Novell Workspace gives companies powerful new tool to improve productivity of teams

Novell, Inc., the leading provider of Net business solutions, today introduced Novell Workspace™, a Web-based team collaboration solution that gives team members a personalized view — based on their role on the team — of all their project and team-related priorities. Novell Workspace also provides a central place to store work in progress and decisions and notes made during team meetings, along with easy-to-build team agendas and project management capabilities. For executives and managers, it shows project milestones and status of key actions and responsibilities, so their time can be better spent solving problems rather than discovering them.

"In today's business environment, teams are the foundation for creating new ideas, new products and new ways of doing business. Novell Workspace is the team's headquarters and communications center," said Chris Stone, vice chairman, Office of the CEO of Novell. "Novell Workspace provides this experience by building on an organization's existing collaboration tools and creating a team environment that spans organizations and businesses. If your project will only last a couple of months, your IT group may not have the time or the resources to set up a customized Web site for your team. Novell Workspace allows teams to instantly set up their own secure workspace, which relies on security policies that IT has already put in place."

Since most teamwork is performed by individuals working on coordinated tasks within their own schedules, Novell Workspace helps individual team members work more effectively across multiple projects. It is explicitly designed for non-technical users and offers unique advantages such as Hotlists, which help each team member assemble tasks and deliverables from all of his or her workspaces and allows users to add, delete, modify and prioritize their workloads. Organizations reduce costs as teams can more easily adapt to team resource changes with minimal impact to new and existing team members. Action items, project history, team notes and documents remain with the team and do not leave when a team member leaves, which also helps new team members come up to speed quickly on the project.

"Our customers want Web-based solutions that immediately resolve real business problems by building on their platform of choice," said Laurie Teal, president of IT Systems& Consulting, a Novell solution provider partner who helped the New York City Department of Health automate systems to service more than 30,000 health-care providers. "Novell Workspace is a great fit for companies that want to drive team productivity without burdening their IT staff with continual Web-site support. It's exciting that we will be able to provide a solution that powers teamwork within and between organizations so our customers can do business better across the Net."

Built with Novell's expertise in collaboration, portal integration and personalization, Novell Workspace leverages and integrates with Novell® GroupWise®, Novell Portal Services, Novell eDirectory™ and Novell provisioning solutions, giving organizations the total content, personalization and security control that's lacking in other team-oriented solutions. Novell Workspace also integrates with Novell access and security solutions for complete information security for cross-company teams. Novell Workspace is a Web-based application that is compatible with a variety of Web application server platforms and is supported on Novell NetWare® 6, Windows NT*/2000 and Solaris* platforms. Novell Workspace will initially integrate with Novell GroupWise and Microsoft Exchange.