Jacques Sauve (center) and some of his team members with their new laptop.

Unless you’ve been completely disconnected from the Internet for the past two months or so, you may have seen this video of Mr. Tommy Jordan, a North Carolina father who dramatically destroyed his daughter’s laptop after she posted some nasty stuff on Facebook.

Ok, so he shot her laptop with his .45.

Needless to say, the video went viral and opinions were polarized as to whether he went too far.

I don’t care about the “shooting of the laptop”. Enough has been said about that.

What I do care about is Mr. Jordan’s message: that we need to own up to the fact that we need to educate our kids that there are consequences to living in a digital world, and that with the freedom to post things publicly comes a certain responsibility. As he stated in his blogs after  all this happened, it’s not up to the schools or the education system to teach them; ultimately, it is our job as parents to make sure they get that.

I have two wonderful daughters of my own,14 & 12, and I’m happy to say that so far we’re very proud of who they are. I’m hoping that this is some kind of reflection on my wife and I’s work. We’ve done things differently, but to quote Mr. Jordan himself:

“Modern” parenting raises ill-prepared kids who can’t do anything and have no skills because they’re protected from even LEARNING them until 18 years old, at which time you want us parents to throw them out into the world, send them off to college, and expect them to be productive members of society? You can take your “modern” parenting, and shove it. Jeezus people. Half of you think chores at 15 are too much! God forbid we make them actually WORK too!

I agree!

I also like the fact that he received great support:

The police by the way said “Kudos, Sir” and most of them made their kids watch it. I actually had a “thank you” from an entire detectives squad. And another police officer is using it in a positive manner in his presentation for the school system.

Recently, Mr. Jordan decided to shoot another laptop to raise money for charity, in response to everyone who asked “Hey Tommy, when are you gonna shoot another laptop?”

The laptop on display at the Adaris office.

I certainly didn’t ask him to shoot anything else, but decided to bid on the laptop for several reasons:

1. To show my support for Mr. Jordan’s position on taking ownership of our kids’ education
2. To help his fundraiser
3. Why not? Own a part of a great Internet viral story!
4. I work on a Mac, anyways – I don’t like PCs either! (Ooooh, this’ll draw the ire of a couple of trolls! LOL!)

That’s all! Stay happy, folks!

Jacques Sauve
President
Adaris Technologies

One of the places I took him to was a restaurant called L’Entrecôte St-Jean, right in the heart of downtown. This place has been around for over 25 years and has always had the same menu: a striploin marinated in a mustard sauce, served with homemade fries, all prefaced by a crisp salad. You basically have only two options: you have it with or without the soup of the day and the dessert! Shouldn’t take anyone more than about 12 seconds to decide! Of course, the beef is delicious, as are the fries, soup and salad. An excellent selection of wines is available to accompany your meal, and an ambiance that leaves no doubt that you are in French Canada.

My friend agreed that this was a great business model: do one thing, but do it well. The proof was right there: 25 years in business with only one dish on the menu, and patrons are still packing the place.

The Crèperie Catherine in Mont-Tremblant, Quebec

On Sunday morning, I took him to Mont-Tremblant, Quebec – a world-class ski resort with plenty of local fare to enjoy. We ended up having breakfast at Crèperie Catherine, a tiny little restaurant that specializes in – you guessed it! – crèpes (very thin pancakes, normally stuffed with cheese, mushrooms, and whatever assortment of fillings you can imagine). We happened to be sitting right next to where Catherine (yep, the Catherine!) was making the crèpes. We started talking with her and found out that she had started the place 18 years ago with her husband, François, and her sister Lorraine. Her sister was still behind the counter with her making breakfasts for the guests! They had both been working on merchant marine ships, sailing back and forth across the Great Lakes and working as cooks. Catherine loves making crèpes, so when she met François they started Crèperie Catherine and have been loving it ever since. If you are ever in the Montreal area, you owe it to yourself to head out to Mont-Tremblant and kickstart your day with one of Catherine’s crèpes!

Catherine (right) with her sister Lorraine, doing what they do best!

And again, the topic of “do one thing, but do it well” came up. Catherine said that over the years, many people had suggested that she make the place bigger and add more items to the menu. My friend and I both shook our heads and agreed with her: No! It was perfect the way it was: quaint, friendly, and delicious! Why would you want to gamble when you already had a winning formula?

