The Condrey Corp. Blog

David Condrey Speaks at Novell TTP Conference

The annual Novell TTP Conference is being held this week in Provo. TTP stands for Technology Transfer Partners and the membership is largely members of Novell academic accounts, including K-12 and higher education. There are members from all over the world attending the event this week. A similar event will be held later in Riga, Latvia.

David conducted four individual sessions yesterday on the Novell File Management Suite, Novell File Reporter, Kanaka, and Novell Storage Manager.

In the latter session, David talked quite a bit about the feature parity that will be introduced in this summer’s release of Novell Storage Manager for eDirectory and Novell Storage Manager for Active Directory.

Attendees also got a first look of screens showing collaborative storage management and quota management in Active Directory—features that have never been available before in the Active Directory version of the product.

A popular item at the conference has been the Condrey Corporation hats featuring the Novell TTP logo that each attendee has received. Here is a picture of someone wearing the hat during the Novell Storage Manager session.

The Novell TTP Conference continues throughout the rest of the week.

Novell Storage Manager Development, Kanaka Deployments

All of us at Condrey Corporation have been involved in the development of a new version of Novell Storage Manager, codenamed “Pinehurst,” that is scheduled to be released sometime this summer. This version is the long awaited feature parity version where the Active Directory product has all of the features of the eDirectory product.

Over the last three weeks, this blog author has been writing documentation for the Pinehurst Active Directory Administration Guide. The new quota management and collaborative storage management—features never before available in the Active Directory version of the product—are working great.

The biggest change with the eDirectory version of the product will be the NSMEngine being hosted on an OES 2 Linux box. I haven’t had a chance to work with that yet, but I’ll be doing that soon.

In other news, a lot of our Kanaka customers have been upgrading to Kanaka 2.0—the easiest, and now most flexible way of providing Mac access to Novell network resources.

The upgrading has been especially fast paced with our academic customers in the U.S., where it is summer vacation—the time when many of the K-12 projects take place. The feedback on Kanaka 2.0 continues to be good. Customers seem to be pleased with the addition of the new Kanaka Desktop Client.

Kanaka 2.0 Released Today!

Today we released Kanaka for Mac 2.0, a significant update to the product’s single login access for Mac OS X in Novell networks. In addition to the traditional single login authentication and access of Novell storage resources through the Kanaka Plug-in, Kanaka for Mac 2.0 provides a new Kanaka Desktop Client as an alternative authentication and access method.

Our press release went out this morning, and we’ve updated our Kanaka product pages, as well as made the Kanaka 2.0 release the focus of our front page.

A focus of our press release is our restructured pricing, which our partners have been eagerly sharing with their customers.

If your organization has Mac users who need access to Novell network storage resources, Kanaka is for you. It’s easy to install, easy to configure, and now even easier to purchase!

Novell Storage Manager Featured in Success Story; Kanaka News

Novell recently published a press release of a solution deployment at Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW) that included Novell Storage Manager. You can read how the university "...reduced storage management time from 40 days to one day."

We posted earlier that Kanaka for Mac 2.0 would be available in April. Well, we've moved the release date to May 4. We'll be posting plenty of news about the new product next week.

Novell File Reporter 1.0.1 Released Today

It was just a little over three months ago that we introduced Novell File Reporter 1.0 during the launch of the Novell File Management Suite. Following the release, we immediately set to work on making Novell File Reporter be able to report on the file-based data stored on NAS devices in Active Directory and file-based data in server clusters in eDirectory and Active Directory. Released today, Novell File Reporter 1.0.1 does this through the introduction of proxy agents that work in conjunction with NFR Agents.

If you have Novell File Reporter in a network environment with Novell Storage Manager, you will need to update to Novell File Reporter 1.0.1 as well as the new Novell Storage Manager 2.5.2 (also released today) to utilize proxy agents.

 You can read how to set up proxy agents for reporting on EMC Celerra or NetApp NAS devices by reading the new Chapter 8 in the Novell File Reporter 1.0.1 Installation Guide. To read how to set up reporting in server clusters, read the new Chapter 9.

 Both updates also include bug fixes which are detailed in the Novell File Reporter 1.0.1 Release Notes and the Novell Storage Manager 2.5.2 Release Notes.

Getting Ready for Kanaka for Mac 2.0

We’re pleased to announce our plans for releasing Kanaka for Mac 2.0 this month!

Kanaka for Mac 2.0 will provide Macintosh OS X workstation users automated single login access to Novell eDirectory storage resources through flexible login options. As with previous versions, the Kanaka Plug-in component will allow users to simultaneously log in to the workstation and mount storage resources through a single username and password. Kanaka’s newest component, the Kanaka Desktop Client, will allow users to access network storage resources after they have logged in as a local user to the Mac OS X workstation.

Additional product enhancements will include an updated Kanaka Plug-in Console (formerly known as the Kanaka Dashboard), and support for Macintosh OS X “Snow Leopard” including 64-bit support.

