Things I learned from Brainshare Day 1
1. New boss, Same as the old boss. Unfortunately, the replacement of Jack Messman as CEO of Novell did not lead to any significantly better Keynote presentation. B O R I N G! Once you’ve seen a Stevenote, the rest is pretty pointless.
2. OES2 is going to have some really amazing stuff in it, primarily in regards to XEN paravirtualization. Clustering GroupWise or other apps through XEN should allow seamless cluster failover.. and when I say seamless I mean they are claiming zero packet loss when moving VM’s between two different physical machines.
3. Bonsai is looking good. The next version of GroupWise finally has a Mac/Linux client that looks usable. I do need to talk with the GW folks at meet the experts about integrating with OS X address book (or at least importing it) since I have so many users already using that facility.
4. iFolder 3.6 is looking good. Unfortunately the Mac client will lag behind the release about 90 days. I’ll have to keep my eye on that.
5. AFP on OES2 doesn’t look very good. Spoke with some guys at the NSS booth who handle filesystems and they said that they were shocked during the beta conference calls how many people were asking for AFP services. I sent an email to one of the product managers involved in making that decision. That email is below. I encourage you to write the same email if you are interested in this feature.
From: ecallis@district106.net
Subject: AFP on OES2
Date: March 19, 2007 3:34:16 PM MDT
To: kkimball@novell.com
Kirk,
Thanks for your time today in the lab at BS. I wanted to take you up on your offer to accept my input on AFP for OES2. I was greatly dismayed to learn that the team has not developed a directory integrated implementation of the AFP protocol for OES2. I am a long time Novell customer, about 12 years and have always used Apple computers on our desktops with Novell products in the data center. Not having AFP or a native NCP client is an absolute deal breaker for me with regards to a continued relationship with Novell as a customer.
You and Paul discussed using SMB as a substitute for AFP for Macintosh access to OES2 boxes. In some instances this would be OK, but in many instances it simply would not work in the academic environment that is my reality. I have been able to test several OS X applications that simply don’t work correctly over SMB links (for whatever the reason). They were written and tested for AFP services and are not likely to ever be tested in a CIFS network environment.
I am willing to give any more input that would help in the cause of building this AFP capacity back into OES2. I would really hate to see my long relationship with Novell come to an end over this.
I’ll try to post some more notes today… BS 2007 Day 2
Technorati Tags: Brainshare, 2007, AFP, OES2, iFolder, SMB, Bonsai, GroupWise, XEN, paravirtualization
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