Red Hat Linux in professional portal push

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Red Hat has opened a dedicated online resource for its partners around the globe, giving them access to the product, program, pricing and training information on both Red Hat and JBoss solutions and services from one single location which is localized in the Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish languages.

"We worked closely with our business partners from around the world during the development of the . Our partners made it clear that they wanted a central partner repository, an easy and seamless way to work with Red Hat, language localization, a single global agreement and access to information to help develop new business and manage existing business" said Mark Enzweiler, Vice President of North American Channel Sales at Red Hat.

This looks like being just the start of a process of change at Red Hat which should be good for the Linux industry as a whole. It flags a positive effort to become not only a channel-friendly company but a channel-driven one, and the partner portal is the strongest display of evidence yet. Of course, there was a previous partner website for Red Hat resellers but it hardly inspired confidence in the company or helped people in the business of selling Linux to actually sell it. The statistics show that during the last quarter alone in North America, channels sales accounted for more than half of all Red Hat sales.

"In the past seven years, we have seen Red Hat commit to and invest in the success of the channel, especially in government" said Christine Schaefer, Director of Marketing at DLT Solutions, Inc., Red Hat's largest government reseller "the new Red Hat Partner Center is just another example of that commitment and rivals some of the best partner portals we have seen in the industry."

It is a demonstration that Linux is maturing in the marketplace, as it must, in an attempt to become a professional alternative to the OS mainstream.

Dani AI

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As pointed out, a vendor partner portal is a signal of maturity — but it only becomes valuable when partners treat it as an operational platform, not just a place to download PDFs. Practical benefit comes from mapping portal assets into repeatable sales motions, technical playbooks, and automation so you can convert marketing materials into billable services.

Quick partner checklist (practical items to action now)

  • Turn enablement into one-pagers: a 30‑minute pre-sales demo + an install checklist.
  • Map pricing and quoting tools into your CRM so quotes are consistent and auditable.
  • Register a canonical reference deployment (hardware + OS + middleware) you can reproduce.
  • Capture three standard service offerings (install, hardening, upgrades) from portal assets.
  • Verify training/certification paths and assign one engineer to complete certification per quarter.
  • Subscribe programmatically to security/CVE feeds and add them to your ticketing rules.
  • Automate licensing/subscription checks so customers don’t hit support surprises.

Technical checklist and a small workflow example

  • Build a reproducible lab: use Ansible (or your preferred IaC) to provision and tear down test stacks.
  • Automate subscription and repo verification, patching, and image builds so upgrades are predictable.
  • Containerize where it reduces uplift risk, but keep a documented rollback plan for each service.
  • Example quick commands to verify subscriptions and update a test node:
# Verify subscription and enabled repos
sudo subscription-manager status
sudo subscription-manager repos --list-enabled

# Update a test node (RHEL 7/8/9)
sudo yum update -y     # RHEL 6/7
sudo dnf update -y     # RHEL 8/9

Cautions and immediate next steps

  • Don’t assume “portal = co-sell.” Confirm lead-sharing, MDF rules, and escalation paths in writing.
  • Convert one portal reference architecture into a turnkey offering and validate it with a pilot customer.
  • Track two KPIs at first: time-to-first-certified-engineer and time-to-first-deployable-offer.
Member Avatar for mohanavv
mohanavv 0 Newbie Poster

Hi!
I have a network of about 55 computers (netware & NT) all running Win98 workstations. We have about 5 network printers and copiers to which a computer can print. What I'd like to do is build, if possible, a simple VB program to intercept what they are printing (from any application) and capture certain information about the print jobs before it gets sent off to the specified printer.

For example, when a user selects print from the menu in MS Word, and after the Ok button is pressed on the printers dialog window, have my program then pop up asking the user to fill in specific information (who they want to charge for the print job...this is typically an internal billing code, etc.).

The program would have to capture the name/driver of the printer users are printing to, the document they printed, number of pages, number of copies, date/time, etc.

Is/are there Windows API's to help in my programming of this application? I've been, unsuccessfully, searching MSDN, web sites, etc. on how to intercept/detect a print job. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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