Of course, this got me thinking about my own business – Adaris – and how, throughout the years, we had decided not to add too many vendors and products to our portfolio. We were, and still are, first and foremost a “Novell shop”. We also work with VMware products, and other vendors are certainly part of our arsenal for some services (TrendMicro for AV requirements, Fortinet for UTM devices, etc), but Novell solutions are the reason we exist. This always surprises many people, since so many have migrated to Microsoft solutions and never looked back; they are often stunned to hear how many Novell customers are still out there, enjoying the reliability of the products. Not only that, but most customers have no idea that most of Novell’s solutions work natively in a Microsoft/Active Directory envrionment (think ZENworks & Vibe, for example).

Our team is small, but we have had the opportunity – and the pleasure – to work with some very large, important customers all across Canada and the US. I strongly bellieve that one of the reasons is because we choose to do one thing, but do it well.

It all started with this blog by David Strom. Mr. Strom is described as an IT journalist, so I’m not sure what real-world experience he has with actually supporting and managing enterprise email systems; however, he apparently knows enough to claim that no one cares that Novell has a new version of GroupWise. This, of course, has set off a string of responses & comments.

First, there was Michael Osterman of “Osterman Research”, who rebutted Mr. Strom’s article with his own blog entry and argues that actually, many care about a new version.

As a Novell Platinum Partner who works with many GroupWise customers, I couldn’t agree more – customers are indeed happy to hear about the new version! For sure, many customers have dropped GroupWise in the last several years to move to Exchange, and quite a few of these have secretly admitted to us that it’s been a step backwards in terms of support, maintenance & reliability. Of course, no one will ever admit that publicly – just as in the past “nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM”, today it’s the same with Microsoft. Those customers who have remained with GroupWise, however, cling to it with almost religious fervor.

Why?

Well, for one – it just runs! One of our local customers is a school district with over 7,500 employees and teachers on a 5-post office GroupWise system, all running on virtual servers in a XenServer infrastructure. Last summer we added three post offices in order to provide email services to the more than 40,000 students; although the students don’t use the email services all that much, the employees are very heavy users. In the past year, hundreds of these users have also started synchronizing mobile devices – Blackberries, iOS & Android devices – with GroupWise.

What’s so spectacular about all this? There is only one, single, lonely administrator for this entire email infrastructure! GroupWise, the BES server and the Datasync Mobility server – all alone…

Based on the last research we’ve seen (download Michael Osterman’s paper, Comparing the Real Cost of Email), it takes one Exchange administrator per 1600 users, so the system described above would require about 4 or 5 administrators (and I’m not even counting the 40K students in this calculation)!

Finally, Kari Woolf, Product Marketing Manager for Novell GroupWise, published last week a wonderful rebuttal to all the naysayers  - get over the past and move forward! Like Kari, I too am tired of the negative press and the pessimism about GroupWise and Novell in general. Adaris is entirely focused on providing professional services to Novell customers, and not only are we doing well (which always surprises many people!), but we’re also growing and hiring!!

We love the new Novell and are confident that things will get even better!

January 2012 – Adaris rolled out Novell Service Desk to enable closer customer communication, more customer involvement and interactions! Our staff has been using Novell Service Desk since late last summer to log Service Requests and Incidents, which already took a major load off of the support tracking process, and now we have enabled even more collaborative features so that our customers can open their own tickets and follow-up their progress. Thus far, our clients are thrilled; this gives them a more active role in our partnership and better visibility into the resolution of any technical issues.

Adaris customers now have three options for opening tickets with our technical team:

1. They can call in and our technician will open the ticket for them
2. They can email a dedicated support email address and a ticket will automatically be created
3. They can login to the Novell Service Desk portal and open and manage their own tickets

Novell Service Desk is entirely web-based and works with any browser on any platform. This allows our technicians to respond to and follow-up on their tickets from anywhere, even from their iPhones using the iOS mobile app! All communications with customers are handled by Novell Service Desk; when a technician adds a note to a ticket, it is emailed to the customer. He or she can simply respond to the email and their response gets added back as a note to the existing ticket. This ensures that the entire history of communications with the customer is stored in the ticket, making it easier for another technician to pick up the ticket and know what has been done and follow through.

Alternatively, customers can login into the Novell Service Desk portal and manage tickets there: open and close service requests & incidents, add notes and comments to existing tickets, upload attachments such as screen shots or log files, and get the status of the tickets.

Novell Service Desk is based entirely on ITIL processes making it a very solid foundation to streamline and automate IT services on! In addition to providing better communications with our customers, the team at Adaris is also implementing Change Management processes in order to better serve them. Our staff is now using Novell Service Desk to plan, execute and track changes in our customers’ networks, ensuring that all changes are handled effectively.

In the continual quest to improve our service response times and delivery, Novell Service Desk is a critical component towards achieving our goals through better and more collaborative service delivery to our clients.

