This week Novell launched Mono Tools for Visual Studio, a revolutionary add-in module for Microsoft Visual Studio. Mono Tools lets .NET developers build Linux, UNIX and Mac OS X applications without leaving their familiar Visual Studio environment. By allowing .NET-trained developers to leverage their existing expertise and ecosystem of .NET code, libraries and tools, Mono Tools slashes the time and costs of developing multi-platform applications. But don't just take our word for it – check out Mono Tools for yourself. Download a free 30-day trial here. Try it and let us know what you think.

In this video, Grant Ho, senior solutions manager for Novell Endpoint Management Solutions, offers some tips to help organizations manage, optimize and secure their endpoints.

The openSUSE Project is getting ready to release openSUSE 11.2 in just under a week. When the release is final, the project will create promotional DVDs and CDs to give away at Linux and open source events. But what cover should be on them? The openSUSE contributor community has come up with three really fantastic designs to grace the openSUSE media sleeves, but which one should they choose?

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier has blogged about the choices and is soliciting comments and votes for the community favorite. Polling will end on Monday, so help the community choose today!

And don't forget the openSUSE launch on Thursday, November 12. The openSUSE 11.2 release will come with brand-new GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice, Firefox, and all your favorite open source server and desktop apps.

Your vote counts, so don't delay, let us know which cover you like best today.

“Novell's network of smaller, regional-based integration and consulting continues to grow through established integration providers such as Atos Origin, Deloitte and Wipro, as well as global alliance partners such as HP and SAP.”

Mixed IT environments are a reality for all organizations, which means our customers depend on our ecosystem of partners to reduce cost, complexity and risk.  A great example of our partnership in action is highlighted in this SAP Insider article:

Let’s say an employee is changing roles from an accounting clerk to an accounting manager. For her new role, the accounting manager must have access to a new set of resources. For this, her organization needs to provide and track access, and instantly identify and provide alerts about any policy violations, such as gaining access to both the accounts payable and receivable systems. Properly setting up the accounting manager requires a strategic layering of technology, such as SAP BusinessObjects Access Control and the Novell Compliance Management Platform extension for SAP environments. This pairing helps companies ensure that business policies will be consistently enforced and monitored across SAP and non-SAP applications throughout the organization.

As John Dragoon appropriately says in this post, "Making IT work as one is who we are, what we do and it embodies the core values that we provide to our customers."

In additional, we also announced that Novell and Google 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 with 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. A beta of Novell Pulse will be available early next year, with generally availability planned for mid -2010 in a cloud deployment and an on-premise version to follow later. In the meantime, check out some of the early press coverage in here, here and here.

To learn more about Novell Pulse check out our website, view the demo or register at the Enterprise 2.0 conference site to see the archived keynote address from Novell and Google.