sometimes amazed and I do know GroupWise a little bit.

 

This book has been available earlier via Amazon and we've quite a few back orders already, but it really came available online last Wednesday.  Cool: since yesterday we already sold several site licenses and of course individual copies. It's very nice to see the result of our work take of like this, check it out at www.books4brains.com or Amazon.

 

(Yes, this is a plug, but not shameless: this is a GroupWiseR project and most of the profits will flow back into the GroupWiseR initiative...)

 

*** The Keynote at Friday ***
This keynote was "directed & hosted" by Jeff Hawkins, one of the Novell VPs and I must say, he kept his promise. The other two keynotes earlier were cool, but a bit (too) log, and Jeff managed to create an exciting keynote which ended on the scheduled time. My compliments, good show!

 

The content of today's keynote were very diverse, here's an overview:

* The theme for today and the future is: Novell is "Open for Business, Open for Growth, Wide Open"

* For example: Novell has started the OpenSuse project a year ago, currently more than 7.500 downloads/installs per day.

* Importance of the Ajax Open Source project, resulting in far richer web interfaces, almost similar experience with Windows/Linux desktop based solutions, with things like drag & drop and much more.

* Demo of Martin Buckley showing Zenworks Asses Management, free for customers under maintenance, very advanced way of keeping track of all things like hardware, software, license and maintenance contracts. Available later this summer.

* Dale Olds demonstrated CASA, the Common Authentication Services Adapter, which allows you to securely store authentication credentials for any service, especially webbased. Demo included a login to GroupWise WebAccess at the office, storing the credentials at an iPod automatically and ten re-using these same credantials automatically on another machine at home. Very cool!

* Allan Murray demonstrated Identity Management, creating system tot system connections between all kind of databases, but also the very strong new documentation module, always something that's often forgotten. The demo included a module called "Enforcer", which allows to make sure that data entered is in line with the your own policies. For example, phone numbers or login names in AD or eDirectory can be checked and changed. Last but not least the very strong Workflow Designer.

* Sonja Krause showed a brand new service to easily build packages from your own code, all online, very nifty!

* Eric Anderson and Robert Wipfel showed us around thru the Adapative Data Center, creating complete new images from scratch, testing them first and then deploy them to one of the cluster nodes, all webbased en very powerful.

 

As mentioned, a very well orchestrated keynote, all in line with the schedule, from my point a good entertainment factor, job well by Jeff Hawkins and his team.

 

Although GroupWise was not mentioned much in today's keynote, it certainly got a lot of attention in the two earlier keynotes. I was hoping to visit some more sessions today, but to be honest: I also had a lot of other work to do and to discuss things with a lot of people. I'm happy to be able to have met so many people and I'm certain we will see a nice follow up coming from this: I think that Danita Zanre and Gregg Hinchman might surprise us with a GUG-USA soon and I had a meeting with Willem Bagchus and Andres Bach about a similar setup for a GUG-Canada as well. Would be great, so let's keep our fingers crossed an see what comes out of this.

 

You might have come across www.gwcheck.com, the site for all GroupWise cracks all over the world. The person behind this very lively site is Gert ter Burg, who's also a Board Member as well as one of the Founding Fathers of the GUG-NL, the GroupWise User Group for the Netherlands We were already proud to have him on board, but here's another reason: Gert is also VERY active in the NGW-list forums, where he answers GroupWise related questions from many people all over the world. Other famous people who often answer questions on this list server are Danita Zanre, Tommy Mikkelsen, Colin Bretagne, Matt Ray, Morris Blackham, Holly Newman and many, many others.

 

Now the cool thing is that mr. Gert is really taking of big time: he has hit the ceiling and has become the most active member on the NGW List, check it out at http://www.ngwlist.com/stats.html We're proud to have him on the Board of the GUG-NL, more GroupWise expertise pur sang coming from the Netherlands ;-)

 

This e-mail was created during our one-hour stop-over at JFK, New York, with Sander van Vugt sitting opposite to me writing Chapter 3 of his new "Pro-Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10" book. And yes, we did have a good trip from SLC to JFK, we'll fly home in another few minutes on DL080. Thanks again for your listening ear, I hope you liked these BrainShare updates (more at www.groupwiser.net/bs2006), if not just send me an e-mail and I'll take you of the list.

 

Hope to see you soon in one of the 15 countries we will visit during our GroupWiseR EMEA Tour or elsewhere, check it out at www.groupwiser.net/emea-tour.

 

 

Erno de Korte