Novell News » 2008 » February

CRM info from the GroupWise client

Kevan Barney — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 01:27:44 +0000

Interesting GroupWise news today … Omni Technology Solutions announced availability of Riva GroupWise Integration for SugarCRM.

Riva synchronizes opportunities, quotes and cases from SugarCRM and makes them available in all GroupWise clients including BlackBerry and GroupWise Mobile Server mobile devices, GroupWise WebAccess, Linux, Macintosh and Windows desktops.

What a whirl …

Kerry Adorno — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:35:16 +0000

Novell today announced plans to acquire PlateSpin, a leader in data center workload lifecycle management. Novell's chief marketing officer, John Dragoon, posted on his blog about what this means for Novell's strategy in the data center.

Additionally, you can listen to a replay of the press conference and hear Novell and PlateSpin discuss this important move here.

What interoperability means to Novell

Kevan Barney — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 22:55:54 +0000

You may have seen Microsoft's announcement today on changes the company intends to make to expand interoperability and openness of its products. In his blog, Novell CMO John Dragoon offers perspective on the announcement from Novell's side of our interoperability collaboration with Microsoft. It's worth a read.

Bringing it all together

Charlotte Betterley — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 22:17:55 +0000

Today, the Eclipse Foundation announced the availability of Higgins 1.0, a freely downloadable framework designed to integrate identity, profiles and social relationship information across multiple sites, applications and devices using adaptable components. Novell is a member of the Eclipse Foundation and our open source identity Bandit project has contributed code to the Higgins Project.

The explosion of web-based applications, mashups, social networking, etc. and increasing concern about protecting identity information is driving the need for an open and consistent identity framework. Higgins 1.0 is a significant step forward in bringing together all the different identity protocols, standards and systems under one framework.

Do your office docs play well with others?

Kevan Barney — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:33:17 +0000

You know they've been in the works, but the Office Open XML/OpenDocument format translators for presentations and spreadsheets are now available for download. The OpenOffice.org, Novell Edition binary versions are here, and the project source and upstream versions can be found here. The word processing translator, which provides the ability to open Office Open XML-formatted documents in OpenOffice.org, has been out since last March. Now users of the Novell Edition of OpenOffice.org 2.3 can open Powerpoint (.pptx) and Excel (.xlsx) documents in OpenOffice.org.

The OpenDocument format (ODF) is used by default in OpenOffice.org, and Office Open XML is the default file format for Microsoft Office 2007. The availability of these translators is a milestone in the document format compatibility work of the Microsoft-Novell technical collaboration. Users of Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org now have an improved and higher fidelity option for exchanging data in the Open XML format. The improved consistency in word processing documents, combined with the ability to share spreadsheets and presentations, is critical for business users who need to be able to share documents with users of other office productivity software packages.

While these new translators are plug-ins to OpenOffice.org. Novell is also continuing development (with Sun Microsystems) on high-performance, native translators that will be built into OpenOffice.org and released with the next major upgrade to SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop in 2009. Previews of the current state of the native translators are already available via the openSUSE project.

The right place at the right time

Charlotte Betterley — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 22:18:12 +0000

Dark Reading is reporting on new Forrester numbers that indicate the identity management market is expanding. According to Dark Reading, Forrester predicts that identity and access management, a $2.6 billion market in 2006, will grow to $12.3 billion by 2014. Novell's solutions are addressing some key business concerns in the identity and access management market, including compliance, roles based provisioning, advanced authentication and physical and logical convergence. As enterprises look to increase their identity and access management investments, Novell is providing cost-effective, easy to deploy solutions to help them verify compliance, manage identity and control access.

Novell in the business media

Bruce Lowry — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 16:01:33 +0000

In case you missed them, there were a couple of online stories this week in leading business publications based on interviews with our CEO, Ron Hovsepian. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal's Ben Worthen posted this blog. Yesterday, BusinessWeek put up this piece. Novell's business story is gaining visibility.

openSUSE community gets new resident

Kevan Barney — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 18:27:54 +0000

Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier just started work at Novell as openSUSE community manager, which is good news for Novell and the openSUSE community. Zonker's job is to be an advocate for the community, to make sure the community's needs are heard by Novell and the openSUSE board. He will also serve as a bridge from Novell to the open source community.

It's his job to help the openSUSE project grow and to make sure the project can scale to handle that growth. Zonker is charged with communicating what's going on in the project and promoting openSUSE and Linux in general.

He's up to the task: Zonker has been a Linux geek since 1996 and has worked as a tech journalist covering Linux and open source since 1999, most recently as editor-in-chief of Linux Magazine. Welcome aboard, Zonk.

Gartner sees open source expansion

Bruce Lowry — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 18:35:41 +0000

Gartner has just put out a Top 10 tech trends for 2008 and beyond. Open source expansion is one of them. In the next four years, Gartner sees open source elements in 80 percent of all commercial software. That's a really big number. The business value of open source, in terms of flexibility and cost, as well as the compelling leveraged cost of open source as a development model, are really driving the space forward. We're happy to be smack in the middle of this key trend, not only with SUSE Linux Enterprise, but also with our participation in open source projects around identity (Bandit), collaboration (ICEcore) and other areas.