Novell Zenworks

The last day of my course touched on Zenworks and when I say touched I mean that we spent a day on Zenworks yet looked at just a VERY small handful of the suite.

To say Zenworks is huge is a bit like saying a nuclear explosion is a 'bit noisy'. This thing contains support for pretty much everything out there from laptops to desktops to servers to handhelds and beyond.

The area we looked at on the course was Zenworks for desktops. Basically this requires a NetWare server for the explorer components which goes out on the network, finds all the machines and reports them to the Zenworks database.

Once in the database you have all sorts of management and monitoring as is normal with these types of products. Alerts will be reported into a central database and can be send out via email, pager, SMS or other combination.

Zenworks appears to be a pure 'back end' product. There is no 'nice' front end from which the status of a network can be easily worked out it really is a techie back end tool.
From what I saw of Zenworks there is very little it cannot do but it requires NetWare and eDirectory which if not already used day to day by clients in an environment can really complicate the environment. In these cases something much simpler such as SMS would undoubtedly win.