Novell's Opern Source Wepons In Collaboration Arena Aims At Microsoft SharePoint.

Last time I dealt with collaboration with Novell was a years ago with Groupwise. But recently Novell acquired the ICEcore project as part of the SiteScape. Since then Novell renamed the IceCore Project to be Kablink, sighting that name, IceCore did not cut with the enterprise computing. The ICEcore project / Kablink is open source, it is the basis for Novell's Teaming + Conferencing commercial solution. Novell takes the Kablink development tree and adds some additional enterprise features such as backup and recovery.

Novell Teaming brings together people and the content they need to do their jobs. Users create workspaces and invite other members to participate—both from within or outside organizational boundaries. Virtual teams can easily and securely manage, share, locate and access documents, calendars, discussion forums, wikis and blogs. Novell Teaming also includes powerful, built-in workflow functions to help team members track the status and progress of documents. Team workspaces also enable enterprise social networking and the creation of effective teams, with members chosen not by proximity, but because they possess the required content expertise and skills for the project.

There are more features in the real-time collaboration solution make users aware of the online availability of team members and give users the ability to instant message (IM) with team members–either individually or as a group–or participate in live voice conferences or Web conferences. The Web conferencing components let users share desktops, show slide presentations and participate in whiteboarding sessions. With these solutions, teams communicate more effectively and become more productive irrespective of their platform of their choice (Linux and Windows).

The Novell's Teaming + Conferencing commercial solution place itself in the Microsoft's Sharepoint Space and from the comparisons provided on the Novell site shows the differences.

Novell Teaming + Conferencing includes:

• Document management and sharing
• Team calendars and shared task lists
• Discussion threads, wikis, blogs, and RSS feeds
• Workflow
• Content and knowledge management with quick search
• Web and voice conferencing
• Instant messaging/chat
• Application sharing and whiteboarding
• Integrated presence awareness

Tags: Conference Solutions, Collaboration, ICEcore, SiteScape, Kablink, Teaming + Conferencing, voice conference, Web conference