Teaming & Conferencing Cool Solutions

Early Bird Discount: Save $300 on BrainShare

mattclayton — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:31:43 -0700

Novell has taken steps to make BrainShare more affordable by dropping the full price of the conference from US$1,895.00 to US$1,695.00. You can save an additional $300 with the "early bird" registration. The "early bird" rate of US$1,395.00 will be available until February 19, 2010. Learn more at http://www.novell.com/brainshare

Cool Solutions

Heads Up! Novell Pulse Coming Your Way

ssalgy — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:28:47 -0700

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.

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:

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.
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.
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.
Enterprise social messaging
Social Blog allows users to share, follow and comment on topics and ideas.
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.

End-User Computing

Gradenko, ActiveSync, GroupWise, Teaming and a Webinar!

dlythgoe — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:03:24 -0700

The engineering team is working on several product releases over the next several months. It is important that we keep you informed about our progress and what is coming. It also allows you to participate in the many activities surrounding a product release. Those activities include product requirements, design reviews, BETAs, Lighthouse programs and final shipments. So here goes:

Gradenko (DataSync):

Gradenko is currently in authorized BETA. We have had several beta calls including beta calls for the SDK. Gradenko includes the following components:

- Sync Engine
- GroupWise Connector
- SDK
- Salesforce.com Connector
- SugarCRM Connector
- Sharepoint Connector

BETA2 is scheduled for later this month. Engineering is focused on installation, configuration and scalability. We are listening to our beta sites and gathering input from our internal testing and superlab experiences. Gradenko is the foundation for ActiveSync and for all of our 3rd-party integrations. Continue to watch this space for updates on our progress, schedule and final release.

ActiveSync

First of all, I refer you to Alex Evans' blog. This was posted back in September and provides some excellent background on the feature set, architecture and what will be available in this first release. http://www.novell.com/communities/node/9006/active...

ActiveSync BETA is scheduled for this month as well. Great progress has been made within the team over the last several weeks. The ActiveSync project is being head up by Jay Parker and they have implemented several aspects of the agile development model. As part of this methodology, the team demonstrates to interested team members the progress made during each 'sprint'. On Thursday, October 22nd, the team provided a demo of their Sprint 5 work. Several iPhones and iTouches were handed out to the audience and we were given several tasks to complete. Scheduling an appointments, sending an email, accepting an appointments, creating a contact, etc. There were a few delays and a few hiccups as several in the audience were all using the same account, but overall, things went very well. Engineering is now focused on performance, scalability, install, troubleshooting and documentation. We are anxious to begin the beta process and work out the final details.

GroupWise 7 and GroupWise 8

GroupWise 7.0.3 HP4 was released in September. Feedback so far on this release has been very positive. We do plan to release GroupWise 7.0.4 and that will be our final release of the GroupWise 7.0.x product line. We expect to release that final version of 7.0.x in roughly 6 months or so. GroupWise 8.0.1 was released in August. We are currently evaluating and planning a Hot Patch for 8.0.1. Our next support pack for GroupWise 8 will be 8.0.2. This is currently scheduled about mid-year 2010.

The vast majority of the feedback on 8.0.1 has been very positive. We continue to listen and evaluate the progress as our customers adopt and roll out this significant version of the product. Support has brought 6-10 issues to our attention, which we have addressed and provided specific customers relief. We plan to make these and other fixes available in a Hot Patch currently scheduled for December/January.

Cortez (Teaming 2.1)

Cortez is the next major release of our award winning product Teaming. As you may know, Teaming is a product that we are pushing as a 'rapid release' product. We plan to have new versions of this product available every 6-9 months. Teaming 2.0 was released in July and Teaming 2.1 was currently scheduled for January. It has a very specific and finite set of features and will be entering BETA also in the month of November. To see the design documents, participate in the user interaction mock ups and provide your input, please visit the project on kablink.org. A full list of the changes, features and roadmaps are all available as we engage our customers and partners in this project. Cortez includes:

- Import and Export capability
- Undelete
- Data quotas
- Mobility access
- Landing Page Editor
- Extension Administration
- Task/Calendar Improvements
- maybe a couple more :)

So watch for the BETA, check out kablink.org and download the 20 user Starter Pack.

Last note: There is a Webinar this Thursday, November 5th, "GW8 & M+Archive: Your email collaboration solution" I will be presenting with Messaging Architects. They will be presenting their stubbing solutions and I will be talking about GroupWise, Teaming, DataSync, etc. Tune in!

