Tech Talk 1 by Ken Baker
Feel the Pulse – Part One
Novell Pulse: Taking Advantage of in-the-Cloud, Real-time, Ad hoc Collaboration
A few months ago, Novell announced that a “new and innovative user experience” would play a key role in its vision for collaboration. In November, that innovative user experience—taking shape as Novell Pulse—was previewed to wide accolade at the Enterprise 2.0 show in San Francisco, California. With planned availability in mid-2010, this new cloud technology enables users to enter a completely new arena: real-time, enterprise-class collaboration. The goal behind Novell Pulse is to help drive enterprise productivity and innovation by making it easier for users to communicate, generate ideas and share information instantly and from anywhere. To deliver on this promise, Novell Pulse combines communication, document authoring and social messaging tools with robust security and management capabilities.
While Novell Pulse shares some capabilities inherent to Novell GroupWise and Novell Teaming, it complements these solutions by creating a seamless bridge between traditional collaboration and the productivity gains offered by in-the-cloud, real-time, ad hoc collaboration. Essentially, this means that Novell Pulse lets users communicate, co-author, co-edit and share in the cloud from anywhere on an ad hoc basis.
Get Ready, Set, Share
One powerful aspect of Novell Pulse is its self-service nature. As an on-demand service, users don’t have to wait for IT to set it up. (See Figure 1.) If a few users within a department want to try it out, they can sign up for the free version and take it for a test drive. (See Feel the Pulse – Part Two.) But the self-service aspect doesn’t end there.
Similar to popular social networking services, users can create their own profiles and connect with and follow other people. They can determine what elements of their profile are visible to their followers or different groups. Users can also set up groups of people with whom they want to share content and communicate. This enables the quick, ad hoc creation of distributed teams comprised of people who can offer unique insights, experience and expertise. And because one of the primary design principles of Novell Pulse is interoperability, these groups can span organizational, geographic and even product boundaries.
The ease with which you can create teams, follow people and build ad hoc relationships forms the basis for users to share just about any type of content in real time. In fact, Novell Pulse breaks down the barriers created by traditional collaboration tools, letting you share and collaborate in ways that accommodate the way you work.
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With Novell Pulse, the primary vehicle for sharing is messages, but messages can be communicated or delivered in a variety of ways. When you send a message to someone’s personal address, it works just like a regular messaging system. When you send it to your personal feed address, it's similar to a personal blog that people can follow. When you send a message to a group, it acts like a group feed or a location to syndicate content.
Messages can be styled and directed to other locations as well. For example, a message can be styled like a Wiki within Novell Pulse. A message can also be embedded in another Web page, where it can be styled as a wiki or other appropriate format. Additionally, since Novell Pulse uses a powerful document editor for content creation, messages can become full-blown documents that can be shared, co-authored and co-edited as desired.
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Figure 1
The self-service nature of Novell Pulse makes it easy for users to sign up for it and try it out.
Figure 2
Novell Pulse makes it easy to post messages to your feed for all your followers to view, reply and participate in real time.
Figure 3
Novell Pulse allows you to co author and co-edit documents in real time with other members in your groups.
Figure 4
Novell Pulse includes a library of document templates to further facilitate document creation and co-authoring.
Article 1 of 2
Feel the Pulse–Part OneArticle 2 of 2
Feel the Pulse–Part Two
