Qmunity Blog

Making the Most of NetIQ Qmunity

2010-01-13T21:36:00Z

When we created Qmunity we had some lofty goals. Some we have reached, others we are still working towards, and then there are the new ones. But, they all came down to one simple question: Are NetIQ users [you] getting everything they can or want from the product/s in use?

Do they know about the latest hot fix or the script written by John Doe at XYZ corp that shortens, finds, reports, displays this that or the other? Do they know that by doing this you get that? Do we have the answer to your latest burning question or issue?

Over the last year Qmunity has grown. It is now a worldwide group of expert peers and product specialists who are providing pretty immediate information and useful links to helpful resources, enhancing overall user experience. As we entered 2010, Tim Sedlack and I thought it would be good idea to give a quick web seminar overview and guide to Qmunity, covering:

Establishing an account.
Participating in forums.
Keeping up with product notifications.
Accessing how-to videos.
Using the Knowledge Script Depot.

Come join us on January 26th at 1pm CST and if you are interested please register just so we can ensure there are enough online 'seats'. We will focus on NetIQ AppManager, but don’t miss this introduction to the valuable resources available in Qmunity that might help you achieve your goals in 2010.

Qmunity Update: AppManager & Aegis Knowledge Depots Open

2009-12-11T18:45:00Z

In my last post I mentioned some exciting changes were afoot for Qmunity. The first of those went live earlier today:

A few months back Jared Webb suggested that Knowledge Depot would work well within Qmunity. It has taken us some time to migrate and review all the content from the old AppManager Knowledge Depot, but there are now 276 items to help you get the most from your AppManager deployment. Plus, we created a depot for Aegis. The Aegis Knowledge Depot has just over 30 workflows and helpful files already and is growing steadily.

These depots are for maintained AppManager and Aegis users respectively. You can now view, download, add a file or galleries to favoritesllery from favs quickly and easily. You can also upload your own files, workflows, etc. to share with, and help other users. Other Knowledge Depots will be opening over the coming weeks, but do tell us what you think of these and how we might make then easier to use.

Congratulations to the new "Uber Geeks"...

2009-12-04T16:19:00Z

It has been a while since I updated you on what is going on with Qmunity and there are some exciting changes afoot that I will cover in the next week or so.

As you know members accrue points for certain activities within Qmunity. The purpose of the Qmunity Member Points System (QMPS) is to help determine a member's reputation within Qmunity. As part of that QMPS process we evaluate user and present Award Icons. 'Uber Geek' is possibly one of our highest honors and indicates an individual who possesses a higher state of NetIQ product/solution understanding, to which others might aspire, with a willingness to share and advise other Qmunity members and is based on the number of posts, best answers, and highly rated posts.

Today, I'd like to congratulate: Michi Schniebel, Haf Saba and Tim Sedlack who join Andy Doran as 'Uber Geeks'. Many of you have benefited from their words of wisdom, file shares, how to videos, blogs and more. I'm sure you'll join me in congratualting them on this achievement.

These are not the only rock stars within Qmunity, as you know, and to ensure everyone gets the recognition they deserve please don't forget to rate posts, verify or suggest answers, post comments and share blogs, etc. within your Qmunity. Plus, any ideas/suggestions on how we can grow and improve or QMPS system are always welcome.

Qmunity Update: New Blog, Tech Support, AppManager User Group...

2009-07-08T15:36:00Z

June was a busy month. You had many questions, boosting the number of posts to only 25 shy of the 10,000 mark and our membership continued to grow to over 16,600. So just what did happen and what is in the pipe:

Tech Support
As you know the first Technical Support forum post sought your feedback on GUI updates to the Tech Support home page - the goal being to make it easier for you to get the information/assistance you need quicker. We created the selected page layout in our QA environment and it was tested it to breaking point. The new home page will be rolled out within days of this post. So thank you once again to everyone who responded.

New Blog & 'Automate This!' Blogger
Qmunity introduced a new blog called "All Things Admin" dedicated to the management, security, and administration of Microsoft Active Directory (AD). Personally, I'm looking forward to learning more about the management, administration and security of AD, but do respond to Erin Avery's request for topic suggestions.

