Novell has a Pulse

David Heath
Tuesday, 23 March 2010 23:25

Business IT - Technology

Today at the annual BrainShare conference, Novell unveiled the preview of their cloud-based collaboration tool Pulse.

Attendees at BrainShare in Salt Lake City were today presented with a preview version of Pulse including 5 access licences.

Pulse combines real-time authoring, communication and social messaging tools with strong security and the kind of corporate-grade management tools required by large companies.

"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."

According to Novell's press release, key features include:

* Security Granular policy-driven controls at the person, group and organization levels enable people to keep information safe.

* Real-time collaboration Collaborative editing and document sharing enable users to get work done with other users in real-time, from co-editable online documents to the ability to share, view and comment on traditional office documents in real time.

* Enterprise social messaging Social blog capabilities allow users to share, follow and comment on topics and ideas. A suggestion system allows users to recommend people and groups.

* Document presence Document presence shows users in their in-box when their colleagues are visiting, editing or commenting on a document or message.

* Unified inbox A single interface allows users to see, sort, filter and send direct messages, blog postings and group feeds all from one place.

In addition, Pulse supports full interaction with Google Wave.  Furthermore, there will be a free version of the product for more general use.

Slated for release in the second half of 2010, Novell is inviting applications for access to a preview copy of Pulse via the website.