Novell News » 2009 » June

Teaming test drive

Kerry Adorno — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:00:33 +0000

Looking for ways to boost productivity and maximize efficiency in your organization, then check out the beta of Novell Teaming 2.0. The Novell collaboration and enterprise social networking tools offer a compelling value proposition for GroupWise customers and are differentiated by a focus on interoperability and a TCO that won't break the bank.

While the final release is still several weeks away, you can take the beta out for a spin today. Go here to download the beta and let us know what you think.

Go team! Kablink 2.0 released today

Kerry Adorno — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:07:23 +0000

Kablink, the Novell-sponsored open source platform that provides collaboration tools that can be integrated into every business, today announced the availability of Kablink 2.0 with teaming functionality. With Kablink, users can integrate the most popular collaboration tools (blogs, wikis, forums, microblogs) into their infrastructure and harness the power of their knowledge workers under one standardized platform. Check out this video with Kablink Community manager, Brent McConnell, which discusses the evolution of enterprise collaboration and offers a first look at Kablink 2.0.

Kablink provides the foundation the Novell Teaming solutions. As a preview of the enterprise products, Kablink is an excellent way for IT departments to start planning and building teaming and conferencing solutions today. The new release includes an updated user interface, advanced workflow features, and features to allow users to find the most relevant information in their organization quickly and effectively.

According to Robert Mahowald, Research director at IDC, “The worldwide collaboration market for integrated collaborative environments is expected to grow to $3.3 billion by 2012. Interest in these productivity tools is increasing and open source collaborative solutions with robust functionality, like Kablink, offer customers a compelling value proposition, allowing them to get their feet wet at minimal cost. A pilot approach, using open source tools, can help customers to address immediate productivity needs, while positioning themselves to adopt enterprise offerings as the economy improves and their business grows.”

Bridging the gap between content and collaboration

Almost all most all organizations have thought leaders and product content, but finding the data, the experts and a way to work together can present significant challenges. Kablink allows users can harness the knowledge within their organizations, ensuring that experts can be found and leveraged for maximum productivity. New features include:

Advanced Workflow: Perhaps the single most powerful capability in Kablink, advanced workflow allows users and administrators to define and create processes as well as connect data with each process to ensure consistency and efficiency across business functions.
Expertise Locator: This built-in functionality helps users to find the most relevant information, resources and people within an organization. Reducing the amount of time users spend looking for information, Expertise Locator identifies the people in your organization who are actively working on the topic of interest with every search.
Personal Relevancy: This highly customizable tool allows users to set preferences, ensuring that the most important information rises to the top and the user is kept informed and involved in the conversations that are most relevant for them.

For more information vist the Kablink community site.

We're a-Twitter

Kerry Adorno — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:04:14 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Novell is now @novell on Twitter. Follow @novell to get all the updates about the company.

There are a number of Novell tweeps already tweeting about our solutions and community projects, below are a few other people and groups that you might also want to follow:

Marketing
@jkdragoon
@justinsteinman
@ianrbruce
@NovellTalks
@kadorno
@NovellEvents

Collaboration
@Novell NOWS SBE
@GroupWise_Info
@thegroupwisepm
@rlindstedt

Endpoint Management/ZENworks
@grantho
@LaurencePitt
@Jgiffard

Open Source/Community
@opensuse
@jzb
@susestudio
@migueldeicaza
@natfriedman

Dell turns to Platespin for virtualization support

Ian Bruce — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:31:32 +0000

Today Dell announced significant new additions to its enterprise portfolio with data center and virtualization services, new product configurations, and a new PowerEdge server and EqualLogic storage array. At the core of these announcements is a drive towards even greater performance and efficiency in the data center.

On the virtualization front, Dell announced two business-ready product configurations to simplify the design, procurement and deployment of virtual enterprise infrastructures. Critical to optimizing virtual environments is the ability to support mixed IT environments, enabling enterprises to easily manage, optimize and protect all workloads in the data center. To make this happen, Dell turned to Novell and Platespin Migrate.

With broad support for Windows and Linux, as well as leading server hardware and hypervisor technologies, Platespin Migrate enables enterprises to profile, move, copy and replicate data, applications and operating systems across infrastructure boundaries to make physical and virtual environments work as one. Dell will ship Platespin Migrate with Dell PowerEdge M-series blades and EqualLogic PS6000 iSCSI storage technology, making the move to virtualization easier, quicker and more efficient.

