Novell Ships Teaming + Conferencing to Increase Customer Productivity and Cut Costs

Novell today announced the upcoming availability of Novell® Teaming and Novell Teaming + Conferencing, two new team workspace and real-time collaboration additions to Novell's workgroup product line. These solutions will help boost end-user and team productivity and reduce overall customer costs by improving the everyday business processes people engage in to create, share, discuss and manage information. They also support a new model for technical and business innovation Novell calls "open collaboration," which describes the open source technology development process that allows customers and partners to participate in product innovation, the actual tools that allow for customer choice, and a way of working to increase team effectiveness and organizational success.

"Novell hit a home run with the addition of Teaming + Conferencing," said Steven Tharp, director of IT at Davenport University in Grand Rapids, Mich., and a software beta tester. "Novell has always been a leader in networking and file storage. With Teaming + Conferencing, Novell offers next-generation networking and collaboration tools that leverage Web 2.0 and social software in an integrated suite. Now it's a breeze to deploy and support blogs and wikis, to store and manage documents with built-in version control and workflow, and to tag and locate content and experts via search."

With Novell Teaming, users can create online workspaces and invite the project team, other organization members or external vendors to participate. Team members use these virtual workspaces to share and access documents, calendars and discussion forums. They also extend their peer networks by using search to locate content and experts. Novell Teaming + Conferencing includes all the capabilities of Novell Teaming and enhances them with real-time collaboration. Team members can collaborate via live Voice over IP or Web conferences and instant messaging. Novell Teaming + Conferencing will immediately integrate with many features of Novell GroupWise® and the Novell Open Workgroup Suite, with additional integration to follow in subsequent releases. With these open collaboration solutions, teams communicate more effectively and will be more productive on the platform and client of their choice, whether Linux* or Windows*.

Robert Mahowald, IDC program director for Collaborative Computing, said, "Team workspaces, wikis and blogs, global content and expertise search, and application and desktop sharing are among the latest 'must haves' for companies seeking a competitive edge. A particularly compelling feature of Novell Teaming + Conferencing is the extensive integration and presence indicators between the teaming and conferencing modules. By combining social software, Web 2.0 technologies and other real-time collaboration tools, Novell's new product can help businesses meet their next-generation collaboration needs."

A substantial portion of the technology in Novell Teaming and Novell Teaming + Conferencing is included in the ICEcore open source project, and various components from other open source software projects are also included. This open approach offers a distinct advantage over proprietary solutions such as Microsoft* SharePoint* and those from other vendors who develop their products in isolation, hoping customers will be satisfied with the proprietary code. With ICEcore, customers and partners are allowed to innovate with Novell, as they wish. New capabilities are produced more quickly, resulting in a more complete and cost-effective team productivity solution. Novell is an ongoing contributor to the ICEcore project.

Kent Erickson, senior vice president and general manager of Workgroup Solutions for Novell, said, "These new open collaboration offerings help our customers compete better in today's fast-paced markets. They can manage projects more efficiently, create high-performance teams with the right mix of talent and motivation, streamline business activities, reduce travel costs, and meet user demands for next-generation collaboration tools. All this while enjoying the advantages of open source software."