Altiris and Novell

I have often been asked if Altiris can work well in a Novell environment. The main reason for concern is the perception that Altiris is tied directly to MS Active Directory. For the most part we work just fine in such an environment. There are only really 2 areas that are difficult:

1. Initial client installation - There are two issues here. The first being is that you can use AD GPO objects to do the install. This is not really a big deal because you can use Novell login scripts instead which also solves any rights issues when running from the login script.
2. We can't get user information from the domain (because it's not there). However we can use connector solution to pull contact information from eDirectory using LDAP if it's needed.

Once our agent is on the system then just about all solutions work just like normal. The only thing you have to be worried about is authentication in some instances. Package Server's can now handle creating their own credentials that can be used. And if that can't be used then a common service account on PS will take care of that problem.

As far as installing software using SWD or Patch, since the client is running as a service this usually isn't a problem. If you need to authenticate a user to do the install then a common local account with proper rights will suffice and can be specified within a task.