* Reader calls for a ZENworks module for instant messaging
Last issue, I was talking about reader mail in response to last month’s newsletter about the new ZENworks 7 suite. One note I got, from a reader in New Zealand, proposed that what was really needed was a new “ZEN,” one for instant messaging. That brought back memories, some good and some not so good, going back over my 20 years with NetWare.
I’m not sure if Novell claims to have invented instant messaging, but it’s certainly been present in every version of NetWare I’ve ever used. Those short text messages, often called “broadcasts”, which appear at the bottom of the screen. They originated back in the days of all DOS clients (even before Windows 1.0 was available) by taking advantage of an often overlooked element of the DOS operating system.
Although the screen could display 25 lines and 80 columns on the typical PC screen, whenever the 80th position on the 24th line was written to and the cursor advanced to, the screen would scroll up one line. Applications, thus, were only writing 24 lines of text. There were system calls that could be made to put the cursor at the first position on the 25th line without scrolling the screen, and the bright folks who created NetWare took advantage of this to institute a method for the network manager to communicate with the users. The server itself would issue messages to the clients (“Warning! Server going down in 5 minutes!”), or the administrator could do it manually (“Log off now!”). Messages could even be sent to particular users or groups (“Justin, log off now!!”). This was a great tool – when used for the good. The problem was that any user could use the tool to communicate with any other user. Worse, users quickly discovered that they could embed backspaces in their message so that no one could tell who was sending it. A cottage industry grew up trying to find the right tools and utilities to control 25th line messaging.
There were some limits to the messaging, specifically in the amount of text that could be entered and the ability to engage in actual conversations (and scroll back and forth through the text). Jump forward to the 21st century, and other developers such as Yahoo, AOL, ICQ and MSN have solved those problems. Instant messaging is not only something teenagers do with their cell phones, but what millions of computer users around the world use to keep in touch with an immediacy not present in e-mail. The traffic as well as some of the content that IM can cause, though, is something many network managers want to control.
When Novell rolled out the “Digitalme” project some years ago, it announced a plan to work with AOL to deliver “Instantme” to the desktop, an instant messaging solution which never got off the ground.
But Milan, in Auckland, suggests that Google’s recent announcement of an open source IM client coupled with Novell’s embrace of all-things open-source could make for a fertile ground to grow a new Open Enterprise Server feature, and a new ZENworks module – ZEN for IM. ZENworks is the tool network managers like to use to control their networks. IM is an application that users want but managers want to control. I do hope Novell is listening.
