Novell Rivals Google with Real-time Enterprise Collaboration

By Chelsi Nakano (@chelkano) Mar 25, 2010

Betting that Google Wave would've fared better had it been released for business folk rather than consumers, an enterprise software company called Novell recently announced their own real-time collaboration mashup platform. Because it uses the Wave Federation Protocol, Novell Pulse is essentially Google Wave with a greater emphasis on security and management.

In a Nutshell…

Novell's angle is serious. "We include features that the business consumers want, but also the security and controls the enterprise demands," said Ken Muir, CTO for Novell WorkGroup.

Those features include:

Security: Provisioning, sign-on and permissions leverage enterprise identity and access management systems, directory servers and audit tools to integrate with established processes, keep data safe and support compliance requirements.
Real-time collaboration: Collaborative editing and document sharing enables users to get work done with other users in real-time, from co-editable online documents to the ability to share and comment on traditional office documents in real time.
Unified Inbox: A single interface allows users to see, sort and filter all their personal and professional content from various social messaging services, email, Wave, etc. all in one place.
Enterprise social messaging: Social Blog allows users to share, follow and comment on topics and ideas.
Real-time awareness and chat: Allows users to know exactly when their colleagues are available via people, group and message activity monitoring

“Novell Pulse is the first enterprise class, real-time collaboration platform that unites communication, authoring and social messaging tools. Novell Pulse helps drive enterprise productivity and innovation by making it easier to communicate digitally, generate ideas and share information,” said the Novell team in a recent statement.

Don't Call it Wave

Who knows what upcoming versions of Wave will include (Google is scheduled to release a business-y version the the collaboration platform later this year), but for now, it looks like Novell is attempting to fill in the Google gaps. In addition to being able to collaborate with Wave users and offering what Wave is known for, Pulse provides social-networking features like profiles as well as the option install the tool locally. Local installations do not rely on Google for any of these features

Moreover, the security features are a big deal, and certainly a must for any enterprise customer.

Collaboration

No matter which way you slice it, the future of the enterprise is about collaboration. Because Novell leverages what Wave has to offer while simultaneously providing the features the enterprise really cares about, Pulse could be something to keep an eye on.

For now the tool is only available to those that attended the Novell Brainshare conference, but general availability is expected in the first half of 2010 in a cloud deployment, with an on-premise deployment coming sometime in the future.

Check out Novell for more info.