For more information on the product, please visit the Novell Service Desk page, or contact us for a demo and more information.

Our immediate need is for a Network Support Consultant, who will manage our service desk and monitor our customers’ networks, but we are also looking to hire a (preferably!) young Linux enthusiast who wants to launch his or her networking career. Both positions will be out of our office located on Sainte-Therese, Quebec, located about 30 minutes north of Montreal.

Having said that, our consultants are called upon to travel very frequently, as we get engagements across the continent: Charlottetown, Calgary, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Quebec City & Toronto are some of the Canadian cities we have worked in during the last year, and New York, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh & San Antonio are some of the US cities we’ve had a chance to work in. So if you don’t like traveling and meeting new people, then Adaris will not be a good place to work for you!

Keep in mind that Adaris is a Novell Platinum Partner, and as Canada’s most pro-active Novell partner, it is the focus of our business. If you believe that the world is painted blue and and only Microsoft products interest you, then you will be disappointed if you come to Adaris! We will train you and invest in your career, so if Linux is your OS of choice and you want to learn something new, then you will love it here!

Basic Requirements:

• Bilingual, French and English
• Valid passport and no travel restrictions
• Must have a car and valid driver’s license

Current Postings

Network Support Consultant

• Receive and handle all support calls from customers
• Manage service desk tickets
• Manage network monitoring system & respond to alarms from customer networks
• Ensure integrity of customer documentation
• Be available on call evenings and weekends to handle network alarms

Network Consultant

Ideally, as mentioned above, we are looking for a young Linux enthusiast who would like to kickstart their networking career. We are looking to train someone on the following technologies:

• SuSE Linux Enterprise Server
• Novell Open Enterprise Server
• Novell GroupWise
• VMware

Much travel may be required, so keep that in mind!

Interested?

We hope so! Send us an email telling us why, along with your CV, to info@adaris.ca.

I replied to her tweet with, “?? What are you talking about?”

My brother then called me and told me that it was in the news – the office building where Adaris is located had been burned. Apparently reporters were calling it a “total loss”.

Great. This was gonna put a dent in the Christmas festivities, for sure – cancel all the guys’ time off, call the insurance, find a new office, order some new servers and equipment, rebuild all of our servers and restore the data.

Eeeeehh! “Restore the data!”

This is where you really see if your backup strategy is worth a dime! Luckily for us, Sebastien, one of my engineers, did have the last good backup tape with him! Phew!

Despite all the initial excitement, I told my brother that it couldn’t be that bad; after all, I had received the email from our network monitoring service at 6AM, I had over 15 new emails on my iPad from our GroupWise server, my web sites were up, Vibe was working…how could it be a total loss?

As it turns out, the media had exaggerated the story a little. A couple of teens had set fire to the garbage cans outside the building. The flames climbed up the wall and damaged a small restaurant downstairs and an office next door to Adaris, but as you can see from the picture, it’s far from a total loss.

Still, this was wayyyy too close for comfort, and I was glad to see that our backup strategy ensured that all of our data was safe. I give thanks to my team for taking care of that!

I share this story with you so that you can see how vitally important it is to take your backups off-site! I still come across customers who backup their data every night but leave the tapes in the office. This is USELESS, folks! Think about it!

Oh, and by the way, they caught the two teens who did this. Yay!

Gotta be some proud parents, there, eh?

The Adaris team has prepared some special Holiday treats for you!

First up, Jacques, Eric & Gary are Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree:

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Click here to view the video on YouTube.

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And then the rest of the team is celebrating with Santa: Michel, Sebastien, Mathieu, Anne-Lisa & Debbie!

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

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Here’s wishing ALL THE BEST for you and yours during this Holiday season,

and may your 2012 be absolutely FANTASTIC!

From Everyone @ Adaris! 

• Versioning Management – turn on/off, set max/minor versions, auto-delete old versions, multi-delete versions
• Vibe Connector – sync calendars and tasks from Vibe to GroupWise
• File Management – file size quota
• Workflow improvements – need workflow transitions based on field value, add the ability for a workflow to modify the value of an entry field
• Survey improvements – add ability to change order of survey questions
• “Change To” support – change entry from one type of entry to another
• Landing Page improvements – fixed and percentage widths of table columns, easy removal of menu bar, define background image or color
• Task improvements – easy date and task order changes in folder view, “Order” as secondary sort, wrap long task names
• Mobile apps – iPhone/Android apps
• Performance improvements – various
• UX improvements – improve look-and-feel of emails

However, we here at Adaris think that one of the coolest features coming down the pipe is a plugin for MS Office 2007 & 2010, which will make in-place file editing soooo much easier! This plugin should be available early in 2012, hopefully around January. We’ll keep you posted!