We also welcomed, UK based, David Mount as a new blogger for the 'Automate This!' blog. His first post, which is also the first in a series of three: 'ITIL - does it really work? Part 1: What is ITIL striving to achieve?' has generated quite a bit of interested and has proven to be the most read blog within the first 24 hours of publication. Stay tuned for part two and three.

Member of the month

June's 'Member of the Month' honor goes to Jon Greaves, easily recognisable by his Joe 90 avatar. Jon has been an active member of the AppManager and Aegis forums and not been shy about coming forward with some really great suggestions or feedback on improving Qmunity or the NetIQ products. You may want to contribute to his AM8 Feature Request post which I know is being intently observed by the product management team (I really must kick them into providing some feedback). Look for Jon in the Top Contributors list and hopfully at the next AppManager User Group (AMUG) meeting in his area.

AppManager User Group (AMUG)
Talking about AMUG do read Travis Greene's post around organizing a live AppManager User Group MeetUp for the Autumn. He is looking for your input on what would be most valuable to you.

As always, your feedback is welcomed and helps to improve your community and any question do not hesitate to ask.

Thank you for using Qmunity.

All the best

David

Qmunity Update: Knowledge Depot, Tech Support & Softball

2009-06-03T13:44:00Z

Wow, Qmunity membership surpassed 16,500 in May and we are currently welcoming 4 new members a day and during June we should pass 10,000 posts. But, what does that all add up too? Well let me outline some of progress we've made that's designed to help you as a result of your participation in Qmunity:

Tech Support
As many of you saw we created a new Technical Support Forum, where you can ask all your questions about NetIQ Tech Support. But we also want you to post your suggestion and feedback here and help us make our Tech Support better. The first post in this forum actually sought your feedback on GUI updates to the Tech Support home page - the goal being to make it easier for you to get the information/assistance you need quicker.Well the results are in!

We are now creating the selected page layout in our QA environment and we'll get a few of you access to test and break it, so we can ensure it delivers when it is rolled out live in the near future. So thank you to everyone who responded to the poll.

Knowledge Depot
I can also give you an update on the Qmunity hosted AppManager Knowledge Depot. This development was in response to your support of Jared Webb’s suggestion that Knowledge Depot would work well within Qmunity. The depot is now live for maintained AppManager users. Not everything worked smoothly in our tests, hence the slight delay, but we believe we are there now - but if you see anything please let us know. Script downloads are quick and smooth and our legal eagles are happy with the appropriate disclaimers. Currently the depot contains only a few files as we are migrating and tagging the several hundred files in the old depot; so bear with us as we work through this and the dual locations for a short while. I can also tell you that Aegis and Secure Configuration Manager Knowledge Depots will be live soon.

Member of the month
This month's featured Qmunity member is SzZsolt. Many of you will know SzZsolt by his old user moniker: IRM Expert. Budapest based SzZsolt has been working in the financial sector for 8 years in what he describes as a "not-so-well-developed-but-still-EU country" dealing with InfoSec all the time. He is a regular poster, contributing and initiating many threads, and is another frequent member of the Top Contributors list and active in the the Security Manager User Group. SzZsolt's positive Qmunity activity was mentioned twice this month in face-to-face meeting I had with different teams within NetIQ. Congratulations SzZsolt.

Softball
Finally a quick congratulations to the Code Monkeys (Engineering) who beat a team from marketing in a close Houston Office Inter-Departmental Softball final 13-12 to earn the trophy and the bragging rights for an entire year! On a personal note, I was connected to a losing team so any Houston based customer/competitor interested in putting the Code Monkeys in their place drop me a line

As always, your feedback is welcomed and helps to improve your community and any question do not hesitate to ask.

Thank you for using Qmunity.

All the best

David

Qmunity Update: Knowledge Depot, Meet Up and more

2009-04-30T16:00:00Z

It only seems like only yesterday that I was introducing Qmunity, but it has been over a quarter now. What a quarter it has been and I am pleased that Qmunity users are “…really impressed with the new Qmunity site…, it looks highly professional, usable and genuinely useful – great stuff!" to quote a two time Data Centre Europe Awards best Managed Services Provider.

