Novell Pulse - Google Wave for enterprise

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.

Each user in Pulse has a profile and personal micro-blog, can create groups, subscribe to personal and group feeds and can send / receive private messages. Each message (whether it's a micro-blog post or a private message) is almost Google's "wave". All edits and comments in these messages appear in real time. Of course, the message can be used as a web document for collaborative real-time editing.

You can also insert any file in the message and this file will be automatically synchronized (!) between Pulse server and your computer. So if someone makes changes to the file - it will be updated with all the workgroup. And previous file versions are backuped on the server.

Among advantages over Google Wave, Pulse developers name advanced access control and the ability to provision groups and workmates from an enterprise identity system. And for those users (and external collaborators) who use Google Wave, Novell will provide an opportunity to work in the Pulse messages (waves) in Google interface (by means of Google Wave Federated protocol).

Novell Pulse will be delivered in SaaS and on-premise version. The release of this product is scheduled for the first half of 2010.

See also: Top 10 Email services