Ease of Use.....

About 2 months ago, we started working on this new "Provisioning Solution".  We had the full court press from the vendor, out of country contractors, VP's of Application, PM's of Doom and the Salesman. Our current provisioning is a rather ingenious in house system that was cooked up using Access and a good deal knowledge. Having been working on Novell IDM for the last 3 years I have a pretty good idea of what it can and can't do.....

This new solution? Can't rename attributes down stream? Can't edit the XML directly, can't reconfigure on the fly or move drivers from one device to another rapidly. No IDE, no easy command line access,. It's all "web" 2.0'd to death, and it's sluggish. IDM routinely parses over 12,000 records in an hour, this one? (and this is from their developer) would take "20 hours" to parse the same amount of records. To support this super duper solution we need to spin up a "DEV" environment, which means that I needed to produce a separate but identical eDir, IDM and AD. The eDir? simple, spin up a SLES 11Sp1 box, load in eDir, load in IDM. Do the connector magic in Designer. LDAP export PROD into the new DEV for the O's and OU's. Deploy, get the Certs right and start. Minor tweaking ensues and in 5 hours I have a duplicate environment with all the users and groups.  The IDM and the AD won't take even close to that long. 

That new fangled one? yeah.... 8 weeks, and it doesn't do anything yet. It could provision eDir and AD sure, but it has this bug....

If you use the new tool to change your password, it sets it in eDir, it sets it in AD, but......

it locks you out of the new solution.......

Because it can't change the password there......

Ease Of Use, Helps get IT done......

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.