Cool Solutions Available Here Web Communities Deliver Ideas and Experience
It's midnight on a Friday night, and you realize that
you've just inadvertently deleted your User Profiles,
which means that no one, including the CEO, has
access to their mail accounts. How do you recover?
Or perhaps you've just installed some new Novell
software on the server, and now despite your best
troubleshooting efforts it's not working the way you
think it should. Where do you start?
What you need is a place to turn where you can find
answers, examples, and advice from a community of
people who can help you think through the problem.
Often, the solution is simply the right information at
the right time.
The Novell Cool Solutions Communities are web
sites hosted by Novell and designed to round up the
best ideas and present the experiences and best
practices of fellow users and others who really know
how the products work.
Cool Solutions communities aren't meant to replace
Novell's comprehensive technical support offerings.
Rather, they're supplements, providing information
and tips that you may not find anywhere else.
When you enter the community, you're connected to
a variety of information sources: answers from
manuals, ideas from popular Novell Technical
Support Documents (TIDs), postings from support
forums, tidbits from training courses, scenarios from
consulting, excerpts from popular Novell Press
books, and, most importantly, real-world examples
from reader submissions.
One important role of the communities is to highlight
the most important and timely information for readers
and to connect good ideas from all around the world.
A THOUSAND HEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE
Because Cool Solutions readers are immersed in
system administration tasks every day, they know
best what the critical issues are for other system
administrators. And they enjoy sharing their ideas
with everybody else.
Take the recent "Melissa" virus crisis as an
example. Melissa began spreading on a Friday night
and by Monday morning an alert reader, Craig B. of
Winnepeg, Canada, had already shared his method
of using ZENworks to distribute an anti-virus tool.
Sharing this type of timely information with the world
would have been impossible without a community
like Cool Solutions.
In some cases, the editors of Cool Solutions are
surprised by what readers think is useful, and they
respond by supplying information that fills the
information gaps. For example, several readers
inquired about command-line options for ZENworks,
and the editors discovered that this information was
not available to users. They obtained the information
from the lead engineer, and it will be published soon.
The Cool Solutions Club:
ZENworks
GroupWise
Novell Directory Services
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E-mail this article to a co-worker,
a friend, or the boss
Send a letter to the editor
Subscribe to the lead stories
mailing list
Visit the lead stories archive
READER FEEDBACK DRIVES THE SITE
Without the feedback from readers in the ZENworks community, the editors would never
have known this information was valuable. In addition to readers' e-mail and web surveys,
the editors review site stats and monitor the areas of the community that get the most
traffic. Based on this analysis, they develop content that readers want.
Sometimes people don't just share success stories. Sometimes they share their
mistakes, attempting to save other readers from repeating them. For example, Paul M., of
Silver Spring, Maryland, posted a confession on the support forum when he accidentally
deleted all his users' User Profiles using ZENworks. He explained in detail how he made
the mistake and what he did to fix it. Since not everyone has time to read the support
forums (which are automatically archived after 45 days), the editors contacted Paul to see
if they could publish his experience as an example. As a result, everyone can benefit from
Paul's experience. "No sense everyone making the same mistake," Paul wrote. "Avoiding
this one will give you time to make others."
Sometimes members of the community send more than just information. For example,
Daniel S. of Wuerzburg, Germany, sent in his QuickTID application which automatically
launches TIDs from the Windows system tray. This EXE saves a lot of time looking up
technical support documents that are referenced by number. Because of this easy access
to the world-wide community of Novell users, Daniel was able to share his tool easily and
everyone benefits.
NOVELL USES THE COMMUNITIES TO BUILD BETTER PRODUCTS
Cool Solutions editors read each e-mail message and analyze trends in reader problems
and requests, sometimes even posting surveys to measure customer satisfaction and to
test feature ideas. This information is given to each of the product's core teams. This
customer integration is becoming more and more important in the design of products that
will be successful.
Often the engineers use the information gathered from the Novell communities. For
example, when GroupWise engineers began designing the next version of the Calendar
Printing feature they contacted Cool Solutions for customer feedback. This has been a
popular topic with GroupWise Cool Solutions readers for more than two years. Using the
reader's questions and suggestions as a starting point, the engineers were able to extend
the product in the direction that people wanted. In fact, the engineers actually
corresponded with some of these readers to explore their requirements. As a result, Novell
released the Calendar Printing Pack 2 in April 1999 which comes closer than ever before
to being the perfect calendar solution.
In a lot of cases, readers ask for things that don't yet exist. For example, Naum L.
submitted an idea about where she'd like to see Novell extend NDS: "Is there a plan to
develop NDS to work with mobile phones? My immediate idea is to extend the NDS
schema to include a phone number field in the user object. Then, through a special
interface software, a mobile phone could connect to NDS to search for a user's phone
number. So a mobile user would no longer be limited to the storage size of the handset
itself."
The Cool Solutions editors shared this idea with the NDS core team, which consists of
engineers, product management, support, and testing. They immediately saw the value of
the idea and are considering it for the future.
HOW READERS USE THE COMMUNITIES
The GroupWise Community has been online since December of 1996. Readers report that
this information has helped them evaluate the product, successfully install it, train new
users, and optimize GroupWise for their use. They've learned to create rules, add
signature blocks, leverage shared folders, and store documents in a library. Using the
resources available on the site, such as Custom Third-Party Objects (C3POS) which are
offered for free downloading, users have been able to do things such as use GroupWise as
their default e-mail program in Internet Explorer.
The ZENworks community began for users of the Novell Application Launcher (NAL) in
August 1997. Readers report similar gains in their success with that product, due to the
information they've found on the site.
Based on the success of the GroupWise and ZENworks communities, it was decided to
expand and add a community for NDS users. This site was launched in May 1999.
HOW TO ACCESS THE COOL SOLUTIONS COMMUNITIES
The editors do not consider that they own these communities, they simply host the
interaction. The strength of these communities is the ongoing dialogue that takes place
between the readers and Novell. By hosting the Cool Solutions Communities, Novell
provides a place where readers can talk with other readers, product experts, and power
users.
In these communities, readers can share their success stories, learn from each other's
mistakes, and get information about implementing Novell products. In addition, each
reader who participates in the communities has a vehicle to let Novell know what new
products, or enhancements to existing products, they need to be successful in the
competitive IT world. And Novell has a forum where they can interact on a daily basis with
their customers and become acquainted with the issues they face each day.
This means that Novell can build products and software solutions that solve real problems
and make life easier.
Published May 25, 1999
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