Yes, there have been some teething problems, but, I think we are doing well overall. The standard response to the team behind Qmunity: Chase Caldwell, Damian Smith, Josh Harbert, oh, and me ; on addressing a glitch is like this one from one of the Top 25 companies to work for in 2008 : "Thank you for your quick and proactive response!" We can do better – there is always room for improvement. So do let us know what you think of Qmunity and what you’d like to see.

I took a snap shot on April 16, almost a quarter exactly from launch, and we had welcomed almost 400 new Qmunity members, putting us over 16,300 users. There were 1,135 new threads and 1,454 new posts in the user forums. I’m not even counting user group, blog and direct message content. I am really pleased, that together, we are building a valuable, interactive community for NetIQ users – 12 times as interactive as our old web boards.

Feeling a little smug (and I’m not talking about the Security Manager User Group) and retrospective, I took some time to look at the most popular forum threads – like me, you may be surprised by what I found:

The five top forums threads by views (I’d also like to know your personal top five):

Performance problems with NetIQ on VMWare in NetIQ AppManager Forum – 6,457 views

A few suggestions in Qmunity Ideas – 755 views

Knowledge Depot in Qmunity Ideas – 689 views

Company Info in Qmunity Ideas – 689 views

How are Groups and Forums created in Qmunity Questions – 472 views

This is how I analyze this: items two through five tell me that you are interested in making Qmunity better or understanding how to do things within Qmunity. That’s great. We can work on the suggestions and improve the help wiki (see below for one update).

The first item, however, is just miles more popular, and in review, it was an isolated incident involving a job that locked up the servers just at this user’s site. But it does illustrate that users back in 2007 were (and still are) successfully running over 100 servers. But the interest level in VMware sparks me to double down on our Managing VMware blog and to get you more of what you want.

Here is what's been happening in our community lately:

Knowledge Depot
Many of you have positively supported Jared Webb’s suggestion that Knowledge Depot would work well within Qmunity. Well, we heard you and are testing an AppManager Knowledge Depot right now. Everything looks to be working smoothly; script downloads are quick and smooth, and we are keeping our legal eagles happy with the appropriate disclaimers. Now all we need to do is migrate and tag correctly the several hundred files and open up the beta for you to use, review and recommend tweaks. As far as an ETA, I will know more by early next week.

Member of the month
This month's featured Qmunity member is Lance Tost. Lance “got the memo” has a passion for UNIX and hails from Pennsylvania. He has contributed over 200 posts, with many a helping word for other users. He is a regular feature in the Qmunity Top Contributors list and has stepped up as a co-owner of the AppManager for UNIX User Group.

Congratulations, Lance, on being our Member of the Month!

Featured Blog Posts
This blog post has been syndicated by Inside Interop, and to quote Curt Franklin: “Travis Greene had an in-depth look at must-have features in an ITPA tool (in a handy list format).” So do check out Travis’s handy list.

Question: Qmunity Meet Up – Yes/No
Part of Qmunity’s DNA was to help you connect with your peers and learn from each other’s experiences. There are plenty of possibilities within Qmunity, but nothing quite beats a face to face over your favorite beverage. There will be a number of key Qmunity members at Interop, Las Vegas. Is anybody interested in partaking in an informal meet up?

As always, your feedback is welcomed and helps to improve your community. Any question do not hesitate to ask.

Thank you for using Qmunity.

All the best

David

A Month In...

2009-02-13T14:16:00Z

..the life of Qmunity and to quote many a British pantomime "what do you think of it so far?"

It has been a busy first month helping registered users join user groups, edit forum posts and subscribe to forum notifications. We have also been working on a number of improvement suggestions that have been posted to the Qmunity Ideas forum and received directly from you:

New Features/Updates Coming:

Mail Gateway - A few of you mentioned that you would rather reply to the forum post notification emails you receive and have those responses appear within the forum thread, than have to log in to Qmunity to write a response. We heard you and it would make things easier for all of us. In the next couple of weeks we will be adding a Mail Gateway extension allowing you to post to forums by using email.

New Blog Page Layout - There are significant layout changes afoot for the blogs page, and we have already added the 'Qmunity Blogs' menu to the right menu bar and a 'Share This' icon at the base of each blog post - but what we would definitely appreciate are your thoughts on what would make this section more usable to you.

