Novell's got finger on Pulse of enterprise collaboration

Novell said it will make Pulse, its enterprise social networking tool, available for beta testing this week. The technology modifies popular consumer applications, such as micro-blogging and social networking, for the office environment. It enables real-time document collaboration, status updating, and photo and video sharing, and it allows users to view and filter all content from email and social networking services. At the same time, it provides tools for the IT department to manage usage and security policies.

The product will compete with Google Wave, which Google is expected to deliver to its business users later this year. Somewhat ironically, Pulse uses Google's open source Wave Federation Protocol, and it eventually may be integrated with Google Wave. But, as eWeek's Clint Boulton points out, Novell's product will offer more in the way of security and management tools than Wave, perhaps making it more appealing to enterprises.

In a post at ReadWriteWeb, Alex Williams suggests that the open-source nature of Pulse makes it particularly appealing, and organizations interested in a collaboration platform that they can customize may discover it is a good option. However, Williams questions whether Pulse will be apply to handle a large number of users at the same time--something Novell will be looking into during the beta testing.

Pulse, which joins an array of similar offerings already available from Microsoft, IBM and others, is scheduled for actual release later this year.

For more:
- read this eWeek article
- here's Alex William's post at ReadWriteWeb

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