But why talk about, when we can show you!

Check it out!

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

For more information on the GETYOURVIBE offer, click here!

Anne-Lisa and Gary manning the Adaris booth

It’s already been two weeks since BrainShare, and so now is a good time to look back and summarize some of the highlights for us. As usual, it was wonderful seeing all of the great folks at Novell with whom we work with and who support us – Tracy Smith, Wendy Steinle, Jared Burrough, Patrick Hynes and all of his crew – as well as making new friends with whom we hope to work on new business – Karyn Victory, Greg Barnes, Kyle Revell, etc.

Adaris was there not only to learn and find out what’s new; we also had a booth and got to meet a lot of Novell customers! A lot of conversations around ZENworks and our new aZension Companion appliance – we think this is gonna be hot!

There sure was a lot of buzz this year about the “new” Novell, this of course being the first BrainShare since the acquisition by AttachMate. There certainly was a lot of emphasis on the new theme of “re:focus, re:kindle and re:turn”. Signs were everywhere reminding us that there’s a new crew running the ship and that things are about to change.

Juan Carlos Cerrutti (VP North America Sales, Novell), Jacques Sauve, Jeff Hawn (CEO AttachMate) and Bob Flynn (President Novell)

As usual, BrainShare is not just about the keynotes and technical sessions; it’s also a chance to build relationships. We certainly got the chance to do that, including the opportunity to meet and discuss with the AttachMate and Novell executives. Jeff Hawn and Bob Flynn are very likable people, and are very dedicated to rebuilding Novell.

If you want to get an idea of what the whole theme was about, you can view Bob’s keynote address here, if you haven’t already seen it. It’s only about 10 minutes long and worth watching.

From a technical standpoint, there were a couple of great announcements. Probably the biggest buzz was created by Richard Lindstedt’s demo of Novell Filr. If you have 15 minutes to spare, watch the keynote – this is file management taken to a whole new level!

On the GroupWise side of things, the new version – announced as GroupWise 2012 – sports a brand new WebAccess UI. Very nice! The WebAccess templates for iPad also received a lot of praise.

With Tay Kratzer of GWAVA. Tay is the one who wrote Reload. He's our GroupWise Hero!

Not to be outdone, the ZENworks team also showed up with their demo of ZCM 11 SP2. Among the highlights:

• Full-disk encryption
• Mac support for remote control, application deployment and asset inventory (now that got a lot of applause!)
• A new NTFS driver that will greatly speed up Windows imaging

I also got to do a couple of Vibe sessions with Tracy Smith, Product Manager for Vibe, and some partners from Europe. It was fascinating to see how much farther ahead Europeans are with Vibe! It has gained a much broader adoption over there than here in North America – we would definitely like to change that! Tracy also demoed the Microsoft Office plugin, set to be released early in the new year, after Vibe 3.2 arrives in mid-November. Users will now have a new tab on their Office ribbon to allow them to open and save documents directly from Vibe! Very cool! That was very well received by attendees.

BrainShare is just so jam-packed with information, it’d be impossible to cover all the announcements and news here. You can head out to the Novell BrainShare site and see all of the keynote videos and demos, as well as download all of the session presentations. It’s nowhere near as exciting as being there, but at least you’ll have all the good stuff!

With Lanai Bayne & Crissi Gutierrez of SEP Software, our favorite backup solution for OES!

Novell used this line a couple of years ago when marketing Teaming + Conferencing, and we’ve continued to evangelize the wisdom of this tagline, because we believe it to be true. No matter where your work takes you, you should still be able to securely stay in touch with what is going on back at the office, contribute and collaborate with your colleagues. Teaming has since evolved into Novell Vibe, and adoption is growing. Customers who have begun their deployment are thrilled with what it’s going to mean for their organization to have this kind of collaboration solution!

It’s a huge paradigm shift for most organizations, but once that shift is made, the potential to unleash their employees’ talents, skills and knowledge becomes evident (if you haven’t seen Kevin Jones’ video about social media, yet, then I encourage you to check it out here!).

So it’s great to see companies like Forrester confirming that indeed, you do not need to be at the office to get your work done! As more and more workers want – and need! – to have access to corporate knowledge, solutions like Novell Vibe should seriously be considered.

Office Work Is So Last Century, Forrester Reports

GETYOURVIBE! Adaris offers a great way to get started with Novell Vibe: a one week on-site engagement to kickstart your deployment! Our engineer will help you install and configure your servers, train your administrators and users, or simply brainstorm use cases for your organization. Contact us for more info! Details here.