For those of you who did not get a sneak peek of Kanaka for Mac 2.0 at BrainShare, here is a look at the login screen for the new Kanaka Desktop Client.

The Kanaka Desktop Client is something that some of our customers have been wanting for a long time. In fact, a few select customers are using it now and love it.

If you’re a Kanaka customer and up to date with your Maintenance agreement, you’ll be getting the new version real soon.

If you are tired of painful manual configuration process involved in integrating your Macs in your Novell network, then Kanaka is for you! Learn more about Kanaka by visiting our product website.

Novell File Reporter Attention at BrainShare

The IT Central lab assignments at Novell BrainShare 2010 last week had Condrey Corporation people dispersed among the three tables and six workstations showing components of the Novell File Management Suite. As the author of the Novell File Reporter documentation, I was asked to work at the eDirectory and Active Directory Novell File Reporter demo workstations.

In a very short amount of time, it was easy to show the power of Novell File Reporter with its ability to generate reports among the server volumes of large enterprises, so that administrators could access information such as duplicate file reports, owner reports, access date age reports, filename extension reports, and more.

I recall talking to one woman who worked for a state government. Among all of her responsibilities, she had a task of periodically going through peoples’ home directories, determining which files were non-work related files and then removing them. I asked her how long this takes, and she didn’t want to say, but responded that she had now learned who the biggest storage abusers were and really focused on those individuals’ home directories, so it didn't take as longs as it used to take. She said that a few people had a real problem of storing a large amount of JPEG files.

I then asked her if she wanted the ability to quickly see how many JPEG files were being stored and where they were located. In no time, I showed her how to generate a filename extension report using Novell File Reporter. I then asked her if it would be useful to know what all of her workers were storing. She replied that this would indeed be useful, so I showed her how to generate a user report showing what all of the users in our demo network were storing.

She is just one of the many people who requested that I get back to them this week on Novell File Reporter.

To learn more about Novell File Reporter click here.

BG

BrainShare 2010 Day 4 Report

On this, the last day of BrainShare 2010, Doug Ouzts, David Condrey, and Ed Shropshire conducted the last of our seven sessions at 10:30 AM. It was another session on Novell Storage Manager, and attendance was good.

Those of us working in the IT Central lab did more demos of components of the Novell File Management Suite, and even demos of the upcoming Macintosh client in the next version of Kanaka. A few of the people that stopped by only had a couple of minutes to talk before they were heading out to the airport, but they wanted to get some last-minute information on our products.

Novell File Management Suite was the first of the on-stage demos during the final keynote address during the afternoon. Richard Lindstedt and Kevin Smith from Novell gave the demo, which covered all three products in the Novell File Management Suite.

Overall, our experience was terrific. The attention that Novell gave to the Novell File Management Suite was remarkable. And this attention seemed to gain momentum as the week progressed. For those of you who stopped by our tables in the IT Central lab, thank you for talking with us and giving us feedback on the products. We all took a lot of notes and we’re now determined to make a great product even better.

For those of you attending BrainShare in Europe in May, be sure to stop by and visit with Ed Shropshire.

BrainShare 2010 Day 3 Report

Wednesday was another full day for all of the five Condrey Corporation employees working at BrainShare. The IT Central Lab was again busy, as more and more people are hearing about components of the Novell File Management Suite and are coming over to ask for demos.

There were also a number of people that came by following the session conducted by Doug Ouzts—“Control the Chaos with Novell File Reporter.”

David Condrey had an interview with Burton Group analyst Richard Jones on Novell File Management Suite in the afternoon. The suite had Richard’s attention because he and David talked for three hours.

In the evening was the IT Tech Talk event. Formerly, this was known as “Meet the Experts.” Since this event is held at a time when no sessions are going on, many people choose this time to come by and say hello as well as learn about the products we are showing.

All five of us stayed busy all night answering questions and giving demos.

Many came by to learn about Kanaka and see a demo of the new Mac client that will be available with the plug-in in our next release.

BrainShare 2010 Day 2 Report

We hosted a partner breakfast this morning for some of our Condrey Corporation partners that are in town for BrainShare. Following breakfast, Doug Ouzts, Ed Shropshire, and David Condrey all helped present our first session of the day: “Novell Storage Manager, Your Secret Weapon for Simplified File and User Management.”

The IT Central lab was very busy today. We had a lot of Novell Storage Manager customers stop by to say hello. We also were visited by a lot of people just wanting to learn more about the Novell File Management Suite. After demonstrating the suite of products, we encouraged people to go to the Installation and Migration Depot to do some exercises with each of the products.

A lot of people came by today to specifically see Novell File Reporter. Many had heard about the product in sessions they had attended either yesterday or today, and wanted to see the reporting capabilities of the product.

David Condrey participated in a Novell File Management Suite executive event this afternoon for some select Novell customers. Along with David’s presentation, the group heard from Rick Villars, IDC storage analyst, and Ross Chevalier, CTO of Novell Americas and President of Novell Canada.