Novell News

Paul Murphy over at ZDNet is trying to pull together criteria for determining how to rate office productivity programs. He’s looking at Microsoft Office vs. OpenOffice. I like the effort to develop an objective, rather than ideological, approach to the question. That there’s even a question – given the long-term lock that Microsoft Office has had on the desktop for so long – is evidence of the growing power of open source in changing existing market dynamics. We continue to move forward internally on our OpenOffice adoption. As of Monday, April 3, the standard format for documents for internal use at Novell will be the OpenOffice 2.0 default (.odt for documents, .odp for presentations, .ods for spreadsheets). These files are Open Document Format compatible, meaning any ODF compliant program can be used to read them.

At recent BrainShares, Novell has sponsored a contest for local (Utah) film students to come up with mock advertisements for Novell. We get some pretty creative stuff. We put these files online here, along with other marketing videos. Have a look. Some of these are pretty funny.

A couple of interesting customer stories were recently posted, highlighting GroupWise as a great solution for governments, from the Pennsylvania State Senate to the Aberdeen City Council in Scotland. Check out the stories. After taking a good look at the alternatives, the customers cite price/performance, security and reliability for thousands of users as key selling points for GroupWise. A thorough check under the hood before buying always pays off.

There’s a nice new partnering win for Novell in the financial services arena. Market Systems Technology has put their solutions for the financial services industry on Concurrent Real-Time Extensions Powered by SUSE Linux. MST’s Market Access ticker plant processes hundreds of thousands of messages per second of financial market data and its messaging middleware can distribute over one million messages per second, supporting thousands of client applications. Concurrent’s RTE is a version of the popular SUSE Linux platform from Novell enhanced with Concurrent’s field-proven, real-time Linux extensions.Needless to say, in a sector where information is the product, this kind of system is absolutely mission critical. And it’s on SUSE Linux Enterprise.

Novell President and COO Ron Hovsepian was on Bloomberg TV this morning. He talked about Novell’s financial position, the Linux strategy, and our partnerships. You can track down the transcript by searching for “Novell” from this page (not the easiest process, I know, but I can’t link to it directly).

Thanks to BrainShare, it’s been a bit too busy to post the last few days, but things have slowed down on the press front today. It’s been a good show. We had over 40 press here, roughly split down the middle between U.S. and non- U.S. press, with good representation from Novell’s key European, Canadian, and Latin American markets. We did extensive interviews with senior management – Jack Messman, Ron Hovsepian, Jeff Jaffe, Roger Levy, Kent Erickson, and more. We also had solidly booked tracks on our major solution areas – desktop, data center, resource management, security and identity management, and workgroup. The online press room has plenty of photos, keynotes (video and documents), partner news, some good customer wins, and more. I’ve been to six BrainShares, and this has been the best. We’ve had a lot of good announcements in key areas of customer focus – Linux management, data center issues like virtualization and performance, expanding the partner ecosystem around Linux, and compelling news for our installed base around GroupWise, NetWare support and OES futures. And Nat Friedman’s desktop demo brought down the house, just like it did at BrainShare Europe last fall. Nobody can watch this demo and say that open source is just “catching up” to existing proprietary platforms. There are innovative features in SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 that you definitely don’t get from Windows. Any customer who’s facing a Vista upgrade in the coming year really needs to look at this as a serious alternative – a full-function, open desktop at very low cost. My sense of talking to the press this year versus earlier years is that we’ve moved beyond the “Is this Linux thing working for Novell?” stage to questions around the business value of what we’re delivering. That’s where the conversation should be.We’ve seen a lot of good coverage so far, and expect to see more. You can see some of that here.

We had a last minute room change for the BrainShare press conference today which resulted in some confusion for the dial in. We videotaped the press conference, so you can watch that here. The front end of the press conference is a demo by Nat Friedman of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, which includes some great office productivity, search, photo, and video capabilities. Have a look.

BrainShare kicks off this weekend. We look forward to seeing a number of our press friends at the show. For those not attending, we’ll be setting up an online press room with releases, partner releases, photos, links to the keynotes, and more. You’ll be able to find that here starting Monday. The keynotes will be webcast live on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 9:00 am Mountain. They’ll be accessible from the main BrainShare page and we’ll archive them in the online press room.On a separate note, but keeping up with the theme of the week, the OES guys – Jason Williams, Richard Jones, Doug Clower and David Mair – are also now up and posting on Cool Blogs.

The good stuff keeps rolling in. The GroupWise guys – Ken Muir, Bill Pray, and Alex Evans, with others joining shortly – are now blogging on Cool Blogs. Even though the site is growing, it’s easy to navigate. Blogs are tagged by category and/or poster, so you can find what, or whom, you’re interested in. We’re also teeing it up so you’ll be able to subscribe to RSS feeds by category and/or individual poster. There’s a lot of BrainShare discussion going on right now, so several groups have created BrainShare sub-categories. If you’re headed to the show and have a particular interest in a certain product area, you can get some good info on Cool Blogs.

Miguel de Icaza, Novell’s VP for developer technologies, co-founder of Ximian and founder of the Mono project, will be participating in a UN panel tomorrow in New York on how open source can help governments in the developing world improve government services. “eGovernance and Free Software: How They are Changing Developing Countries” will also focus on the potential for open source development to help promote economic development.The event is open to the public and press, and you can sign up here. Miguel always has an interesting angle on things, so I’d encourage you to drop in if you’re in New York.