I am not new to Novell’s Zen product suite. I used Zen about 10 years ago at one of my first technology jobs. Looking back I would consider myself to have been closed minded about technology. I was all about Microsoft OS’s and discounted Novell’s NDS. That was difficult for me since at the time I worked for a company who used Novell, and Microsoft was just gaining a footing in the network department. My first real promotion was when I got taken off the help-desk and given the task of dealing with our growing NT environment. As a side aspect of my job I was to head up any special projects that came up. I know that the special projects aspect was just my boss Jeff wanting to be able to get me involved in anything he wanted to put me on. I was one of a few people who he liked to use to just get stuff done quickly.
I bring all this up because one of the first projects I got involved with was Novell Zen. When I was on the helpdesk I got involved in desktop image building, and then projects related to installing applications. I remember spending countless nights with a team of 10 people running around floor after floor upgrading software. I swore there was a better way. One day I was complaining to someone in our network dept and they where like “yeah we have something that would speed that up”. They where talking about ZEN, or Zero Effort Networking. At the time it was a new application from Novell that we owned, but no one wanted to deal with it. My big mouth got me in charge of looking into using it. If after all I had an issue with how we deployed apps, why didn’t I try this out and see if it would work. I remember that most people looked at me funny when I talked about using it. Everyone was skeptical, including myself. But the potential was huge. I ended up leaving that company before we could roll out every application with ZEN, but we had gotten to a few of them, and the fundamentals where down.
The next job I went to ended up having their own packaging system that the put together from an off the shelf app. When you are a group at IBM Global Services you can do such things. The project I was on was a fantastic example of automated application deployment, but I am getting off topic a bit.
In the end after Global Services I really didn’t get to play with any software deployment tools again until recently. The jobs I took for a while where not desktop management related, or where too small of an environment for them. Where I am now has grown enormously since when I started. A few years ago we kicked around using Microsoft SMS, but it never got out of the testing phase. I just wouldn’t do what we wanted. We always talked about how awesome ZEN was, but we thought that you needed a Novell network to run it, and we where all Windows so we never gave it much thought.
That was until last year. My friend Joe who is a big into Novell software said you can get ZEN to work just fine with a windows environment. Our interest was peaked. It wasn’t until Scott (another Scott, not me) started that we had the kick in the ass to look at ZEN. he had some experience with it and finally convinced us to seriously look at it. That was earlier this year. I am amazed at the potential of this application. We are in the middle of rolling out client desktops with ZEN and the Novell Application Launcher. Most of the products we use are packaged, and we are working on the rest of them. What is amazing is that we have eDirectory (Novell’s version of Active Directory, or shall I say AD is Microsoft’s version of Novell eDirectory since Novell has had their directory services around for years before Microsoft’s) getting all its information out of our 2003 domain and it really does work!
As I said we are in the middle of a ZEN deployment at one of our offices. it coincides with a new hardware roll out so it makes life easy to enable all new machines to use ZEN. Next up is doing the same roll out in our larger office. We have only cracked the surface with ZEN. Right now we are using the imaging function that works great. We have the remote control feature setup but as of yet I am not sure if we have actually used it on anyone. That makes supporting people between two offices nice since we can have support staff in either office help just about anyone if they have ZEN configured. We also have the packaging part of ZEN down pretty well. That of course was the driving force to use the product in the first place.
Next up is finishing re-deploying desktops and laptops everywhere in the company using ZEN. Then it is on to inventory control and more frequent updates (allot more) of the software suite. Now that we can package and quickly update images we can make changes faster with less down time. it is amazing stuff. I must sound like a Novell poster child? I sing the praises of products that work. Now it wasn’t all sunshine. We had our setbacks, and it took allot longer than we had planned to get as far as we have, but it DOES WORK!!!
It is weird going from mocking Novell, to being a person looking at other products they have going, hey this stuff may be just what I was looking for. And on the flip side I have come to question allot of Microsoft’s moves recently. Not all of them, but it says allot that I am writing this entry on a Macbook Pro, and I find myself looking at linux based applications more and more.
The moral of this entry (yes there is a moral to this) is that I shouldn’t mock any technology because one day it may be just what you need!
Technorati Tags: Desktop Management, Novell, Package Distribution, SMS, ZEN Works