Brainshare attendees offered Novell Pulse accounts

At the annual Novell Brainshare user's conference this week, Novell announced it was providing attendees with a Novell Pulse account and five invitations, which they can use to bring colleagues on board. Pulse is a cloud-based collaboration platform, which we first covered last year in a One on one interview with Ken Muir of Novell.

This announcement brings the platform one step closer to the general Novell user base, but it was vague as to when the product would be ready. Pulse sounds like an exciting product including granular security settings to be sure that you're not sharing sensitive documents with those who shouldn't have access, "document presence," which shows you graphically when someone is reading or editing one of your documents, a unified in-box with messages, blog posts, feeds and so forth, sorted and filtered all in one place; to name but a few.

Michael Fauscette, an IDC analyst thinks that companies need to be exploring these kinds of collaboration platforms because employees are looking at the publicly available tools and using them at work. "The traditional tools of business collaboration fall short of the social web capabilities people use in their personal lives and are now insisting on in the workplace, forcing people to use both to get their work done." 

He adds, "In this social business environment, enterprises need solutions that serve both the demands of the business and the user." He believes that Pulse could help solve this problem for enterprises.

Pulse is built on the Google Wave Federation Protocol, meaning it can work alone or in conjunction with Google Wave or Google Wave widgets (plug-ins with special functionality).

For more information:
- see the Novell press release

Related Articles:
One on One with Ken Muir of Novell
Novell's got finger on Pulse of enterprise collaboration
Novell launches Novell Teaming 2 collaboration platform