Here are the details:

GW8 & M+Archive: Your email collaboration solution - November 5, 2009 - 3:00PM EST

Both leading IT publications and end users alike agree GroupWise 8 brings collaboration to the next level with next-generation web technology and the latest productivity-enhancing tools featuring a highly customizable email client, as well as improved calendaring, contact and task management. Besides the enriched email client, one of the most important improvements in the GroupWise 8 release is a new Stubbing API that enables tight integration of GroupWise with email retention solutions and gives end users transparent access to their archives.

During this Webinar, Dean Lythgoe, Director, GroupWise Engineering, will discuss GroupWise 8 features, roadmap futures, mobility direction and the new DataSync technology. He will give a sneak peak at what is available today and what exciting new things are on the horizon in 2010.

Ranjit Sarai, Product Manager for M+Archive will then demonstrate the stubbing feature of M+Archive, currently the only product that offers this feature for GroupWise. After attending this Webinar, you will know how GroupWise with M+Archive will help you achieve an enterprise-class secure and compliant collaboration environment while helping you reduce overall cost, increase system performance and ensure a superior end-user experience.

BONUS: Registrants will receive a complimentary white paper written by Novell and Messaging Architects, which will give you more in depth information about how GroupWise works with stubbing.

Date: Thursday, November 05, 2009
Time: 3:00PM EST / 12:00 PM PST
Speaker(s): Dean Lythgoe, Director, GroupWise and Teaming + Conferencing Engineering at Novell & Ranjit Sarai, Product Manager for M+Archive at Messaging Architects

Register Now: https://messagingarchitects.webex.com/messagingarc...

Dean

Workgroup Cool Solutions

BrainShare Jacket Promotion

mattclayton — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Get a free jacket by being one of the first 400 to register for BrainShare 2010 using this registration code: jacket. Sign up and share the news with your friends. The red and gray, athletic jacket is the perfect jacket for the spring weather in Utah. Jackets will be available for pick up at the registration booth on Monday, March 22, 2010.

ZENworks Cool Solutions

Virtualization... Hurry up already

jasondea — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:59:35 -0700

In the process of cleaning out my desk I've discovered that I'm a bit of a pack rat when it comes to industry whitepapers, and documents sent to me by various analysts.

Came across a rather interesting one from September 2007, from Gartner.

"US Datacenters: The Calm Before the Storm"

According to Gartner, “by 2011, more than 70% of US enterprise data centers will face tangible disruptions related to floor space, energy consumption and cost”. In fact they also predict that “infrastructure demands and increasing energy costs mean that IT costs could double by 2012”.

Quite alarming if you ask me. Now that we're 2 years past when the article was first published, I wonder if IT is still tracking to hit those "milestones" or if the rapid adoption of virtualization has helped stave off this disaster.

From what I've seen in the front lines, enterprises are gobbling up virtualization at an incredible rate, even still, most statistics will show that less than 20% of today's x86 servers have been virtualized. Transforming IT infrastructure is always a long process, but more than ever as we come closer and closer to those deadlines laid out by Gartner, I predict that this evolution from Physical to Virtual will accelerate.

Vendors like Novell, with our PlateSpin Workload Management suite of solutions, should be well positioned to help move things along.

Data Center

GWAVACon Las Vegas Sessions Announced

GWAVAComm — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:14:17 -0600

GWAVA is pleased to announce the session schedule for GWAVACon, to be held January 24-26, 2010 in Las Vegas. GWAVACon sessions are focused around Novell products such as GroupWise, Teaming, ZENworks and SLES as well as third-party products supporting GroupWise.

These sessions are designed to help you as a GroupWise administrator or partner make your system more secure, run more smoothly and save you both time and money. Here are a few examples:

• Getting Things Done with GroupWise 8 - Linux/Mac & WebAccess
• Teaming Technical Deep Dive
• Going with the Flow with Teaming Advanced Workflow
• Surviving a Security Attack
• iPhone Support For Novell GroupWise
• GWAVA Reload and Retain Hands-on
• Shape the Future of SLES with openSUSE
• Proven Ways of Keeping GroupWise in your Accounts

For a list of all of the great GWAVACon sessions that are being offered this year, click HERE.

For more information on GWAVACon, go to www.gwavacon.com.

Workgroup Cool Solutions

BrainShare - Flip the Switch

mattclayton — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Here's a link to a great article about some of the changes and modifications we've made for BrainShare 2010. Check it out to see how we've incorporated your feedback to make this year's conference better than ever.

http://www.novell.com/connectionmagazine/2009/10/b...

ZENworks Cool Solutions

Subscribe to the GWCheck Meta Blog

gburg — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 10:36:33 -0600

Like reading some of the following blogs...?

