As I am writing this I am sitting in on a meeting with Novell to learn more about their new Patch Management software. The concept is great, instead of trusting my 800+ users to learn everything about each patch released for their workstation and use their judgement to install it, I can review a list of updates that are applicable to the computers on my network and push them out based on my judgment as a network administrator. The service is provided by PatchLink, who gathers and "fingerprints" the updates to determine what .dll's will be affected, what exactly the patch is doing, and who really needs to install the patch. (And that's just based on a brief introduction!) There are tons of other features, but what this thread is really about is how the Novell Patch Management Server operates. While it does interact via the Novell network with a client-side application that adds itself to the end user's control pannel, the server-side application itself is little more than a web application! (in fact, you can safely close all ports except 80 and 443, it is actually reccommended.) This is making me feel much better about my new project, which I hope to keep 90% of the application web-based. The demonstration I am watching from Novell is reassuring me that we no longer have to think of enterprise applications as non-portable, self-contained, pre-compiled packages. This application uses IIS, ASP, and SQL Server, which I'm definitely not a huge fan of (The demonstrator appears to be looking forward to a less Microsoft dependent solution almost as much as I do.), but this does make me feel better about using webservers with enterprise level database servers to manage a truly elaborate, functional, and reliable enterprise application.
hmmm "paradigm" and "novell" someone's been watching a powerpoint presentation given by a sharp dressed sales rep...
Who? Me?! maybe.... But he didn't mention once "paradigm" or "outside the box" (which was good, because I would have had to throw something at him if he did). I just used paradigm because it's a cool word. (And I used to listen to a band called paradigm shift, which I remembered during my post for some reason...) And novell wasn't really meant to be descriptive so much as the company's name. (The one that somewhat recently purchased SuSE).
Yup, we touched on SuS/WuS but since they are competing, they've put some spin making Novell looking better. (I was more impressed by the fact that an enterprise application was web-based.) Their solution was more Novell-oriented, and would probably be more beneficial than WuS for reporting services more than anything else. (But that's just because we use Novell in my office. If we used ActiveDirectory, we'd go with WuS probably.)
oodles of enterprise stuff is web/java based. myself i still prefer terminal for a lot of stuff thou (quicker)
