Jeff Jaffe’s Blog

Fifth in a series about Novell’s comprehensive approach to cloud computing.

Reprise

In “The Cloud”, we identified five cloud infrastructure priorities:

• Connect
• Secure
• Manage
• Develop
• Collaborate

We’ve elaborated about Connect, Develop, and Secure and here we will talk about Collaborating in the Cloud.

Modern Collaboration

I’ve previously discussed the revolutionary changes in collaboration that have arisen from social networking. There are two simultaneous changes in support of each other.

• The nature of collaboration. Modes of interaction between people and modes of broadcasting information are changing. This is impactful in personal, business, and political dimensions. A glance at the impact of Twitter—to true-up reporting of events in Iran confirms this.
• The technology to support collaboration is changing. In “Acquisitioin of SiteScape” we discussed the mechanisms to support the change in the nature of collaboration.

Collaboration in the Cloud

As the twin changes—nature of collaboration and technology to support it—bootstrap each other, we move to the next breakthrough technology of cloud computing. A cloud computing collaboration infrastructure increases the facilities for ad hoc teams of people to work together in an informal, opportunistic fashion. These people are distributed across enterprises and may fuse enterprise needs with personal needs. Key new properties of an infrastructure to collaborate in the cloud include:

• Collaboration at “chat speed”. Teams can instantly form or break-up. It is easy for individuals to join or depart team collaborations and be apprised of the history of communications of this team. Many are calling this the real-time web.
• Unification. A difficulty with today’s collaboration techniques is that there are too many of them. Cloud based collaboration can make this worse by adding more modes. Cloud communication infrastructure must create a unified dashboard for the multiple approaches to collaboration.
• Real-time awareness. Cloud computing’s instant-on nature will raise the awareness of what others are doing to a new level. Instead of a static view of whether individuals are on-line we create a dynamic view of the “properties” of what groups are doing.
• Security. We must find a way to secure the collaboration—when it is used for business needs, without sacrificing the ease-of-use required for personal or consumer needs.

Novell Teaming

Novell has been investing in collaboration technology. Our strategy is to provide the infrastructure for computing and collaboration for our customers. With that in mind, we were gratified last week when Forrester recognized Novell as having a “solid position as a collaborative platform vendor” as a consequence of our Novell Teaming product.

The Next Step—the Integrated Cockpit

Building on our success in Teaming, we will take collaboration to the next level for the cloud. In “Innovation Culture” I mentioned our breakout move initiative that identifies revolutions in our industry and innovative solutions to address these revolutions. One project that we funded was the Cockpit project. This provides an integrated “cockpit” for users to view all of their collaboration paradigms. It has the cloud computing support mentioned above: collaboration at chat speed and real-time awareness with security. In this way, it supports ad hoc collaboration as never before. It has other outstanding capabilities such as social message flow and co-editing; which we will elaborate on as the project reaches greater degrees of maturity.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 9:01 am and is filed under Workgroup Collaboration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.