For a complete look at what’s new in Novell Vibe 3.2, check out the list below.  We want to remind you to stay tuned for additional features coming this winter, including off-line file synch for Vibe workspaces and a new Microsoft Office add-in.

To learn more or to download a free Starter Pack, visit: http://www.novell.com/vibe

New features of Novell Vibe 3.2 include:

• New mobile apps for iPhone and Android devices: As a web-based collaboration tool with a mobile interface, people have long been able to access their Novell Vibe team workspaces via their mobile devices. NEW with version 3.2 are actual iPhone and Android applications. Now users can store their credentials for one or more Vibe sites for fast and easy mobile access.
• File management:  Do your files proliferate faster than lightning speed? Ehancements provide more control over files.  Now you can turn file versioning on and off, set a maximum number of minor file versions, set the system to auto-delete old versions and delete multiple versions at once. You can also set quotas on file size.
• Expanded capabilities with landing pages and task management: With our rapid release process for Novell Vibe, each version brings subtle but highly requested enhancements providing users with an upgraded experience.  Vibe 3.2 includes improvements to landing page formatting for tables, background colors and images.  We’ve also made it more efficient to keep team members on track with enhanced task updates through task and calendar sync from Novell Vibe to Novell GroupWise.
• Improvements with workflows and surveys:  Survey builders have more flexibility with the simple ability to move questions up or down in the question list. Workflow steps now change dynamically based on the value of a field in a preceding step, and a workflow can now modify the value of a field entry.
• Performance, usability and quality improvements: Additional asthetic changes include usability improvements and a fresh look and feel for system notifications via email.

Since Novell’s acquisition earlier this year, the company has been reorganized into four businesses units focused on speed, simplicity and success.

The majority of Novell’s heritage offerings are now part of three business units: Novell, NetIQ and SUSE. Attendees got a glimpse of the future for each business unit as each president took the stage. You can see the keynotes here:

Novell: Bob Flynn, President, General Manager, Novell
NetIQ: Jay Gartner, President, and General Manager, NetIQ
SUSE: Nils Brauckmann, President and General Manager, SUSE

Bob Flynn, president and general manager for Novell shared with the audience what a renewed focus on customers will look like in the months to come. The business unit structure allows Novell us to be 100% focused on the technologies it delivers. This includes collaboration solutions (GroupWise and Vibe), endpoint management solutions (ZENworks) and file and network services solutions (Open Enterprise Server and Novell File Management Suite).

Flynn’s commitment to reestablishing trust and confidence with customers while also delivering more frequent product updates received a resounding applause from the audience. Specifically Flynn touched on Novell’s commitment to GroupWise as a critical part of the company’s success by inviting his team to provide a sneak peak of its new version, GroupWise 2012.

Flynn exited the stage allowing his teams to showcase new product features in Novell’s collaboration, endpoint management and file and network services solutions.

With a reassuring commitment to the audience and Novell customers, Flynn stated: “The measure of our success is how we execute against these commitments I’m making to you this morning. We’re going to help you maximize the value of the products you get from us.”

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware – and our alliance with VMware inked in September 2010 – continues to offer vSphere customers a proven enterprise Linux distribution for their virtualized environments. This is yet another proof point of SUSE’s commitment to deliver the best products, services and solutions to our customers.  According to a statement from Nils Brauckmann, President and General Manager of SUSE in a May 2011 press release:

"By operating SUSE as a separate business unit focused on the Linux marketplace, we can accelerate our delivery of high-value Linux solutions that help organizations enhance growth, reduce costs, tame complexity and spur innovation. We have the world-class engineering resources, partners and state-of-the-art technologies to succeed. Now we are sharpening our focus on making SUSE Linux Enterprise the preeminent Linux distribution across physical, virtual and cloud environments."

If you’re attending VMworld this week, stop by booth #747 to learn if you qualify to:

• Get SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware vSphere
• Receive patches and updates to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware at no cost
• Run unlimited number of virtual machines per qualified vSphere host

In addition, vSphere customers can streamline their support experience by receiving technical support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware directly from VMware.

For more information, check out VMware's announcement and download the Getting Started Guide.

It’s been about 2.5 months that I have been in the role of President and General Manager of Novell, and since joining The Attachmate Group, Novell has taken many steps towards defining the next great chapter in its evolution and history.

I want to take this opportunity to articulate our renewed focus and plans – where we are going, how we want to build on the strengths we have in our innovative and battle-tested technology, loyal customers, strong partners, and dedicated employees.

