Heads Up! Novell Pulse Coming Your Way

[Cool Solutions]

Heads Up! Novell Pulse Coming Your Way
04-Nov-2009 10:28 AM

Novell just announced the first real-time collaboration platform for the enterprise, called Novell Pulse. Novell and Google jointly announced that they are working together to enable Novell Pulse users and Google Wave users to seamlessly work together across both systems. Novell is the first collaboration provider to integrate Google Wave.

What is Novell Pulse?

Novell Pulse is the first enterprise class, real-time collaboration platform that unites communication, authoring and social messaging tools. Novell Pulse helps drive enterprise productivity and innovation by making it easier to communicate digitally, generate ideas and share information. People continents apart can share and edit documents, jointly browse websites, and have a digital conversation, all in real-time. Individuals can also manage content overload by filtering for people and topics to follow as well as storing files—both native and office type—along with their related groups and conversations.

What can you do with Pulse?
Novell Pulse is an enterprise real-time collaboration solution. Real-time collaboration tools allows people to easily share and work together on documents, have real-time conversations, interact using social media tools, and much more.

Novell Pulse was designed specifically for the enterprise user, so it includes robust security and management capabilities. Novell Pulse will also interoperate with other real-time technologies like Google Wave, as well as existing collaboration solutions.

How would you use it in a business setting?

Communication. Say you have a project that requires input from 5 people. Before Novell Pulse, you would email those 5 people and receive separate responses—some of which would be responding to your email, while others would be responding to other emails from the distribution list, depending on when each was composed. Then you'd have to aggregate all the responses, synthesize them, and begin the cycle of emails all over again.

With Novell Pulse, you send one, synchronous message, and all 5 people can respond to you and each other in real-time. No aggregation, missed information or repetition of efforts—and if you make the conversation public, you may get valuable input from someone you weren't expecting.

Intra- and Inter-company Collaboration. For example, you plan to issue a product datasheet jointly with one of your partners. You work in different document publishing environments such as OpenOffice and MS Word. Before Novell Pulse, you would have written the press release and sent it as an OpenOffice attachment to everyone on your team within your company for input, then aggregated all the input, edited it down for redundancy, and then converted it to MS Word before sending as an attachment to your partner for input. Then you'd begin the cycle again for every round of edits.

With Novell Pulse, you and your partner could simply collaborate on the document in real-time and then both companies could export the document into their preferred format when it's final. This also works seamlessly if you are using Novell Pulse and your partner is using Google Wave.

Breaking Through the Clutter. Information overload is a serious concern for companies today. Users are hit with information from all directions—email, instant messenger, blogs, micro-blogs, social networks, calendars. By unifying all these information mediums into one, easy-to-use interface with folders, filtering and search, Novell Pulse enables users to make sense of it all and focus on what's really important.

Working With Google

This is a technical collaboration between Google and Novell to bring federation to both systems, using the Wave Federation Protocol. We're the first company to show federation using the WFP, and we're the first collaboration solution to integrate with Google Wave. Novell Pulse and Google Wave systems can operate in tandem so that users of the two platforms can work together in real time, each using their preferred tool.

What does federation with Google Wave involve?
Federation involves using a protocol call the Wave Federation Protocol to enable messages (or Waves) to be shared in real-time, character-for-character, as they are being created or edited between*two or more separate systems.*

The sharing is based on addressing.* You place addresses ( which look just like e-mail addresses) from potentially different domains on a message or Wave, then the message is live and any edits made by anyone will be automatically shared in real-time.

Novell is the first company to show federation with Google Wave. One of our design principles for Novell Pulse is interoperability.

How is Novell Pulse different from Google Wave?
The design point for Novell Pulse is the enterprise user, so we've placed a strong emphasis on features such as security and management controls. We've also drawn on our 20+ years experience in the enterprise collaboration space with products like GroupWise, and worked to address enterprise and business use-cases.

Novell Pulse is a key component in Novell’s collaboration strategy and open collaboration architecture, working standalone or in concert with Novell’s broader product portfolio. Novell Pulse is very complementary to Google Wave and to our existing collaboration products such as GroupWise. Key features, which draw on the best of e-mail, instant messaging, document sharing, social connections, real-time co-editing and enterprise controls, include:

1. Security
   Provisioning, sign-on and permissions leverage enterprise identity and access management systems, directory servers and audit tools to integrate with established processes, keep data safe and support compliance requirements.
2. Real-time collaboration
   Collaborative editing and document sharing enables users to get work done with other users in real-time, from co-editable online documents to the ability to share and comment on traditional office documents in real time.
3. Unified Inbox
   A single interface allows users to see, sort and filter all their personal and professional content from various social messaging services, email, Wave, etc. all in one place.
4. Enterprise social messaging
   Social Blog allows users to share, follow and comment on topics and ideas.
5. Real-time awareness and chat
   Allows users to know exactly when their colleagues are available via people, group and message activity monitoring.

Novell Pulse will be available in both cloud and on-premise deployments.

Is Novell Pulse designed for the consumer or the enterprise customers?
Novell Pulse is focused on the enterprise customers. It addresses the needs of a global, knowledge-based workforce and gives enterprises the confidence to embrace real-time collaboration technologies. Novell Pulse leverages Novell's expertise and experience developing enterprise collaboration and communication tools, as well as industry leadership in creating strong identity and security management solutions.

Is Novell Pulse open source?
No.

When will Novell Pulse be available? What will it cost?
Novell Pulse will be generally available in the first half of 2010 in a cloud deployment, and with an on-premise deployment option in a subsequent release. Pricing will be announced at general availability.

How can I get access in when this goes to beta availability?
We'll be announcing that later this year.

Where can I see Novell Pulse in action?
Novell Pulse was demonstrated on Nov. 4, 2009 during the Integrating Google Wave into the Enterprise keynote at Enterprise 2.0 in San Francisco. We'll be giving previews of the technology over the coming weeks via Novell blogs and video. Stay tuned. A select beta is scheduled for early 2010.

Where can I get more information about Novell Pulse?
You can find more information at www.novell.com/pulse . We'll be previewing more of Novell Pulse over the coming weeks too.

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