BrainShare 2005 has started again and here are some of the notes that I always create and send in an e-mail message. Hope you enjoy them, please take them as they are, it's just some "raw material", food for thought.

Regards,
Erno de Korte

Dear all,

BrainShare 2005 in Salt Lake City has started today and as always I'm excited to be there again. This year will be special for several reasons, as I will explain in my daily update messages containing the highlights of the day.

First of all, our little group did not fly into SLC immediately, but instead we first went to Miami and spend some time with the alligators in the Everglades and at the South Beach in Miami. That was certainly a fun start, although we did have some interesting problems when flying from Miami to Salt Lake City. But in the end we did get there with our luggage and that was much better than some others, who either missed their planes due to blizzards or lost their luggage.

Before we start with some BrainShare details, first of all some other things: we’re very proud that today at BrainShare we’ve been able to officially start the GUG-NL, the Dutch GroupWise User Group, which will deliver a lot of GroupWise related activities in the Netherlands, more at www.groupwiser.nl And last week at Cebit we saw the launch of the German-speaking GUG "GroupWise & Friends", so we’re making great progress there.

And more is coming from EMEA: a very nice new tool is the GroupWise Admin Client, an administrative tool for GroupWise administrators. It allows them to manage and control content in all GroupWise mailboxes by using trusted API technology, so Admin Client is designed to work with GroupWise versions 6.5.1 and higher. By using an interface which is similar to the GroupWise Win32 client interface, one can browse through all mailboxes of a GroupWise system to query, open and export data from one or more selected mailboxes. Check it out at

http://www.redz.nl/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=6&Itemid=26

*** Back to BrainShare, more about the keynote ***
On Monday, as always, we started with a keynote delivered by Jack Messman, the Novell CEO. He welcomed the more than 6.000, of which more than 1.200 are new attendees. Jack mentioned that this last year has be one of the biggest steps forward for Novell and for Linux, for example more than 3 million Linux servers and 10 million Linux desktops

are now running worldwide. And last week Novell has released OES, the Open Enterprise environment that runs on a Netware and a Linux kernel.

BrainShare this year will deliver more than 300 unique sessions, of which more than 100 are about Linux and Open Source. Jack presented the example of one customer Comair (a Delta connection carrier) which delivers more than 1.100 flights per day to 30.000 passengers. This customer is currently changing almost their complete environment to Linux servers and desktops.

Another big step forwards is the raising number of Technology Partners growing to 560, a 10 fold growth. Of course Jack also mentioned the big steps forward with the Novell Linux Desktop. And he spend quite some time on GroupWise, for which we will see 3 major releases until 2008. Jack mentioned "GroupWise - it's just getting better" and the question "Is there a future for GroupWise?" was answered with a Product Support Guarantee for next 10 years. In the vision of Novell Hula will be what Apache is for web servers. Another nice detail: a copy of the Linux server will be part of Sequoia release, more nice on Wednesday.

Next announcement was about Novell Linux Small Business Suite, that was official released today. More about this also on Wednesday. Next subject was about Linux in the data center, which deliver support for Linux and Windows desktops. Novell has started a program for to strengthen Linux in 5 area's and Novell currently runs 179 Linux servers in Novell's data centre. All windows backup server are migrated to Linux and the Oracle environment will be migrated to Linux soon.

Novell has validated configuration program, which adds

* application environment

* high availability & clustered storage
* machine virtualization
* systems management
* security

How to meet Growing and Conflicting Demands on IT?
* YaST - central management for Suse Linux
* ZENworks 6.5
* Zenworks 7.0 suite announced will include Linux

Zenworks 6.5 was rewarded by Infoworld as "best management solution ever".

Novell Application Services Foundation
* JBoss & Novell work together
* Yes-certified Products, from 203 last year to 1.600 this year, 1.400 running on Linux

Another example presented was the State of Nebraska, which did many projects about identity and eGovernment. They implemented the Nebraska directory services includes a Personalized Portal and Single sign-on. Identity driven technologies and the "who, what and the how paradigm" are very important.

David Patrick - VP Linux & Open Source, presented part of the session about Linux adoption in the enterprise and the Linux product strategy. A single OS from desktop to data center, with Linux is the foundation and SLES as the core. Linux in workgroups was a big success even before release, there were 7000 downloads during the Public Beta. Ed Anderson, the VP marketing, showed some of the nice features of OES, which in Novell’s vision is an affirmation of support for Netware. He also showed the Orion cluster, with a single click migrating a NSS volume from Netware to Linux and back again, very cool. All of this is CIM and WBEM based and can thus be integrated in management consoles like Hp console.

SyncSort has announced a release which will support backup of a mixed cluster of Netware and Linux OES and it will back up the shared resource, not the physical server, so after node-failure it will continue from the point before the failure

Last but not least was the demo of the Novell client for Linux, delivering the same familiar experience on Linux as on Windows, even processing the login scripts.

David Litwack, VP Identity Mgmt, showed several cool things about Identity Management. One important announcement was that Novell has connected closely to JBoss, which is a very important Open Source application server platform with 6 million downloads. He demonstrated the strength of the combined solutions in a customer case about Synovus securities, with 25 billion assets and 10.000 employees. They integrated their Peoplesoft environment with Novell and JBoss tools. Another example came from a demo of two banks that merged, after which users of both banks could enter the new system by using Self Provisioning, very cool.

*** TUT 145 - Configuring Novell eDirectory for 802.11 Wireless Authentication ***
After the keynote I was supposed to go to this interesting session, but I ended up in the lab talking to several GroupWise partners.

*** TUT 131 - Novell GroupWise Messenger and Gaim: Installation, Configuration, and Optimization ***
Gaim and GroupWise Messenger are very interesting solutions and this session offered very many interesting viewpoints on how to install and configure both solutions. More details in the presentation file, that will be available at the website soon.

*** DHO 330 - Developing to the GroupWise SOAP/XML Protocol ***
One of the most interesting sessions of the day was this developer session, in which we were shown how we can access the GroupWise data store via the SOAP protocol that will be embedded in the Post Office Agent. The SOAP/XML protocol will be very important in the near future, it will open up the GroupWise backend in very easy to use way for programmers. It will open up things like all messages, appointments & tasks, address book and rule engine. This will enable more and more developers to create very cool integrations with GroupWise. This is a "must-look" for the more serious developers.

************************
In between the sessions I’ve been talking to many GroupWise partners and GroupWise guru’s about many things, like the GroupWiseR EMEA Tour and the upcoming GroupWise Summit in June 28 and 29. As you might know I’m trying to work with a lot of these people to work on a community project called GroupWiseR and we’ve discussed many interesting things about the progress of this initiative.

If you’ve any questions, please mail or call me, my PDA’s are waiting for any mails. And if you do not want to receive this newsletter anymore, just send a reply with the remark "NOT WANTED" and I will make sure you will be taken of the list.

Have fun and speak to you soon!

Regards,

ir. Erno de Korte

MCNE/MCNI/MCSE/MCT
T +31-180-322300
M +31-629-016000
S erno60

" Brought to you by the GroupWiseR guys " (Quote from Gert ter Burg)