Apr 21, 2011

Novell Datasync

Smart App, good interface, needs to be marketed better.....

We're implementing Datasync because we have an influx of iPhones and tablets starting to wander into our world. At effectively zero cost except for the CA Cert and SAN space it makes it an economic good choice in my book. Right out of the box, it's going to save time and money, down the road we should be able to leverage it to our SharePoint Implementation.

The build is straight forward, build a SLES 11 SP1 x64 box with 8GB of RAM. Fairly steep RAM requirement for a SLES box, but it's running in VMWARE, so it's just a configuration gotcha. We updated the build via our SMT before configuring. We followed the build guide and it worked like a charm. We did upgrade the groupwise back end to 8.02 HP2, this is important since it throws SOAP errors unless you do this update. Mail setup is fairly straightforward an easy. We're currently testing blowing up phones remotely and should be implementing this in May/June.....

It really needs to be talked up better by Novell. Businesses have potential savings in large amounts, either through migrating from Blackberry and BES to Android/iPhone or by adding it as a value added service to their users (never underestimate the value of good will).

If we can figure out how to allow some of our outside users onto Mail clients, this should be a slam dunk

Caveats.

You MUST be running GW 8.02 HP2, anything less will SOAP error your PO into a down state very quickly. For access outside your network get a REAL cert from a cert provider, but on the plus side you only need to expose one port to the outside world, 443.