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Getting the Directory To Deliver August 23, 1999 By Jonathan Feldman Standard marketing hype for any desktop management suite would have you believing that the product is faster than a speeding bullet, can leap tall mainframes in a single bound and can even help you centrally manage a great number of desktops. But the vendors shouldn't bother with the hype. All we really want is to reduce the labor involved with desktop management. It's easy to test a desktop management suite. If your primary user authentication method involves NT domains, 10 licenses of Microsoft's SMS are included with Microsoft Developer Network; if you're using NDS, Novell includes 10 free starter licenses of its ZENworks. ZENworks includes an application-management suite, a desktop policy manager and a remote-control component. All are NDS-aware and snap in to the standard NetWare management tool, NWAdmin. The only standalone administration component is the Snappshot utility, which is used for generating standard templates of a given application. ZENworks is comprised of three workstation components: NAL (NetWare Application Launcher), which delivers applications to users via snapshot technology; ZENRC, the remote-control application; and WM, the workstation manager, which delivers standard Microsoft policies from NDS, inventories workstations to NDS and communicates workstation changes back to NDS.
Snapshot Mascot Usually an application will be associated to a user via NDS; the application then shows up in that users' NAL window. However, NAL is also useful for updates. You can combine NALs RunOnce and Force flags, compelling a user to load a required update. Because the system runs the update only once, users aren't pestered the way they are when updates are run from a login script. Unfortunately, there's no way to check the date of a given file, then run the update if the file is out of date. Similarly, NAL can't launch an application based on the results of a registry query, though this capability is scheduled to be in the forthcoming ZENworks 2.0. Luckily, NAL is just as capable of running a third-party scripting tool as any other application; your script can invoke the application, set window focus, send mouse clicks and so on. We used and liked WinBatch, but any scripting tool would work. (See "NAL Plus Scripting Tools Yields Powerful Automation" to the right.)
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During the past 18 months, we tested ZENworks in our Savannah, Ga., labs, and found that it does exactly what it's supposed to do: distribute standard network applications to desktops, simplify the system-policy process, perform workstation inventory and deploy administrative remote control--all within the framework of NDS. Still, there's a knack to using ZENworks, with both its deployment and its troubleshooting. We discovered its snapshot application technologies can require a good bit of juggling to get just right, third-party scripting solutions are almost always required and embedding desktop management functionality in the directory means you'll have to keep your directory super healthy. ZENworks' low delivery complexity means the back end needs rigorous maintenance, but it's a worthwhile trade-off.
