Novell Announces Open Beta of Novell Vibe Collaboration Platform

Novell today announced the beta availability of its next-generation social collaboration platform, Novell® Vibe®. Available as a cloud-based or on-premise solution, Novell Vibe makes it easier for people to work together and drive better and faster business results. Novell Vibe is available in beta today in either format, giving people open access to the cloud service and an opportunity to try the new features of the on-premise software. With Novell Vibe, enterprises can leverage the latest collaboration technologies to improve the productivity of their workforce without sacrificing any of the security that today's business environment demands.

"Business users are experiencing the value of social messaging and networking in their private lives and bringing them into the workplace – much to the dismay of CIOs, who have no control over or visibility into what information is being shared," said Michael Fauscette, Group Vice President, Software Business Solutions at IDC. "Businesses want solutions that help their employees get work done, but don't create security problems. Novell Vibe gives CIOs the balance they need between keeping their workers productive and protecting corporate assets and business knowledge."

Novell Vibe is a new collaboration platform that offers the best of the social business and team collaboration solutions, formerly known as Novell Pulse and Novell Teaming respectively, to help users stay informed, access ideas, and easily connect to and work with colleagues, customers and partners. With Vibe, users can invite experts into groups and workspaces, finish team projects faster, make decisions quicker and capture work in one location. Customers can choose the product that best suits their needs – Novell Vibe Cloud or Novell Vibe OnPrem. While the functionality of Novell Vibe Cloud and Novell Vibe OnPrem will blend closely over time, today there are several distinguishing features in each version.

"By bringing together team workspace and real-time social collaboration tools with enterprise-class controls, Novell Vibe gives our users more of what they want and need," said James Sims, Chief Information Officer at Save Mart Supermarkets. "We've been using Novell Teaming, now Novell Vibe OnPrem, for several years and have seen teams improve their efficiency through collaboration and the ability to more readily leverage information assets, but we know we can go further through the flexibility, speed, and true real time collaboration offered by Novell Vibe Cloud. We've been testing Novell Vibe Cloud within and outside our organization and we like the way it allows people to work better together in real time, which will help us complete projects quickly and meet objectives effectively."

Novell Vibe Cloud
With Novell Vibe Cloud, the focus is on speed, ease, working together online, and secure, inter-organizational collaboration. From brainstorming to business strategy development, more than 7,500 alpha users are finding new ways, to gather, create and work together. Novell Vibe Cloud includes:

• Enterprise social networking – consolidates direct messages, chats, blogs, and wikis into a single unified message stream, making content visible and actionable.
• Online document real-time co-editing – allows users to author and edit documents together, online and in real-time, dramatically accelerating the completion of deliverables and eliminating errors that come from traditional iterative editing processes.
• File sharing - synchronization between the desktop and the cloud service, ensures users are working with the latest version of files.
• Ad-hoc groups and communication – simplifies the process of creating groups and inviting collaborators both inside and outside an organization, enabling users to crowd-source ideas from multiple sources, get feedback quickly and resolve issues fast.

Novell Vibe OnPrem
With Novell Vibe OnPrem, users can create customizable team spaces, forms and workflows. Novell Vibe OnPrem customers have a proven collaborative application for knowledge retention and content management both inside and outside of the firewall. Novell Vibe OnPrem includes:

• Team workspaces - provide a digital office where physically distributed team members can gather online to coordinate efforts, bring in skill sets and share information and resources on specific projects.
• Automated workflows and custom forms – integrated tools, templates and forms enable rapid creation of business documents and processes for more efficient interaction and effective business results.
• Content management – retains documents, conversations and communal knowledge relevant to specific teams in a single, secure workspace and allows team members to easily find and use them at any time.
• Flexible collaboration - provides a powerful on-premise team collaboration solution that is managed by IT to address internal and external collaboration.

"New social messaging and networking tools are changing the way people work," said Colleen O'Keefe, senior vice president and general manager of Collaboration solutions at Novell. "Whether it is on-premise or in the cloud, Novell Vibe brings these tools together with an intuitive understanding of business collaboration needs – simply making it easy for people to work together – quickly and securely."

Novell Vibe OnPrem 3 will be available in late 2010. Novell Vibe Cloud will be generally available in the first half of 2011. Novell will be demonstrating Novell Vibe at booth #105 during the Enterprise 2.0 Conference this week, November 8-11, at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

Sign-up to get a beta account at http://vibe.novell.com (Novell Vibe Cloud) or http://novell.com/beta (Novell Vibe OnPrem). For more on use cases for Vibe Cloud, visit http://www.novell.com/products/vibe-cloud. Follow us on Twitter @novellvibe and find us on Facebook at Novell Vibe.

To learn more about Novell Vibe, visit: http://www.novell.com/products/vibe.