Yesterday, I was invited to the Novell end-user Conference.
It was a nice little conference, with 50 or so people attending.
After the general opening session, we had a demo presentation of Groupwise 8, Novell’s messaging solution. Some nice features in there !
We were also granted with a customer experience report from one of Novell’s Groupwise customer.
Then came Bruno Teyton of IDC which gave us a summary of IDC’s view on the economic perspectives for the next 4 or 5 years as well as how this would impact implementation of messaging and collaboration solutions. Of course, that was a bit grim, but overall, it wasn’t all that dark. There was some focus on messaging solutions as a cost reducing mean by achieving quick ROI. Long term prospects also put emphasis on reducing storage costs by deduplicating data.
After a quick snack, we were back for the afternoon session
IDC was back and gave us more prospects about the 2.0 world. That was probably the part I was the most waiting for. Again, the focus was more on the economic aspects of going 2.0 – with some strong emphasis on the actual management changes required. Overall, going to a 2.0 model seemed like the 2nd executives topmost priority (although I couldn’t get if this was from a global perspective or only for the large businesses). Some of the reasons given for that push was cost reduction (no surprise here) through use of telecommuting and remote communications – via instant messaging, webinars and videoconferencing. Other drives evoked were leveraging knowledge workers assets, being appealing to generation Y workers and increasing reactivity and turaround times – by somewhat shortening the chain of command.
Quite an interresting view on the state of affairs in that field, but – not to lessen IDC’s work on those analysis – it’s what they do anyway – I am personally always a bit cautious about the validity of long term prospects, especially in times like now when everything seems so volatile. Giving 5 years outlooks with 0.1 point accuracy seems a bit ambitious to me !
Novell then presented their own collaborative package – called Teaming and Conferencing. The “teaming” part is based on kablink and seems to offer quite a few nice features. It sports the basic handfull of traditional 2.0 tool facets : groups (or teams), blogs, wikis, tagging and profiles. It also contains some document workflow handling capabilities with a neat graphical workflow editor. They also presented the next version (still not released yet) which has a few additional featurettes and a slightly different look and feel.
The conferencing part was only briefly evoked – but it offers the usual web conferencing facilities.. Whiteboarding, application sharing, slide presenter, group chats, etc.. We didn’t get a demo of this one though !
We then had a presentation by a Novell partner who seemed pretty pleased at how easy it was to put the teaming part in production for one of their customer – managing to roll out within 2 weeks after the deal was made.
The day finished with some tapas and some wine tasting games to flush it all down !
I am not going to make any sort of comparison between the various 2.0 software packages at this point – not without having tested the whole bunch – and – this could take some time ! But Novell’s package did seem to me like a decent player in that market.