Well here it is another year gone by and time to head back to Salt Lake City for the annual migration of the Novell geeks, Brainshare. Actually it is over a year because this time, the meeting was a month later than typical. That means no skiing in Utah this time. Oh well I never have before so no big loss!
Due to other commitments, I arrived on Tuesday for my "first" day of Brainshare. After a great Monday night of tax time abuse and no sleep, I rushed to the airport, flew out on the 6 A.M. flight and arrived in time to catch the end of my first scheduled session! So with no further delay let's talk BS.
The attendance is always hard to estimate and I find that changes to the layout of sessions has spread out the people. But my impression is that a lot more people than last year are seen in the halls between sessions. I will say that most of my sessions have not been completely full so maybe they are not really attending the learning part?!
The Novell BorderManager Advanced Configuration(TUT345) session was good although I missed over 2/3's of it. I was very interested in the material on the new version that is due out and will include some new features including the ability to work with other VPN clients. Maybe I can convince a client to upgrade to it!
My next session was a vendor talking about their product, SurfControl(IO291). It seems that these are more common in recent years at BS but this one was interesting and the speaker was responsive to our questions and concerns. A very short synopsis would be to say that the filtering function and process for web and email was discussed. There was a big round of sighs when the platform used for email scanning was revealed to be Windows 2000 server. The discussion of security and relaying started at that point.
Automated eDirectory Health checks and Troubleshooting(TUT259) was one of the many eDirectory sessions I am attending this week. The majority of these sessions will concentrate on iMonitor as a tool and ignore the older tools. If you don't have eDirectory 8.6 you need to get there or higher if possible(warning your mileage may vary and no warranty is implied!) One 8.6 or higher server(8.6.2 really is best) will run iMonitor and allow you to do many of the monitoring and troubleshooting functions even on your older boxes!
De-Spamming your GroupWise System(TUT231) was a great overview of all the options to reduce and control spam. The new features of 6.5 were discussed and then other third party vendors products were reviewed. One of the speakers was from a GroupWise consulting group that does a lot of GroupWise books and the other was the programmer for Guinevere and the code that GWAVA was based on.
Elevating Business Productivity with Advanced GroupWise Administration(TUT335) was a great presentation from a Novell Advanced Technical Training instructor. He spent a lot of time going over the proper ways to configure LDAP and SSL on GroupWise. The screen shots and explanations were very good reference material. The session finished off with a discussion of the GW backup and restore functionality available in GW 6 and 6.5. Let's just say backup and restore is actually a realistic option with GW without losing your mind. Oh and you can now recover a deleted user without taking heavy tranquilizer doses!
Maximum GroupWise Management(TUT291) was a vendor presentation that concentrated on issues that were addressed by their product. Since I don't use the product and I was very tired I slipped out after a bit.
One irritation is that the BS network has a strange locked down windows workstation configuration. The workstations retain personal information for the GroupWise login and web pages like hotmail from the previous user. I was one of many that could not successfully access the free GW 6.5 account they set up for me.
Finally before heading out for the evening I made sure to take a shot at the climbing wall. Last year I did 3 of the 4 sides of the pillar. This year I would like to do the fourth side but alas no luck the first day. I will keep you posted!