Novell announced the general availability of Novell Vibe, its new cloud-based social collaboration platform:

“Novell today announced the general availability of Novell Vibe™ Cloud, the first secure, real-time, web-based social collaboration platform for the enterprise. Novell Vibe Cloud is offered as an online service and comes in two editions – basic, with all the functionality needed to demonstrate proof-of-value, and enterprise, which offers additional security features, management controls and premium support. Novell also announced the Novell Vibe Enterprise Social Getworking Program to help enterprises quickly deploy and gain value with the enterprise edition of Novell Vibe Cloud.“

One of the capabilities in Vibe is real-time co-authoring (per Pillar 2).

My Comments
1. In the collaboration space, I don’t hear a lot about Novell any more. They used to have a very strong foot hold in the email and messaging space via GroupWise, and while they have tried many collaboration offerings over the past decade, nothing much has stuck.

2. Having said that, at times I write up survey results that include data from organizations using Novell messaging products, and the statistics on users per server, and administrators per organization, are very impressive in comparison to other products on the market. So there appears to be a set of customers that are still very strongly aligned with Novell.

3. One feature that stands out is the ability to include people beyond the organization, and invite them through email. This scenario is usually a nightmare in other products – especially SharePoint when deployed behind the firewall – and if Novell has made it as simple and straightforward as they say, it may help them win converts.