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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

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.

Our Novell BrainShare participation this year is exclusively in
support of the Novell File Management Suite. The five Condrey Corporation
employees we have at BrainShare this week are teaching people about Novell File
Management Suite by conducting sessions, working in the IT Central learning
lab, or both.

In this morning’s keynote address, Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian
talked a bit about the Novell File Management Suite and this seemed to bring a
lot of people to our area of the lab. We are showing the three components of
the suite on three adjoining tables. 

 
The Installation and Migration Depot a few feet over from us
in IT Central, includes exercises for attendees to learn to use the Novell File
Management Suite in either a Novell eDirectory or Microsoft Active Directory
environment.

David Condrey, Doug Ouzts, and Ed Shropshire all helped
conduct sessions today.

Each attendee received in their registration materials this morning, a special BrainShare issue of Open Horizons Magazine. Open Horizons is a magazine published by Novell users in Europe. The BrainShare issue included an article on the Novell File Management Suite written by Buck Gashler.

We were pleased to see that the editors of eWEEK included
Novell File Management Suite among the six products highlighted in the magazine’s
February 15, 2010 “Products to Watch” section. If you happened to miss it, you
can see the review online by clicking here and then selecting product #12.

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.

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.”

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.

Last week, Condrey Corporation hosted technical training for
all of the Novell Technical Sales Specialists in the End User Computing business
unit, sales and marketing officers in the same business unit, and a select
number of partners at our corporate office in Greenville, South Carolina.

A notable attendee was Ross Chevalier, CTO of Novell
Americas and President of Novell Canada. Ross not only attended, but completed
all of the courses over the three-day event.

The training covered Novell Storage Manager, along with two
other new products that will comprise a new offering tentatively set for
release in January 2010. The three-product suite will include two Condrey Corp.-developed
products. As I’ve mentioned earlier, I wish I could divulge more, but I cannot
say much until everything ships.

Our training room has 24 workstations and as you can see,
the place was completely full. According to some of the Novell Technical Sales
Specialists who attended, the training courses were well written, technically
in-depth, and very well conducted by our Partner Relations Director, Doug
Ouzts. The enthusiasm for the upcoming release is very high—especially with our
partners.

We even hosted a “Meet the Experts” night that gave the
attendees the opportunity to visit with our engineers and testers.

Our training schedule continues next week with training at
two locations in EMEA, which will be conducted by our Director of Product
Management, Ed Shropshire and Novell Advanced Technical Training in Las Vegas
with Doug Ouzts.

We were notified today of the release of two patches from
Novell that resolve the AFP incompatibility between NetWare and Open Enterprise
Server (OES) 2 with the new Mac OS X Snow Leopard operating system.

NetWare Patch: Build
129585 ‑ "Mac OS X 10.6 support for NetWare 6.5sp8"

Download URL: http://download.novell.com/Download?buildid=ClL27E0t6HU~

OES 2 Patch: Build 129565
‑ "Mac OS X 10.6 support for OES2 SP1"

Download URL: http://download.novell.com/Download?buildid=DujkwtJ8y7s~