Novell shops help each other

I saw the headline of a press release at Novell’s Web site this morning that read: “Arkansas State Becomes First Novell ‘Linux Center for Excellence’.” Now as a longtime resident of Texas, I’d been taught that “Arkansas” and “Excellence” were two words that rarely showed up in the same sentence (the exception, of course, being “Arkansas game shows Excellence of Longhorn Football team”). That’s a joke, son, don’t flame me!

Of course, in tribute to Novell’s own technical excellence, the headline was available on the Web site, but the actual story wasn’t. Although there was a nice “404” error page inviting me to send feedback to the Webmaster. Still, while poking around looking for the press release I did stumble across an article from a year ago spotlighting a cooperative effort by two organizations that I’ve mentioned in this (or one of the other) newsletters over the years.

British Telecom (now called “BT”) has long been a big user of NetWare and other Novell products while doing a large amount of in-house development to NDS/eDirectory. Blue Lance is one of the oldest developers of third party NetWare utilities. So it should be of interest when these two get together to solve a problem.

The story, “British Telecom deploys LT Auditor+ to manage internal auditing across platforms” was written by BT Senior Technical Specialist Mike Hopkins and is available at Novell’s Web site (https://developer.novell.com/success/bluelance2.html) as a developer success story.

In this case, it’s one developer organization calling on another to help solve a problem. You should read the entire story for yourself, but the gist is that BT, with over 100,000 user accounts, needed to implement strict, watertight auditing rules for the network and its resources. Not “wanted to,” but needed to. It was a requirement from BT’s independent auditors and it’s something many of you are facing as you try to handle your organization’s regulatory compliance efforts.

Even though BT Exact (BT’s technology and research and development organization) is an internationally renowned center of excellence in IT and networking technologies, BT still felt it necessary to go to a third-party to help it get a grasp of the problem. Actually, it may be its ability to recognize when outside help is needed that makes BT such a renowned enterprise. To cut a long story short, the article details how Blue Lance’s LTAuditor was able to allow BT to come to grips with the auditing data it needed for not only its many NetWare platforms but also its Windows servers and networks.

You go read the article and I’ll look for that Arkansas press release again. Or was it West Virginia?