With our portfolio streamlined, our product focus is on collaboration, file and networking, and endpoint management technologies. From a customer success perspective, our focus is on engineering excellence and lasting customer and partner relationships. Our future is tied to how we deliver on our solutions, our word and how our customers perceive and define successful outcomes.

My team and I have much to share with you at our customer and partner event, BrainShare (October – 10 – 14, 2011 in Salt Lake City, Utah) and we encourage you to come hear first-hand our plans. For now, I can tell you that we have a lot to share with you over the coming months. We are committed to:

Delivering higher-quality solutions and greater customer value faster: To do this, Novell is hiring more R & D resources in Provo, UT and reinvesting in our core products with more frequent releases. In CY Q4, look for a series of product announcements to our core product families: Novell GroupWise, Open Enterprise Server, ZENworks and Novell Vibe.

Enabling customers to upgrade to latest versions at their own pace: For long-time customers, we’re making it easier to upgrade at your own pace by aligning and extending support for NetWare 6.5, Novell GroupWise 7, Novell ZENworks 7 for Desktops and the Novell ZENworks 7 Suite.

Enabling a portable workspace across wired and mobile devices securely: In today’s economy, employees need to be productive from anywhere and have the ability to access files from the device of their choosing (desk, laptops, tablets, mobile devices). Novell is ensuring GroupWise and Messenger functionality is accessible via today’s devices. Moreover, with ZENworks, we’re bringing together the ability to monitor and enforce endpoint and data security in one place and integrating management and secure file access across devices.

We are combining the ideas of social sharing with enterprise file discovery and access across devices with innovations that are complementary to Novell Open Enterprise Server. We’re leveraging our new File Management Suite to continue to drive down the cost of managing and storing data even as user output from new applications and devices skyrockets.

Consolidating and leveraging social experience across collaboration portfolio: Novell is incorporating key social experiences from Novell Vibe into GroupWise to bridge social and traditional email collaboration for our customers. We’re accelerating the consolidation of the Vibe platform with Novell Vibe OnPrem as the foundation as well. We’re incorporating the most user-requested functionality from Vibe Cloud into the combined platform rapidly over the next several releases. These strategic decisions and renewed focus have led us to the decision to decommission the Novell Vibe Cloud service as of September 30, 2011. We will communicate directly with Vibe Cloud users on what this means to them in the coming days.

I am honored to lead Novell and this great team into the next chapter of its long and decorated history. We have a bright and exciting future ahead. Our success will be measured on the success of our loyal customers and partners. Today’s Novell is more focused than ever on delivering enterprise-class capabilities in a social, mobile and multi-platform world. We are committed to helping you optimize the value you derive from your current investments and providing compelling reasons to extend your Novell investment to meet your business objectives.

Be sure to register for BrainShare to get the latest updates on these topics and more. I look forward to seeing you then. Can’t wait until then? Share your thoughts here.

When customers are the focal point of your business, you have to keep it real.  And, a common reality our customers must address is making the most of mixed Linux and Windows server environments. Enterprise customers can't afford to do business with “all or nothing” vendors – their environment is simply too complex. They need choice and with that choice they need interoperability.

Today, we extended our collaboration agreement with Microsoft in order to demonstrate our commitment to solve the very real, very complex challenges our customers confront in order to achieve business growth.

More than 725 customers including MoneyGram, BMW, Aeropuertos Españoles y Navegación Aérea, Nationale Suisse, Celesio AG and Coop Danmark A/S have gained greater efficiencies within their operational environments as a result of our collaboration efforts. We accomplished this by offering premium support and cost-effective interoperability solutions, including subscription support for not just SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, but also an Expanded Support offering for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS Linux users migrating to SUSE.

As this collaboration moves forward, SUSE and Microsoft pledge to continue offering the highest levels of interoperability and assurance to customers – especially as they look for greater operational efficiencies through virtualization and cloud technologies.

With the recent acquisition of Novell by Attachmate, there has been some uncertainty around the future of the SUSE Appliance Program. However, with today's announcement of SUSE Studio v1.2, the newly formed SUSE group has put that uncertainty to rest. The updated version of SUSE Studio will be available in two editions -Standard Edition which is primarily targeted towards ISVs and Advanced Edition which is primarily for enterprise organizations. One of the new features that is only included in Advanced Edition is the support for System Z. SUSE Enterprise Linux has long been the market leading Linux on System Z, so it is no surprise that customers have been clamoring for such a feature.

Other updates that are included in both versions of the products include 1-click deployment to Amazon EC2, enhanced versioning, rebuilding and changelog, and better integration with other SUSE products like SUSE Manager and Sentinel Log Manager.

