The Condrey Corp. Blog

GWAVACON Day 3 Report

Doug Ouzts had his second  DocXchanger session this morning and we had better attendance than our Sunday morning at 8:00 session. We credit this increased attendance to the later time as well as the introduction to the product that each attendee got during Speed Dating.

We have been having some great discussions today with partners about DocXchanger and the new Novell File Management Suite.

Doug Ouzts missed the closing keynote this afternoon because he was with a Novell Technical Sales Specialist visiting a customer here in Las Vegas.

Speaking of the Novell File Management Suite, the new edition of Novell Connections Magazine just came out and there is a great article on the suite inside.

GWAVACON Day 2 Report

With most people today attending sessions, we did most of our talking during session breaks.

Unlike last year when we talked exclusively about DocXchanger, we’re talking about both DocXchanger and Kanaka. It’s been interesting to hear all of the stories from people here about Macintosh users who they work with that are having problems accessing their Novell network storage. Many of these attendees are leaving with Kanaka flyers to share with their colleagues and customers.

We’re just down from the Novell booth and many the people visiting the Novell booth are learning about the new Novell File Management Suite and coming to our booth to learn more about the two components of the suite that we develop, namely, Novell Storage Manager and Novell File Reporter.

Speaking of Novell File Reporter, we now have the white paper and podcast available at the product website.

GWAVACON Day 1 Report

The first of our two DocXchanger sessions was at 8:00 this morning. Doug Ouzts did a great job showing how the product eliminates the need for email attachments in Novell GroupWise.

Our next DocXchanger session is on Tuesday morning.

It was a full day of sessions and NFL playoffs. Due to the Saints vs. Vikings game, the famous GWAVACON Speed Dating was delayed an hour this evening. By the time we got started, we had to condense our message from 90 seconds to 60 seconds. We were able to talk briefly about Kanaka, DocXchanger and the Condrey Corporation developed products that Novell OEMs—Novell Storage Manager and Novell File Reporter.

At one point, Doug and Buck were able to get their picture taken with “GWAVA Man.”

Participating in GWAVACON

We’ll be participating again this year in GWAVACON in Las Vegas. Like last year, we’ll be talking to attendees about DocXchanger and its ability to eliminate the need for sending email attachments in GroupWise, or any other email system.

While end users may not recognize the problem created from sharing documents via email, IT people who maintain mail servers certainly do! File attachments are the primary reason for bloated mail servers. Additionally, sharing files via email introduces all kinds of problems with document version control and document security.

Well, you’ve pretty much heard the points that we will be bringing out during the “Speed Dating” portion of the show, where all attendees stop by each sponsor’s booth to hear a 90-second product overview.

Of course, we will have a couple of DocXchanger sessions during the conference on DocXchanger as well. Like last year, Doug Ouzts will be running those.

We really enjoy working with the people at GWAVA. As we learned last year, their customers and partners are extremely loyal.

We will be doing daily updates on the blog.

Novell File Management Suite Released

With today’s release of the Novell File Management Suite, I can finally post some of the information we have been eager to share for quite some time.

The Novell File Management Suite integrates an updated version of Novell Storage Manager, the new Novell File Reporter, and the new Novell Dynamic File Services. Novell Storage Manager and Novell File Reporter are both Condrey Corporation developed products.

By leveraging identities and events in the directory, Novell File Management Suite enables network administrators to intelligently manage files and optimize existing storage investments while helping to derive greater business value from digital assets. You can read about the release here.

Over the last week, David Condrey has participated in calls with analysts from Gartner, IDC, Burton, and Forrester, and each call has gone really well. Each acknowledged the exploding growth of unstructured data and was intrigued by Novell’s approach to 1) Learn what unstructured data they have through Novell File Reporter 2) Automate the tiering of this data based on file type, size, or access through Novell Dynamic File Services, and 3) Automate the lifecycle management of unstructured data through Novell Storage Manager.

As part of the Novell File Management Suite release, we have introduced a new Novell File Reporter Support Site. We’ll be talking a lot more about Novell File Reporter in future blog postings. One thing worth mentioning right now is a new SKU that we created for partners. The Novell File Reporter Assessment SKU lets Novell partners purchase the product at a dramatically-reduced price for a 60-day deployment at a customer site. The partner can then use Novell File Reporter to generate reports to let the customer know the exact state of their storage, and to make recommendations for cleaning up, tiering, and restructuring the storage.

Of course, the ultimate long-term solution to addressing the customer’s storage growth is automated management—through the directory-based policies that drive the other components in the Novell File Management Suite, namely, Novell Storage Manager and Novell Dynamic File Services.  If the partner’s customer chooses to deploy the Novell File Management Suite, the price of the Assessment SKU is credited toward the purchase of the Suite.

 

Novell Storage Manager 2.5 SP1 Available Next Week

There are going to be some exciting announcements next week pertaining to new Novell products that were developed by Condrey Corporation. Once these products are available, we’ll be highlighting some of the more notable product features on this blog.

 

Something we can share now, however, is the release next week of Novell Storage Manager 2.5 SP1. This release includes:

• A completely new NSMAdmin interface for Active Directory managed networks
• Novell Storage Manager policy reporting enabled (through a new product available next week)
• Support for Windows Server 2008
• Event monitors that no longer have to run on domain controllers
• A new Storage Redistribution feature that redistributes storage content based on capacity in use