Networking Technology

When ZfD 7 was released, Novell had a useable product. Now it's just another dumped Novell project

Imaging

It did very good imaging of user desktops and made life easy to replace desktops on crashed systems or roll out new desktops. There wer always driver problems with new Network Card releases, but these were fixable by good support engineers. 

Application Launching

 The problem here was having to repackage most of the applications with the decidely user-unfriendly AdminStudo. In some cases (Adobe) this was almost impossible. It did at the time however offer a quick way to deploy applications to multiple users if technical people could sort out the complexity of repackaging.

Inventory

Again, this was a very useable tool to keep track of what hardware and software was on user's computers, using the Inventory it was possible to get a quick list of all the computers in the Enterprise which would have to be upgraded to deploy a new operating system like Vista. On the down side there are planty of third party tools which could do this just as well.

Policy Management

Unfortunately this was just a hyped-up version of Microsoft's Group Policies and made it easy to deploy them in the very rare cases where a company didn't have a domain.

Novell dumped this and the hundtreds of users who were using it in August 2010 to replace it with ZenWorks Configuration Management, which is a bloated, difficult and badly supported answer to a problem which no longer exists (see VMware View)