Anne-Lisa and Gary manning the Adaris booth
It’s already been two weeks since BrainShare, and so now is a good time to look back and summarize some of the highlights for us. As usual, it was wonderful seeing all of the great folks at Novell with whom we work with and who support us – Tracy Smith, Wendy Steinle, Jared Burrough, Patrick Hynes and all of his crew – as well as making new friends with whom we hope to work on new business – Karyn Victory, Greg Barnes, Kyle Revell, etc.
Adaris was there not only to learn and find out what’s new; we also had a booth and got to meet a lot of Novell customers! A lot of conversations around ZENworks and our new aZension Companion appliance – we think this is gonna be hot!
There sure was a lot of buzz this year about the “new” Novell, this of course being the first BrainShare since the acquisition by AttachMate. There certainly was a lot of emphasis on the new theme of “re:focus, re:kindle and re:turn”. Signs were everywhere reminding us that there’s a new crew running the ship and that things are about to change.
Juan Carlos Cerrutti (VP North America Sales, Novell), Jacques Sauve, Jeff Hawn (CEO AttachMate) and Bob Flynn (President Novell)
As usual, BrainShare is not just about the keynotes and technical sessions; it’s also a chance to build relationships. We certainly got the chance to do that, including the opportunity to meet and discuss with the AttachMate and Novell executives. Jeff Hawn and Bob Flynn are very likable people, and are very dedicated to rebuilding Novell.
If you want to get an idea of what the whole theme was about, you can view Bob’s keynote address here, if you haven’t already seen it. It’s only about 10 minutes long and worth watching.
From a technical standpoint, there were a couple of great announcements. Probably the biggest buzz was created by Richard Lindstedt’s demo of Novell Filr. If you have 15 minutes to spare, watch the keynote – this is file management taken to a whole new level!
On the GroupWise side of things, the new version – announced as GroupWise 2012 – sports a brand new WebAccess UI. Very nice! The WebAccess templates for iPad also received a lot of praise.
With Tay Kratzer of GWAVA. Tay is the one who wrote Reload. He's our GroupWise Hero!
Not to be outdone, the ZENworks team also showed up with their demo of ZCM 11 SP2. Among the highlights:
- Full-disk encryption
- Mac support for remote control, application deployment and asset inventory (now that got a lot of applause!)
- A new NTFS driver that will greatly speed up Windows imaging
I also got to do a couple of Vibe sessions with Tracy Smith, Product Manager for Vibe, and some partners from Europe. It was fascinating to see how much farther ahead Europeans are with Vibe! It has gained a much broader adoption over there than here in North America – we would definitely like to change that! Tracy also demoed the Microsoft Office plugin, set to be released early in the new year, after Vibe 3.2 arrives in mid-November. Users will now have a new tab on their Office ribbon to allow them to open and save documents directly from Vibe! Very cool! That was very well received by attendees.
BrainShare is just so jam-packed with information, it’d be impossible to cover all the announcements and news here. You can head out to the Novell BrainShare site and see all of the keynote videos and demos, as well as download all of the session presentations. It’s nowhere near as exciting as being there, but at least you’ll have all the good stuff!
With Lanai Bayne & Crissi Gutierrez of SEP Software, our favorite backup solution for OES!
We had such a great time! See you Brainshare 2013!