IDC believes software appliances can play a key role in building out cloud deployments. This is why IDC forecasts the packaged software appliance market to grow to $3.7 billion by 2014. The ability to create and maintain one piece of software and deploy anywhere is an essential piece to automating your private, public and hybrid cloud deployments. And now with SUSE Studio's support for System Z, enterprises can use one tool for version control across x86, public cloud and System Z deployments reducing the overhead associated with managing a heterogeneous environment.

With the recent acquisition of Novell by Attachmate, there has been some uncertainty around the future of the SUSE Appliance program. However, with today's announcement of SUSE Studio v1.2, the newly formed SUSE group has put that uncertainty to rest. The updated version of SUSE Studio will be available in two editions -Standard Edition which is primarily targeted towards ISVs and Advanced Edition which is primarily for enterprise organizations. One of the new features that is only included in Advanced Edition is the support for System Z. SUSE Enterprise Linux has long been the market leading Linux on System Z, so it is no surprise that customers have been clamoring for such a feature.
Other updates that are included in both versions of the products include 1-click deployment to Amazon EC2, enhanced versioning, rebuilding and changelog, and better integration with other SUSE products like SUSE Manager and Sentinel Log Manager.
IDC believes software appliances can play a key role in building out cloud deployments. This is why IDC forecasts the packaged software appliance market to grow to $3.7 billion by 2014. The ability to create and maintain one piece of software and deploy anywhere is an essential piece to automating your private, public and hybrid cloud deployments. And now with SUSE Studio's support for System Z, enterprises can use one tool for version control across x86, public cloud and System Z deployments reducing the overhead associated with managing a heterogeneous environment.

GroupWise Calendar and Task Sync: A top priority for Novell Vibe OnPrem customers who also utilize GroupWise, this new connector leverages Novell Data Synchronizer to initially sync calendars and tasks from Vibe OnPrem to GroupWise. Bi-directional synchronization (from GroupWise to Vibe OnPrem) will be added in the next release.

Task management improvements: As more customers utilize Vibe OnPrem for project collaboration, new capabilities have been incorporated to improve productivity of task management, including sub-tasks; task ordering; completed time stamp; changing Priority, Status and Progress in list view; auto-date calculation; and quick search for folders.

User experience improvements: To meet customer demand for better access to information updates in their Vibe OnPrem system, enhancements to the “What’s New” user interface and Vibe OnPrem’s landing pages have been added.  The What’s New activity stream is now more interactive, and building landing pages to suit your purpose is easier than ever, with drag and drop editing, HTML and iFrame widgets, as well as new displays for calendars, tasks and surveys.

Enhancements for customers migrating from Sitescape Forum: For customers still using the Sitescape Forum product, making the transition to Novell Vibe OnPrem is easier, as the product  now offers folder views, workflow transitions, notifications, the ability to disable/retire users, individual form/folder notification schedule; and access through multiple domains.

Search improvements: As key components of Vibe OnPrem and how it performs, the search engine and index now feature basic stemming support, better handling of punctuation characters, stop-word filtering and improved search matching with acute characters.

Novell Vibe OnPrem 3.1 is currently available. To learn more or to request a trial, visit: http://www.novell.com/products/vibe-onprem

In order to help our customers assure their cluster configurations are running at peak performance, SUSE has teamed with the high availability experts at LINBIT to offer a cluster stack health check service.

The LINBIT Cluster Stack Health Check is an extensive check-up for Linux high availability clustering solutions, such as the SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension. LINBIT's Professional Services provides a thorough examination of an organization's cluster stack and a detailed best practice report with recommended enhancements to help customers get the most from their high availability cluster configurations.

Are your clusters running at peak performance, particularly the mission critical components?  SUSE customers with a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscription can get LINBIT's highly-effective Cluster Stack Health Check for a special price until December 31, 2011.  Click here for more information.

This week, Novell, SUSE and openSUSE joined the ranks of Google, Facebook and more than 1000 other participating websites for the Internet Society-organized World IPv6 Day.  During the June 8 global-scale trial of the new Internet Protocol, IPv6, more than 400 participating organizations enabled IPv6 on their main services for 24 hours.  Success!

According to this week's Internet Society newsletter

By providing a coordinated 24-hour “test flight”, the event helped demonstrate that major websites around the world are well-positioned for the move to a global IPv6-enabled Internet, enabling its continued exponential growth.

The June 8, 2011 event demonstrated that major websites around the world, including Novell, SUSE and openSUSE are well-positioned for the move to the next generation Internet protocol.

Check if you and your provider is IPv6 ready by clicking http://test-ipv6.com/.  If your ISP does not support IPv6, click here for advice.