Here at work we’re heavy into Novell products. One of their key products is “ZENWorks”. ZEN is basically a desktop-management suite. It has backend servers which tie into eDirectory (like ActiveDirectory); has middle-tier servers for delivering services, and has a little client app to enable the delivery of services to the desktop (the ZEN Agent).

While we’ve been a big Novell shop for a while here, we never really pushed the ZEN agent enough. After I got here that priority changed. After about a month I was asked to tackle the rollout of the agent to all of the ‘capable’ PC’s (about 1200).

I wrote the script to handle it, check the dependencies, install other apps, everything. In fact, you can find the code I wrote here.

Well, we’ve been rolling the code out to users slowly. While we could easily have just made everyone run it, we knew there were some glitches with roughly 3% of ZEN installs, and didn’t want our desktop guys being flogged with 40 calls in one day.

So, we’ve taken about 2 weeks to do the rollout. Our “critical mass” number is 1000. When we get to 1000 we get free slurpees.

We are at 995 right now.

AGH!!!