GWCheck.log
Alex Evans - GroupWise product manager
BlissPoint - E-mail Expert
Cool Solutions - the GroupWise Community
Danita's Desk - GroupWise Goddes
Dean Lythgoe - Director of GroupWise Engineering
Jeff Jaffe - Novell Chief Technology Officer
John Dragoon - Novell Chief Marketing Officer
Messaging Architects
MSI Wisdom - Roel van Bueren
Open Horizons
Osterman Research

But don't have the time for it...? Subscribe to the GWCheck Meta Blog!

This is a RSS feed with all of the above blogs. This way you are always up to date to the latest blogs.

You can add a RSS feed to your favorite browser or even to the GroupWise client (File - New - RSS feed).

Happy blog reading!
_

Workgroup Cool Solutions

Better Document Management: Novell Teaming 2 - Document Management for the Masses

coolguys — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:10:33 -0600

Better Document Management:
Novell Teaming 2 - Document Management for the Masses
By Ken Baker
Novell Connection Magazine - October 2009

Here's an excerpt:

When you first take a look at Novell Teaming, it’s likely because you want a better way for your users to collaborate and share information with their peers. As you dig in and start to use it yourself, you’ll get even better insight on the value it delivers such as the ability it gives you to generate great ideas; then share, act and preserve them; and then leverage those ideas for other projects. Spanning all three of these value areas, Novell Teaming includes document collaboration/management capabilities that enable users to better manage the lifecycle of the content they create.

Novell Teaming delivers basic document management for the masses that is easy to use, effective and inexpensive.

It should be noted upfront that the document management capabilities in Novell Teaming are not on the grand scale that you would find with a comprehensive and expensive document management platform. Rather, Novell Teaming delivers basic document management for the masses that is easy to use, effective and inexpensive. Perhaps more important is that Novell Teaming enables you to move from the inefficient, error-prone, but often-used e-mail attachment-based document-management scheme to a more efficient and easy-to-use paradigm with version control, access control, histories and powerful workflow capabilities.

Managing the Document Lifecycle

E-mail was never really designed as a tool for content creation, but we use it that way all the time. You create a document and e-mail it out to your team members for review. Hours or days later, you receive five or so e-mails back, all with updated versions of your document attached. You then spend hours sorting through and consolidating the edits and comments. When there are conflicts, you have to decide which edits trump other edits, then hope you guessed correctly. If you don’t want to do the guesswork, you often must have a conference between team members just to sort out the conflicts. The further you go down the revision path, the more complex the problems become. For instance, you might be on your fifth round of edits when you receive an e-mail attachment full of significant edits, but they’re all based on the first version of the document. What do you do then?

Read the article here

Cool Solutions

OpenHorizons EMEA Summit

ukdtom — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:02:40 -0600

Start: 29 Nov 2009 - 9:00am

End: 2 Dec 2009 - 5:30pm

Timezone: Europe/Vienna

This three-day Hands-On Summit is based on the earlier successful EMEA Summits, which have evolved into complete Hands-On events. Based on the feedback from our attendees in earlier years, we've kept improving our events. Here are some of the advantages:

* Learn by Doing: Instead of just listening to speakers, you will get a chance to really work with the latest versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise, Open Enterprise Server, GroupWise, Teaming + Conferencing, ZENWorks and partner solutions.
* By Experts for Experts: All labs will be presented by well known International Experts.
* Fully Interactive: Each lab will run for 3,5 hours with a maximum of 20 people in one lab-room, there is plenty of time to ask questions and get the right answers.
* Fully Equipped Lab-rooms: Each lab-room will be equipped with a laptop for each attendee. All laptops will be fully equipped and prepared to maximize your time spend on the lab content.
* World famous speakers: Connect to global and local experts in their fields. All of our speakers will certainly make sure to help you to get the best results.
* Keynotes by Novell: Several well known Novell VIP's will deliver two keynotes.
* Free USB hard drive for each attendee, so you can copy all labs you attend. This way the labs can also be practiced back home or at the office.

So get involved and become inspired, as all attendees of the previous Summits have been!

What's included in the Summit Package?
Our All Inclusive Package is also based on feedback of attendees of earlier events and offers (almost) everything you need, as it includes:

* Luxury Lodging - 3 nights at the 4 Star hotel, conveniently located at the border of the city center.
* All Meals - Dinner on the evening before and on the two nights of the Summit, lunch (3x) and breakfast (3x).
* VIP Service at the Vienna Airport, including CAT (City Airport Train) ticket and shuttle service from the CAT station in Vienna center to the hotel and back.
* Free USB hard drive which can be used to store all labs in which you will participate.
* Free Internet Access in and around our lab rooms.
* Discounted extended stay - you can stay earlier or longer at the hotel for a discounted rate.

To find more info, please go here:

http://www.open-horizons.net/emea-summit

ZENworks Cool Solutions