14 DAY TRIAL // Google Wave may not be winning over the regular users, but it looks like it might have better luck in the enterprise sector. Novell, a software company specializing in enterprise products and maker of the popular SUSE Linux distribution, has just announced a brand-new, real-time collaboration tool dubbed Novell Pulse. So, what does this have to do with Google Wave? Novell Pulse is actually pretty much a heavily customized Wave and offers complete interoperability with any Wave server out there through the Wave Federation Protocol.
“Novell Pulse is the first enterprise class, real-time collaboration platform that unites communication, authoring and social messaging tools. Novell Pulse helps drive enterprise productivity and innovation by making it easier to communicate digitally, generate ideas and share information,” Novell said in a statement.
“This is a technical collaboration between Google and Novell to bring federation to both systems, using the Wave Federation Protocol. We're the first company to show federation using the WFP, and we're the first collaboration solution to integrate with Google Wave.”
Collaboration tools are popping up all over the place, but this one is interesting in that it leverages all that Wave has to offer while at the same time offering a redesigned interface and several new features catered to the business and enterprise market. The tools include instant messaging, collaborative document authoring and integration, what Wave does already, but also social-networking features like profiles, relatively new to the business space.
Novell Pulse will be available as a cloud service, like Google is doing with Wave, but also as a local install behind the company firewall. It also doesn't rely on Google for any of its features, all the accounts are created locally and the data stored depends on the type of install the company chooses. The real boons, though, are the security features that are a must for any enterprise customer. Despite being purposely built, Pulse users will be able to work with any Wave user, taking advantage of all the features and should be able to also communicate with any service that will employ the Wave Federation Protocol in the future. Pulse is expected to be available by mid 2010, by which time Google Wave should also be available to the general public.
