GroupWise vs Zimbra

Novell was formerly #3 after Microsoft and IBM on the enterprise collaboration market (with its email system Novell GroupWise). When intranet solutions became popular, the company unveiled with some delay Novell Teaming, which it positioned as a Sharepoint  alternative. But this system hasn't become very popular. So now Novell hurry to be among the first vendors to provide modern enterprise social systems with real-time capabilities. The new Novell hope is Novell Pulse, that looks very similar to Google Wave and also is able to work with this Google product. Novell Pulse - is a unique tool, as it provides a combination of microblogging, social networking and next generation real-time messaging.

Novell has introduced a new version of its messaging and collaboration system Novell GroupWise 5.2. As the main competitors (Lotus Notes and MS Exchange) Novell GroupWise deploys the open Internet-standards IMAP4, SMTP / MIME, POP3 and LDAP, so that customers could use the system in combination with other email clients and collaboration applications. Also, Novell has released a gateway, which enables to use the Microsoft Mail client to work with GroupWise server (as you know, this client is included by default in Windows). In addition, Novell GroupWise 5.2 added full support for Java applets, which allows you to access the system through any Internet browser.

This week, the research firm Arthur Andersen has published a study according to which the most effective tool for intranet collaboration is e-mail. According to the report, 90% of office workers use Email on average 23 times a week. The second position is taken by scheduling tools, then go corporate forums, workflow and task management solutions. This fact is also confirms the "big three" vendors of intranet collaboration systems: Microsoft (Exchange), IBM (Lotus Notes) and Novell (GroupWise). All these products include calendars, tasks and shared database. Nevertheless, all these systems are associated by users primarily as enterprise email solutions. The main reason for this phenomenon (according to the "big three" executives) is e-mail simplicity.

Today at the Demo-1996 Conference, Novell introduced GroupWise WebAccess - the module, which enables users to access their universal inlbox in GroupWise through any Internet browser. The server supports Unix, Windows NT and OS / 2 and requires Web-server installation. The web client license cost starts from $ 249. Currently, Novell GroupWise - is the main competitor of IBM Lotus Notes in the enterprise groupware market.

What this deal means? For Yahoo - it's the end of the Enterprise game. The company will focuse on its consumer portal and will not interfere with its new strategical partner - Microsoft (because Zimbra - is MS Exchange competitor). For VMWare - this is another huge step to the elite of Cloud Computing market. WMWare is the largest developer of virtualization systems, that are used in public and private cloud platforms. In addition, the company has recently bought Springsource to create its own web platform - an alternative to Google App Engine. The most popular open-source collaboration suite Zimbra will let VMWare to enter the Web-applications market. There’s no word on the sale price yet, but it's probably lower than the $350 million paid by Yahoo in 2006.