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Technology Stocks : Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sepku who wrote (27972)	9/1/1999 9:29:00 AM
From: DJBEINO	Respond to of 42771

ZENworks 2 Offers Feature-Rich Desktop Management Tool September 6, 1999 By James E. Drews Desktop management has always been a pesky issue for IT. Novell's recently released ZENworks 2 offers a big helping hand. The new version adds features that many administrators will appreciate, including the ability to associate an application with a workstation object instead of just user objects, and the availability of pre/post-install scripts per application, software inventory scans and new reporting features. I'd be hard-pressed to name a feature that's missing. I concentrated on the new features in my tests of ZENworks 2. Rest assured that all the features of the capable ZENworks 1.1 remain (see our assessment of ZENWorks 1.1 at www.networkcomputing.com/907/907sp1.html, and our desktop management workshop on ZENworks at www.networkcomputing. com/1017/1017ws2.html). I very much liked the new association of application objects with workstations. Instead of installing scanner software (by visiting each workstation) on the one or two machines that have a scanner, administrators can create a NAL (NetWare Application Launcher) object and have the application show up only on selected machines. Sure, you could just go and install the scanner software on the machine, but then you miss out on NAL's self-healing capabilities; it detects application launch failures and reinstalls the application. To test the association feature, I created a NAL object for Real Player and associated it with workstations that had an installed sound card. It took about an hour for the application object to become available on the assigned workstations; forcing a refresh on the application launcher didn't help. (Novell has acknowledged this is a bug and expects a patch will be available on its Web site by the time you read this.) After the workstation's normal rescan of NDS, the object showed up as expected. The updated NAL program gives administrators more control over what applications are displayed to the end user. For example, you can set up an application to show up only on a specific version of Windows 95 (such as OSR2), or only if a specified registry key is present. Administrators can apply other filters, including the existence, version or date of a file; variables in the environment; or the installation of another NAL object. Now, when checking for free disk space, the administrator can specify a drive letter, or one of several new options including the drive on which Windows is installed or the drive to which the TEMP environment variable is pointing. Instead of merely hoping all machines are set up identically, the administrator can use any of these new options to check free space. When distributing applications, administrators now are able to launch pre- or post-install scripts. With the previous version of ZEN, administrators only had pre/post scripts that run before or after the application's launch. This is a feature I certainly need nowadays in our NT environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison labs. Our workstations are locked down so users can't modify most of the local file system. The latest release of Netscape insists that a file (NSREG.DAT) be writeable. What's worse is that the file must reside in the C:\WINNT directory. With the new pre/ post-launch scripts, I can set up the post-install script to run the XCACLS.EXE program from the NT resource kit to set permissions on the file. When the application is installed, the NAL helper services do the actual installation so users need no special access to install software. NAL also offers much more reporting than was previously available. Administrators can elect to log application launch successes or failures to a specified log file, or via an SNMP trap. This is enabled per application object, and a different log file could be used for each application object if desired. An impressive Java-based reporting tool can create simple reports. When it comes to controlling user/workstation policies via ZENworks, administrators had been restricted to the set of policies that Novell chose to include. There was no way to add custom extensions. In ZENworks 2, however, you can add your own policies to both workstation and user objects by importing an .ADM file. Here's one feature that's been on my wish list. I quickly used it to add a policy to enable/disable the "Lock Workstation" button on NT workstations. The most recent version of the NT client now supports this option. Another weapon joining ZENworks 2's arsenal is the ability to perform software inventory scans of workstations in addition to hardware scans. Instead of storing all this information in NDS, Novell has provided a runtime version of Sybase that installs along with ZENworks. The workstations will report their inventory to the database. A Java-based reporting tool is also provided to query the database and create printed reports. Novell includes ODBC drivers for ad hoc queries with programs such as Microsoft Access. The ODBC drivers are conveniently installed via a NAL object. When I was setting up the workstation policies to enable the software inventory, I noticed it took a long time to bring up the extensive list of applications for which to scan. It contains more than 8,000 entries and it can be edited. Administrators are able to pick and choose the applications for which they'd like to scan. In my tests, I chose to scan for all applications known to the database. My only criticism here is that there are few tools available for managing the database. There are none for pruning or removing any information about machines that aren't around anymore, although there are tools to backup/ restore the database. Included with ZENworks 2 is a five-user version of Check 2000 from Greenwich Mean Time, a program that determines workstations' Y2K compliance. Also included in the package is a six-month subscription to VirusScan anti- virus software. James E. Drews is a network administrator for the CAE Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Send your comments on this article to him at jdrews@nwc.com. networkcomputing.com