Michael Platt's WebLog : Novell

Events, Events Events!

Michael Platt — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 05:11:00 GMT

So looking through my calendar for the next couple of weeks I have a ton of presentations to give and events to attend. First of all tomorrow at 2pm BST I am giving my Integration and Interop presentation, latest version, as a webcast which should be interesting. I have given this presentation as a 2.5 hour session and a 30 min session and had too much both times so an hour webcast will be interesting.

Next on Wednesday we have an MVP day where I will be presenting the half hour version of the same thing and then on Thursday I will be going to the John Craddock AD day here at Reading which looks very interesting and will help to crisp up my thoughts around IdM and organizational mapping.

On Monday next week (the 11^th) I will be running a session on Architectural Failures at SPA 2005 in Bedfordshire. This is not a presentation but a tutorial / workshop format where I go through some examples and then the attendees add in their ideas. I have never done anything like this before so I am a bit nervous but I think I have some good examples so hopefully it will go well.

Then off on the airplane to Edinburgh (shame because I will miss some of SPA) for the first of the Technet Roadshows at the Corn Exchange on the 12^th and 13^th where I will be doing the Keynote on DSI and the one hour integration and interop talk on the 12^th followed by the keynote on Yukon on the 13^th.

Then on the 21st of April at Reading there is a half day session on Enterprise Library being run by one of the Patterns and Practices PM’s from Redmond. There will be both a customer session in the morning and a partner session in the afternoon. I haven’t been keeping up with what has been happening in the Patterns space recently and so this will be useful to get up to date with how the application blocks are getting pulled into a library.

Further out the next Architect Forum is on June 16^th in the Cavendish Center in London and will be on Connected Systems (Microsoft speak for SOA).

So it looks like an eventful (yuk!) couple of weeks!

Infrastructure layers

Michael Platt — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 20:11:00 GMT

Following onfrom my blog yesterday I have collated all the feedback I got (Thanks!) and came up with these major levels and elements in the levels:

Hardware

1. Hardware (routers, servers, client devices, wireless, storage (SANS / NAS))

Network

2. Networks (Protocols, DNS / Bind, Wireless, VPN, VOIP, dynamic routing)

3. Directory (LDAP, AD, iplanet, NDS, edirectory).

4. Security (Physical, Standards, Kerberos, Certificates, IDS, Virus detection, SSO, IRM, Identity, IM, WS-Sec, Federation)

5. Firewalls (Proxy’s, IDS and firewalls)

Base

6. Web Servers (Apache, IIS)

7. File and Print (Windows, NFS, Novell, LU0)

8. Clients (Apple, Unix, Novell, Win 98, 3270, 5250, Mobile, Office, Browser)

9. Platform (Virtual Servers, Windows, UNIX, LINUX, Zos, AS400, SUN OS)

10. Fault Tolerance (High availability, Clustering, Load Balancing, Backup, Geoclusters)

Packaged Solutions

11. Data (DB types, DB suppliers, Stored Procs, Data Access, Data Formats, Data Transform)

12. CRM (SAP, Peoplesoft, Siebel, Great Plains, Reporting, BI, Commerce Server)

13. Messaging and Collaboration (IM, Lotus, Groupwise, Exchange 5.5, Exchange 2000, SPS, STS, Portals, Fax)

Custom Solutions

14. Applications (VB, Delphi, COM, J2EE, NET, Java / JSP, C++, Cobol, WS)

15. Transactions (ES, MTS, OSI/TP, Tuxedo, J2EE, CICS, IMS)

16. Process (MSMQ, MQSERIES, Tibco RV, Biztalk, Websphere)

Management and Operations Process

17. Deployment and Management (SNMP, WMI, MOM, SMS, Tivoli, CA, HP)

18. Design, Planning and Operational processes (MSF, ITIL, MOF, COBIT, PM)

19. Frameworks (Zachmann, FEA, RM-ODP, TOGAF, BAIT)

Now I can use these to frame my interop presentation and ensure that all the levels are covered. Interestingly if you map products across these levels they tend to be a stake or stovepipe right through the levels.

For example HIS 2004 (SNA Server) provides support at levels 2,4,7,8,10,11,14,15,17 and 18 for a specific technology (mainframes)

Technet Event on Interop

Michael Platt — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 21:23:00 GMT

On Thursday next week I am presenting at a Technet Evening on Interop and so am putting the talk together. I don’t particularly want to go into a huge amount of detail on each Microsoft Interop product but want to give a structure or architecture for thinking about interop, talk about the issues at each level and then use the products as exemplars.

So my thoughts about the agenda are:

Why interop

Approaches for interop (ESB, SOA etc)

An Architectural framework for interop

Infrastructure interop

Application interop

Management and process interop

The future of Interop

With a few demos thrown in. (if I can get them to work, my last HIS demo was not a great success!)

The MS products covered will be:

SFU

SFN

MIIS

.NET

SQL Server

MSMQ

HIS

Biztalk

MOM

SMS

So it won’t be a in depth drill down into each!

I hope to make the event interactive to find out what areas people are interested in so as to refine this talk. Let me know if you are going to be there or would like anything else covered.

As always, Simon Guest is the MS guru on interop

Billg on Interop

Michael Platt — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 17:37:00 GMT

Last week Bill Gates wrote an email about interop which is interesting because emails from Bill indicate a strong interest by Microsoft J) His interop premise was threefold:

1. The need for interop will never go away.

2. The only way interop had worked in the past has been through interfacing software and hard work; not any of the IT snake oils that have been touted.

3. The way we will get interop to work in the future is via interfacing standards (XML and WS-*).

I agree with all he says although I think it will be a long and hard road. I also think that architecture, abstraction and modelling will play a big part in making it happen but then I guess if you are Bill you can leave the details to peons like me J.

Do go and read the email and have a look at the interop site (it is after all interop month). The best MS interop blog is Simon Guest’s.

Novell NDS migration and Quest

Michael Platt — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 17:32:00 GMT

I went to a presentation on Friday by Quest Software on their Novell migration tools (NDS Migrator) which I enjoyed because it was given by a techie who knew his stuff and just demoed the tools. Excellent! I had two main thoughts about the whole NDS migration area:

Firstly whilst the tools did a great job doing the actual migration there was a whole load of pre planning which had to go on around it which was probably more challenging. During this you will need to determine which tools are the most appropriate (manual, SFN, or Migrator) and then a complete project timeline and actions. There is an excellent planning guide which covers the technical aspects of migration but there are still a lot of project and people issues which need to be addressed. Incidentally whilst reading the guide it occurred to me that the actual detailed steps would be ideal for a blogcast to make the whole thing more understandable, a sort of blogproject! Actually talking about project management reminds me of a training video on an office move with John Cleese in it that I saw about 15 years ago which was absolute hilarious and very accurate.

Secondly the key moment is when the user switches over to AD from NDS. Whilst it would be nice if this could all happen at once fact of life is that planned that way. Ideally there should be a (web) portal which the user goes to with all the information they need, the script start points, FAQ and help information. Quest has the bones of this but it would be great to have a templated version.

Anyway an interesting session. If you are interested in NDS migration we will be running an NDS interop and migration session at Reading on the 29th of March where Quest has agreed to talk. Do come along.

Novell at IT Forum

Michael Platt — Sat, 11 Dec 2004 04:24:00 GMT

I was meant to be giving a Novell Netware talk at the UK IT Forum on Jan 13 in Birmingham but read the slides and couldn’t make head nor tail of them so got the expert Planky to agree to do the talk instead. I am going to give him a hand which means I have to build the demos and I will do some blogcasts as I get each piece going.