Novell Pulse Preview Unveiled, BrainShare Attendees to Get First Access

SALT LAKE CITY, March 22 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- BrainShare 2010 -- Novell today unveiled a preview of Novell® Pulse and announced that attendees of its annual Novell BrainShare® conference will be the first to get accounts plus five invitations to access the cloud-based collaboration platform when the preview is released. Novell Pulse is the first real-time collaboration platform for the enterprise. Combining real-time authoring, communication and social messaging tools with robust security and management capabilities, Novell Pulse helps teams drive faster, better business outcomes that enable organizations to compete effectively in today's economy.

"The traditional tools of business collaboration fall short of the social Web capabilities people use in their personal lives and are now insisting on in the workplace, forcing people to use both to get their work done," said Michael Fauscette, Group Vice President, Software Business Solutions at IDC. "In this social business environment, enterprises need solutions that serve both the demands of the business and the user. Novell Pulse is a next generation collaboration tool that meets these challenges by bridging the worlds of secure enterprise class software and the flexible, functional user-driven experience that give users, IT admins and CIOs the capabilities and the confidence to deliver on their job requirements."

Users today want a consumer-like interface for their business collaboration experience. But with  increasing security threats and compliance requirements, enterprises need more identity and access control over their collaboration tools than ever before. With a long history in secure enterprise collaboration, Novell is perfectly positioned to address this challenge. By combining granular, policy-driven controls with federation to enterprise identity and access management systems, Novell Pulse helps enterprises retain flexibility and control while embracing social messaging and emerging collaboration paradigms. Longer-term, Novell Pulse provides an open collaboration framework that enables organizations to access third-party collaboration tools from one common interface.

Built to work alone or in concert with existing collaboration investments, Novell Pulse also uses the Google* Wave* Federation Protocol to allow seamless integration with other next-generation co-editing and collaboration tools, such as Google Wave, as well as new extensions that third parties build on top of the Novell Pulse platform.

"We designed Google Wave to help people work together and discuss ideas in a live, richly formatted environment," said Dan Peterson, product manager at Google. "The Google Wave Federation Protocol broadens the opportunity by enabling any organization to build their own wave service that can interoperate with all other wave providers, including Google. By adopting the Google Wave Federation Protocol, Novell Pulse simply lets users collaborate across systems, in real-time."

Novell Pulse Revolutionizes Business Collaboration

Novell Pulse delivers a collaboration environment that works the way people want to work, drawing on the best of instant messaging, document sharing, social connections, real-time co-editing and enterprise controls. Key features of the preview include:

"Employees today are struggling to be continually connected and informed, but are overloaded with multiple communication mediums that don't give them access to information in a way that makes sense to them," said Colleen O'Keefe, senior vice president and general manager for Novell Collaboration Solutions and Global Services. "Enterprises need a solution that simplifies communication with an inclusive yet secure platform for open interaction. Built on our heritage of identity, security and collaboration development, Novell Pulse is the solution that will revolutionize the way people work together, by working they way they want to work -- not dictating how they should work."

Availability

Attendees to BrainShare 2010 in Salt Lake City will be given exclusive first access to the Novell Pulse preview. Novell will begin sending account access notifications to attendees in the weeks following the Novell BrainShare conference. All other interested parties can register at http://www.novell.com/pulse to be notified when the preview is opened to a broader audience. Novell Pulse will be generally available in the second half of 2010 in a cloud deployment, and with an on-premise deployment option in a subsequent release.

For more information on Novell Pulse and real-time collaboration, view this three-part video series: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsEqqZSOZDY, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SzBFJdbJ1U, and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAmxCohbLjA.

News, photos and archived versions of the Novell BrainShare keynotes will be available at: http://www.novell.com/brainsharepress/.

Novell is a registered trademark and BrainShare is a registered service mark of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries.  *All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Google and Google Wave are trademarks of Google, Inc.

About Novell

Novell, Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL) delivers the best engineered, most interoperable Linux platform and a portfolio of integrated IT management software that helps customers around the world reduce cost, complexity and risk. With our infrastructure software and ecosystem of partnerships, Novell harmoniously integrates mixed IT environments, allowing people and technology to work as one. For more information, visit www.novell.com.

SOURCE Novell, Inc.