One on One with Ken Muir of Novell

Ken Muir is the Chief Technology and Strategy Officer of Novell’s WorkGroup Business Unit. He is responsibile for the overall technical vision and strategy for Novell's collaboration products. We asked Muir about his group's work with Novell Pulse and how it integrates with Google Wave.

FCM: Can you explain Novell Pulse from a high level for FCM readers who might not know about the product? Is it strictly for internal communication?

KM: Novell Pulse is an enterprise-grade, unified, document and social collaboration platform. Instead of collaborating via disconnected traditional tools such as email, instant messaging, and team workspaces, we have brought them all together in a single unified experience.  On top of this, we added social messaging which gives users control over their "Inbox" by allowing them to follow people and topics that they are interested in. Users can also create rich online documents and collaborate on them in real time. Not just commenting on the document but actually "co-editing" the document at the exact same time, eliminating the need to merge results. Eventually, users can co-browse Microsoft Office and Open Office documents thus eliminating the need for a separate Webex-like session. 

Novell Pulse simplifies creating teams and projects (workspaces) with the click of a button. This ad-hoc ability to instantly create teams allows people to quickly collaborate on a project and meet deliverables. Inviting a new member to the team is as easy as entering in their email address. There is no need to call IT to create the team or provision an outside user to participate. Another feature I am excited about is our folder syncing and in-place attachment editing. This becomes a bridge to replicate a user's personal experience into a shared cloud experience. A user may edit a document that sits on their traditional file system via their native tools and their edits are automatically sync'd into the shared Novell Pulse experience. This helps bridge the traditional collaboration user and the "Net-gen" user.  Finally, we built Novell Pulse on top of our security, identity and compliance products so our customers can ensure the security of their intellectual property and ensure they meet compliance regulations.
 
FCM: Explain how the product integrates with Google Wave? Was Pulse conceived before Wave or as an extension of it?

KM:We began to implement our vision of the real-time web in January of this past year. When Google announced Google Wave, we saw that they had a similar vision to ours. We were most excited about the Wave Federation Protocol (WFP) and the opportunity we would have to work with them to ensure that we could bring our vision to a broader audience. By our support of WFP, users in Novell Pulse and users of Wave will be able to seamlessly collaborate regardless of which platform they are using. Specifically, a Novell Pulse user could be editing a document live at the same time a user in Wave is editing the same document. Additionally, we will support Google's "Gadget" and "Bot" protocols, which means the entire ecosystem of applications developed for Wave will run on Novell Pulse.  In support of our enterprise focus, we will also add additional enterprise API's to provide additional opportunities for developers who write these gadgets.

FCM: Do you think this generation of collaboration tools has the functionality to transform traditional ways of doing work inside the enterprise. Why or why not?

KM: I do believe today's collaboration tools and new interaction models have the potential to transform the way we collaborate in business.
However, the biggest challenge our customers have is doing so in a secure and compliant manner. As long as customers can control the data that comes into and leaves their system and can control user access to the data these tools will flourish in the enterprise. We accomplish this by building our platform on the best security and compliance tools in the industry that provide flexible roles and policies and granular user access control.
 
FCM: How do new collaboration efforts like yours affect other systems like ECM, ERP and CRM and do you see them working in conjunction with these tools or replacing at least some of their functionality over time?

KM: I see tools such as Novell Pulse and Wave becoming the real-time platform that glues these systems together. Bringing ECM, ERP, and CRM into the real-time workflows these tools offer tremendous value to these larger back-office business systems. ECM, CRM, and ERP systems are complex, require training, and are for very specific knowledge workers.The goal of the real-time collaboration platform is to consolidate the content, push it to those interested, and enable unified searching.

FCM: There's lots of talk of Enterprise 2.0/Collaboration/corporate socialmedia technologies maturing in 2010. What does it mean to you, in terms of selling a product like this. (For example, you might not have to address early security concerns about social media in the enterprise.)

KM: "Maturing" is an interesting term...will the products "mature" or will people "mature" in their use and understanding of the value of these tools? We will definitely see both in 2010. Enterprise 2.0 tools will become more entrenched in business by proving out solid
use-cases. This will bring along people who previously were hesitant to adopt these tools and they will begin to use these tools and become more productive because of it. The traditional collaborators will mature and begin to shift toward becoming a "net-gen" collaborator.

Note: In the interest of full disclosure, FierceContentManagement Editor, Ron Miller, wrote a paid article for a Novell-sponsored project in Fall, 2009.

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