Novell Strengthens Workgroup Portfolio

Novell Strengthens Workgroup Portfolio with Team Workspace and Real-Time Collaboration Offerings

Novell today announced the addition of team workspace and real-time collaboration solutions to its workgroup product portfolio. The new offerings will help boost end-user productivity and reduce overall customer costs by simplifying the everyday business activities people engage in to create, share, discuss and manage information. Knowledge workers will be able to easily identify resources based on the expertise of other users, quickly assemble high-performance teams, and efficiently manage and access all aspects of team projects. Managers and team members will be able to work effectively from any location, saving time and travel expenses.

"Novell has always been focused on improving the ways people work together to achieve organization goals," said Joe Egan, senior network engineer for Children's Hospital Central California. "These new teaming and real-time collaboration offerings will round out Novell's workgroup offerings while giving us and customers like us tools to increase productivity and cut costs while actually making life better for end users."

Kent Erickson, Novell vice president and general manager of Workgroup Solutions, said, "These new products will deliver team workspace, social networking and real-time Web conferencing capabilities to the many customers who have already deployed proven Novell workgroup services on Linux, further enhancing their investment in Linux and Novell. They will give customers a compelling alternative to Microsoft SharePoint and will be a valuable complement to the Novell Open Workgroup Suite, delivering a more complete, open and cost-effective workgroup productivity solution from desktop to server."

Novell has entered an OEM licensing agreement with SiteScape (http://www.sitescape.com) - an innovator in software that integrates team workspaces with presence-based, real-time collaboration - to offer these new products. The Novell offerings are expected to be available later this year, and product names will be announced at a later date.

A recent Gartner report stated, "Automating more processes electronically often means more interaction between people is necessary. People need to interact with each other, but they are not always going to be in the same location or even in the same time zone. E-mail grew to be a common piece of workplace infrastructure because of the need to communicate inside and outside organizations. Now, with the pressure to do more things more quickly, real-time collaboration is gaining traction and is now a 'must have' part of a workplace infrastructure" - Novell.