DANUG Meeting with Steve Meyer of Avanti

Last night I attended the DANUG meeting and presentation by Steve Meyer, President of Avanti Technology, Inc.

I remember meeting Steve many years ago in my early days at Novell at one of the NetWorld Trade Shows. We're talking 1990 or 1991. It was very cool to meet Steve again. The meeting was well attended. And I finally got to meet Danita Zanre`, GroupWise Expert / Consulting. I've had email exchanges with Danita but we've always missed being in the same location. You can see Danita, myself, and Steve in the photo.

It was great to see so much excitement about NetWare. Steve has been developing for NetWare for years, since the very first version of NetWare 68 ( NetWare 68 aka S-Net; it ran on the Motorola 68000 processor and used a Star network topology. ) NetWare is the platform of choice for Avanti.

Steve gave a demonstration of TaskMaster. TaskMaster provides full manual and automated control over the Server environment via one single NLM, not a conglomeration of NLMs and configuration files. By fully utilizing TaskMaster's features, Server resources can be proactively managed in a more simple and automated fashion than possible using any other combination of tools and utilities. Highlights of the TaskMaster NLM are:

• TMConsole (Shell).
• Enhanced Batch Processor engine
• Flexible Task Scheduler to support both NCF and .TSK scripts.
• Server-to-Server support. Servers don't have to be in the same tree.
• File Replication / Data Synchronization
  

It was a very good meeting and for those who were not able to attend I recommend downloading the evaluation version of TaskMaster. Oh... and we didn't really talk about or show this much but there is a Task Management Windows Client. The TMClient.EXE provides the means to monitor, schedule and terminate Tasks via a workstation.

Steve also discussed some great tips on Optimizing File Server I/O. After the meeting some of us old NetWare guys hung around in the cold and talked a lot about the good ol days and joining the grass roots "Keep NetWare Alive" campain. Go to IWANTNETWARE.COM. I also got to give Steve a hard time about the public inter-dialogue with Dave Kearns.

- Bucky