Longer term improvements projects - improved user, group and forum search; updates to profile/home page and reputation functionality (those points below your avatars); a new calendar and events section, improved video support and an 'Ideas' section dedicated to gathering your comments and suggestions for product improvements.

But, don't let us rest on our laurels keep your suggestions coming, it is after all your Qmunity.

My Featured Blogger:

This month's featured blogger is Geoff Webb, of the Security Webb blog.

Geoff is a respected security expect in much demand for seminars and industry commentary - stay tuned for his Gartner interview video on security automation coming soon - and member of the Information Systems Security Association. He obviously writes mostly on topics surrounding information security and you can catch his thoughts on the Heartland Breach, Fannie Mae and the unified compliance framework approach, amongst other topics. Check out his blog posts and feel free to give him some feedback or share his posts (remember you need to be a registered Qmunity member to submit a comment).

My Featured Question Thread/s:

It took some time to nail these down as there were many very interesting questions in the forums, generating some very informative discussions and responses. But after careful consideration I have chosen the following member (who started the thread) and question as the winner of our inaugural monthly "Best Question" contest:

Mark Hooper's What are the typical KS's you run? in the NetIQ AppManager Product Forum (open to authorized users only)

Mark hopefully will be happy that I managed to purloin a NetIQ digital photo frame key fob or a NetIQ coffee mug for this months winner from the marketing department. (Mark, I'll contact you soon to ascertain your preference). Who knows what Mark will leave for next months best question winner.

But, I must also give a shout out to Lynne Attix as well for her question: AppManager Module Documentation: How Do You Use It?

Finally, just a quick note to say that over the last few days we have started posting a range of short (about 5 minute) tips and tricks videos that we hope you'll find helpful: So do check out How to monitor Server without Agents and Creating & Managing File Filter Groups in NetIQ Change Guardian for Windows when you get a chance.

As always, your feedback is welcomed and helps to improve your community. Any question do not hesitate to ask.

Thank you for using Qmunity.

All the best

David

Welcome to NetIQ's New Community Site - "Qmunity"

2009-01-07T01:43:00Z

Happy New Year!

Just like many of you, we've made a few New Year's resolutions. But instead of losing weight or exercising more, our resolutions are designed to help you get the most value from your investments in NetIQ software by:

Providing a centralized forum to exchange product tips and tricks for getting the most value out of NetIQ investments
Facilitating peer-to-peer sharing of best practices to help speed deployment and enterprise adoption of NetIQ products
Making NetIQ's subject matter experts more accessible
Providing real-time updates about NetIQ product improvements and customer experiences

To help us keep our resolutions, we are launching "Qmunity," our new NetIQ online community. This collaborative network will connect you, your peers and NetIQ experts to help you do more in 2009. By providing more immediate information, useful links to helpful resources and access to NetIQ experts, Qmunity will help ensure that you are mastering the knowledge you need to realize the full potential of IT investments you rely upon on a daily basis.

More than just a community Web site, Qmunity is a true portal into everything - and everyone - at NetIQ, including product managers, developers and architects and consultants. Moreover, it includes thousands of your peers from NetIQ's user forums that are actively contributing insight and guidance on how to further customize NetIQ products to support your business objectives.

This is why you need to bookmark this page and to become an active member of Qmunity. The Qmunity Web site provides you:

Product Notifications - proactive announcements for all product releases, service packs, importnat hot fixes, and critical known issues
Product Forums - open discussions serving to ask and answer questions or share best practices (on topics such as product installation, tuning, shortcuts, utilization, reporting)
Blogs - commentary from NetIQ subject matter experts on the market, products, direction and vision
User Groups -private and semi-private discussion areas to share ideas and commentary about like installations or specific industry examples
Networking - build the relationships that aide in getting the information you need most

You may ask: "How is Qmunity different from the old NetIQ user forum?" The differences you'll notice are: significantly improved ease-of-use; better organization of content; support for content tagging (making it easier to find related content); regular moderation and review; a new response rating system, and better site responsiveness and stability. We believe you will find this site to be your primary destination to find information, share best practices and fine-tune your deployment strategies over the lifetime of your NetIQ investments.

So join Qmunity and subscribe to RSS feeds for the areas and topics in which you're most interested.