aevans's blog

What I SHOULD have been presenting at Brainshare

Like Dean I am moving house to the Novell Communities site. My first post is on there already so go and check it out. You should also update your RSS reader links. So, why are we moving? Well, firstly the readership over there is much larger. Secondly, Novell is trying to open it up to a lot more corporate bloggers and that's the place they we want to do it. These pages will serve as a historical reference for me, we haven't yet decided if we are going to port the posts over to the new site.

So, farewell old friends - and I'll see you on the other side (of this link)

This is a quick overview of the BrainShare sessions that I am presenting. Read this if you want to find out more information about what you can expect in those sessions.

There is some very exciting news in the Workgroup Business Unit. Novell announced the acquisition of SiteScape. For those that don't know we OEMed with SiteScape to create Novell Teaming+Conferencing, which is all about team productivity as opposed to GroupWise's individual productivity. This is a very strong statement to the market on our intentions in the collaboration space and I could not be more excited. So what does this mean for GroupWise? Well, the fantastic work that the GroupWise team was doing meant that we initially embarked on the Teaming+Conferencing product, and that the value that GroupWise and T+C have demonstrated since that point means that Novell is ready to invest into collaboration at an even more significant level than they did before. GroupWise has demonstrated growth over the last few quarters and we expect that trend to continue. GroupWise Bonsai is one of the most anticipated releases of GroupWise that the team can remember and it is a joy to demo at events like GWAVACon, as feedback is invariably very positive.

It also means that we just entered the Unified Communications space - this is not an insignificant point. The UC market is expected to grow to almost $48 billion by 2012. To put that into perspective, the Operating System market is around $21 billion right now. It also means that our roadmap going forwards is going to have a lot of integration between GroupWise and T+C, and between those two products into a UC environment. Of late we have been talking a lot about Unified Messaging and Unified Communications within Novell and with other partners and where we plan to play in that space. It's not something that we are ready to talk much more about at this point, but it is safe to say that the SiteScape announcement puts us on a particular track. Over the last few days we have also been briefing a number of the technology analysts, to a very positive reception. One even confirmed that this announcement makes us a technology leader in the Unified Communications space in relation to teaming applications - much of what our competitors talk about right now is vaporware.

There is going to be a lot more to come on all of this. This acquisition is the result of months of hard work by a large team and I would like to welcome the SiteScape guys (and gals) to the fold. To read more about the acquisition read John Dragoon's Blog, and the press release.

There is some very exciting news in the Workgroup Business Unit. Novell announced the acquisition of SiteScape.

One of our Danish partners, and Novell Sysop, Tommy Mikkelsen sent me a link to a site over the weekend.  It spoke of a Danish effort to consolidate calendars.  It is a long standing effort to allow public sector workers to quickly share calendar information.  The estimates are that it could save up to $10 million per year if every one of Denmark's public sector workers saved just one hour over the year when scheduling meetings.  This puts a real figure on the amount of time and money we all spend when trying to schedule meetings across company boundaries.  I experienced this pain recently trying to set up meetings with three of our partners who where coming into town (actually, it was our admin who experienced all the pain).  What this project does is link calendars in Exchange, Notes and GroupWise into a single central site.  It uses iCal and SOAP to integrate the calendars.

Tommy wrote the GroupWise connector for the project (he's a smart cookie - I have used some of his other projects in other roles).  He didn't mention it but I am assuming that he used the GroupWise 7 SOAP interface.  Now, my Danish is a little rusty so I can't tell you what the project sites say but the source is available out there.

This cross boundary calendaring is a major feature of GroupWise Bonsai, which really validates the goals of the project.  Bonsai will allow users to subscribe to external iCal calendars so that they can view that calendar alongside their own in the client.  Users will also be able to publish their own personal calendars using the Calendar Publishing Host.  The Calendar Publishing Host creates an HTML version of the users' calendar and publishes it to a website that your company hosts.  It also provides an iCal interface to the same data so that external users can subscribe to it. Finally, Bonsai will allow your users to publish their own Free/Busy information, as well as busy search any external users that publish their own Free/Busy information.