View from BrainShare: Novell in Transition

Novell continued to espouse its one Net strategy at its BrainShare 2002 event held in Salt Lake City last week. One Net is a strategy intended to bring instant access to networked information and services, regardless of connection type or platform.

Novell is approaching that goal by creating modular services so that, for example, your boss could send an instant message to your phone while you are commuting, saying that the CEO needs a report. You might then use the browser on your phone to log in to your corporate portal, view the report to make sure that it is correct, and send it. You might even send it to the printer on your boss desk. The technologies involved in transactions such as these are Novell Portal Services, NetWare, GroupWise, iFolder, and iPrint. Novell is also launching a marketing campaign that focuses on providing solutions rather than just products, and services rather than just software.

In its software development, Novell is shifting the emphasis toward making applications more modular, platform independent, and focused on standards. For example, a Web Services application will ship with NetWare shortly, and it will run on top of MySQL for NetWare, Apache, Tomcat, and JBOSS. NetWare itself is undergoing a massive overhaul, with the goal being to simplify management. Novells directory services, eDirectory, and DirXML provide the base on which different services exchange information.

No conference would be complete without product announcements, and those certainly were not in short supply at BrainShare. Two of the most notable were the introductions of Novell Workspace and Novell ZENworks Synergy. Due to ship in the third quarter of this year, Workspace is a secure and flexible Web-based team collaboration solution built on Novell Portal Services. Team leaders can create project plans, assign tasks, establish reporting procedures, invite members to meetings, chair meetings (which involves creating agendas and recording decisions and action items during the meeting) and track project progress online. ZENworks Synergy bundles a series of Novell services (eDirectory, ZENworks OnDemand, ZENworks for desktops, and Novell Portal Services) into a suite that allows organizations to distribute information and applications to employees wherever they are.

This years BrainShare event painted a picture of a company seeking to change its approach, focusing on instant access to information from anywhere.