I thought that for the first post from the NOWS SBE product management team I would address what we built for the partner community. When the NOWS SBE product was developed we started by first asking what did the reseller and the end user communities need. I will address the end user community in a future post. The overwhelming response back was a simple interface to manage services, installations, and maintenance. The reseller community also wanted a solution that provided a platform for future revenue in the form of add-on products, services and support. Resellers can bundle managed services, offer remote support capabilities or use the helpdesk that is built into the product. Many resellers are offering these services today based on the NOWS SBE software.
To accomplish these goals the Novell product management team first took all the core technologies that Novell already owned. Mainly OES 2, Groupwise, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. We then evaluated both the ability to be installed by a non Novell administrators and partners that did not have the experience working with Novell technologies and evaluated how well they integrated into the small business sector. This was important as most of the small business support is done by non-Novell administrators and it needs to be very simple to run.
The result was what the core NOWS SBE team calls SIMBA. Simba is an application framework that allows installation and management of the entire suite of products through a web browser. No special software needs to be installed. This platform can be managed by Windows, Linux or Macintosh desktops.
It can also be extended by ISVs, Software Vendors, or Resellers to allow custom applications or actions to be installed. This is done using the same simplified application framework that is built into the NOWS SBE platform. During the building of the product the NOWS SBE core team used the same public API to package all the applications that are available on the system. The Component API guide can be found here: (http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/Novell_...).
In the coming weeks I will dig deeper into managed services, helpdesk capabilities, product futures, and a bunch of other topics. This post is simply meant to get the conversations started.
