Case study : Novell - "Zero Day Start"

A slightly old case study (2003)...however it shows the challenges the corporate world used to face then....and even now....and spends millions of dollars to get it sorted.....the case described by Art Vandenberg was similar to this one....based on a "authoritative" employee directory (in our case it was the PeopleSoft HR database) as the starting point for other employee attribute synchronization across the corporate....


Given above is how the old Novell IS&T infrastructure looked like prior to the one Net solution (a classic Systems Integration Solution Implementation). This was a nightmare and very costly to maintain the system. However, Novell is not alone. Many companies are suffering with even more complex infrastructure than Novell. The goal for CIO is to streamline and simplify this complexity.


Novell implemented the "Zero Day Start" infrastructure which resulted in dramatic changes across a variety of processes. The figure above shows the automated distribution of employee information between different directories and applications today. By using open standards, it simplified a very cumbersome process in the past and a more manageable infrastructure.

Wide adoption of important new standards are helping make one Net concepts such as Zero Day Start a reality. They include:
1. LDAP: the lightweight directory access protocol.
2. XML: for data Interchange between dissimilar applications and directories.
3. SSL: as a security standard,


The central pieces for Zero Day Start are using eDirectory and DirXML to automate the synchronization of information between the relative systems and provide access to services. eDirectory and DirXML connects the enterprise data systems, like PeopleSoft, to the corporate directory as shown above. This allows automatic synchronization and authorization between user information and disparate systems.

I am proud that I was a part of this implementation team. As typical to any project the initial hiccups was challenging.....but was very satisfying once the project went "live"....