The big news here, is the release of iFolder 3.6, both server and client. Novell’s Enterprise Server is solid, however, there is no shortage of Linux distributions that provide a small, medium and large enterprises with file, print, dns, dhcp and security services such as a firewall and identity management in the form of LDAP. Novell’s integration of iFolder certainly makes Open Enterprise Server unique in this crowded space. iFolder, of course, is not the only unique part of Open Enterprise Server but is the primary reason we believe the product is worth evaluating and why OES2 deserves serious consideration. Although Novell has also open sourced the development of iFolder, the open source version is a bit rough at this time, and purchasing OES2 to obtain iFolder is worth the cost. The open sourced version can be found here. If you are interested in the open source version of iFolder, there are pre-built RPMs for Novell’s SuSE distribution, Redhat’s Enterprise Linux and CentOS. The Windows client is not yet available for download at the time of this posting.

Why iFolder is worth using

iFolder is one of those unique products that you truly have to experience in order to fully understand it’s importance. Prometheon installs and support a wide variety of backup products such as BackupPC that work with cross-platform environments that might have Linux, Windows and OS X installed in the computing environment. As a backup solution, iFolder is far more simple to configure and gives the end user more than just a simple backup. iFolder can be used as a “distributed” collaboration tool. Simply right click on a folder on your desktop, and a menu pops up that allows you to “Convert to iFolder”. That’s it. This folder will now synchronize in regular intervals (the default is every 5 minutes) and now your client customer has an elegant backup to their important data. Finally, the client can decide to share this folder with granular access levels with other users and groups polled from Active Directory. Yes, Open Enterprise Server 2 can read your Active Directory users and groups and use the permission’s accordingly. It’s important to note that OES2 and iFolder will also talk to any LDAP compliant directory server such as LDAP, SunONE and lest we forget, Novell’s own eDirectory, which is included with OES2.

So, check out Open Enterprise Server as soon as possible. You’ll be amazed by it’s ease of, it’s incorporation of standards based security and it’s interoperability with Windows, Macintosh and Linux.