Novell Compliance Management Platform is industry's first compliance management solution to be certified by SAP

Amie Johnson — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:25:56 +0000

Novell today announced the Novell Compliance Management Platform extension for SAP environments, a cost-effective solution for managing access and security across both SAP and non-SAP systems.

Using bi-directional sync, now customers can integrate the identity and security information in their SAP solutions with other business applications. This integration saves organizations time and money by minimizing the duplication of effort and the potential for error that occur when managing IT compliance across multiple systems.

The Novell Compliance Management Platform is the first compliance management solution certified by SAP for integration with the SAP BusinessObjects Access Control application.

The Novell Compliance Management Platform extension for SAP environments is the second deliverable resulting from the partnership between Novell and SAP. The agreement is designed to enable SAP's industry-leading enterprise applications to work with SUSE Linux Enterprise and Novell's virtualization and security management technologies to provide powerful new data center options for customers.

Visit our Novell and SAP partner site for more information.

Are you a fan?

Kerry Adorno — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:09:55 +0000

Whether you just appreciate Novell from desktop to data center or you have a yen for ZEN (ZENworks that is), there is a place for you to mingle with like-minded fans. That's right, Novell has a presence on Facebook that gives friends and fans the latest information for SUSE Linux Enterprise, GroupWise and ZENworks as well as Novell in general.

Become a fan today!

openSUSE sets the record straight

Ian Bruce — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:08:21 +0000

Reports this week about a Novell-developed "app store" have raised a lot of interest, and a bit of confusion. Let me clarify.

Novell and the openSUSE Project have already done the heavy lifting to allow developers and ISVs to build packages for all major Linux distributions with one central build service. The openSUSE Build Service provides installable packages of popular open source software for many Linux distributions — including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, and Ubuntu. Using openSUSE Linux, users can install software from the openSUSE Build Service via the One-Click feature, so they can get the best that open source has to offer with no hassles. We're also working with the Linux Foundation to help make the build service available to a wider community of developers via the Linux Developer Network.

It's not the openSUSE Project or Novell's goal to compete with SourceForge.net, Google Code, or any other project hosting service; to the contrary, it has always been our goal to cooperate with these services. In fact, we view these services as complimentary to the openSUSE Build Service, and use them to host some Novell-sponsored projects like iFolder. We believe that the openSUSE Build Service stands alongside project hosting services as part of the infrastructure that helps support the open source ecosystem.

Couldn't be there? Get all the Moblin news from Computex here

Kerry Adorno — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:52:29 +0000

If you were at Computex, Novell and our OEM partners provided a sneak peek into the future with the SUSE edition of Moblin running on next-generation netbook hardware from Acer, MSI, and based on Intel's industry-leading Atom chipsets. If you couldn't make the trip to Taiwan, check out some pictures from the show including Novell's booth, the presentations, and how cool the SUSE edition of Moblin looks on the Acer netbook.

While still in beta form, the software received rave reviews by visitors at the event. Netbooks and nettops are clearly hot topics and there is a lot going on in the space. In fact, there has been great press around the potential for Moblin, which you can check out here, here, here and here. Also, our friends at Moblin.org, interviewed director of Client Preloads, Guy Lunardi and Novell's alliances manager, Mark Longwell,on Novell's involvement in the project. See that story here.

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation was also present sharing the foundation's perception of the new economics that netbooks and nettops are introducing. In fact, the Linux Forum was particularly well attended.

Stay tuned for more to come from Novell on Moblin.

Pet project

Kerry Adorno — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:24:57 +0000

Perhaps you have allergies or maybe you live in a small apartment, and so you've lived without the companionship of an animal friend. Well, no matter what your circumstances now you can have your own virtual pet Geeko. With the new Geekobuilder, you can build your own personalized Geeko and show the world your love of Linux, without having to adjust your schedule to handle care, feeding or walking.

Go to the site today check out some of the examples in the gallery and create your own customized Geeko artwork for your desktop. If you like the Geekobuilder, feel free to share it with friends using the “Share this site” feature.

Case closed: GroupWise helps law firm get control of e-mail

Kerry Adorno — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:31:00 +0000

Check out this recently published eContent case study to see how Whitelaw Twining is using GroupWise to simplify filing, streamline its legal practice, and get control of the data being stored on it servers.

Though small in employee size, the Canadian law firm has 15,000 open cases at a given time, and they needed an e-mail solution that offered enterprise-class e-mail capabilities while meeting the specific needs of the business. Turns out Whitelaw Twining didn't need to look any further than the GroupWise solution they already had in their enterprise.

With results like this, it's worth learning more about how something as basic as e-mail can help make your organization more productive.