Earlier today Novell demoed it’s Google Wave-like product to the enterprise world. Pulse is the latest workplace collaboration platform to announce at this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference and ReadWriteWeb was lucky enough to catch up with Novell’s VP of Engineering Andy Fox for a demo of the new tool. The beta product is expected early next year.
In late June we offered our first impressions of Google Wave. While Wave’s claim to “reinventing email” has met with heavy criticism in the blogosphere, Pulse appears better-equipped to serve work-related users.
One of the great selling points for Pulse is the fact that instead of forcing users to add individual teammates for collaboration, the tool provisions groups and workmates from an enterprise identity system. This means that new employees are already set up to start. From here users can follow team and employee feeds, edit and send real-time messages and collaborate on documents in real-time.
While users can work on Novell templates within the system, they can also collaborate on 3rd party spreadsheets and documents with real-time syncing to desktop folders. This attention to backup is yet another of Pulse’s advantages over Google Wave. When asked about the scenario of an employee going wild and vandalizing Pulse docs, says Fox, “We’re not just offering point backup. We’ve got versioning on every single system keystroke.”
Pulse also offers a higher degree of privacy for group settings and profiles where IT admin and general users set customized admin settings and privileges. According to Fox you can even customize the privacy on profile form fields to ensure that headhunters are not prospecting your staff from outside of the organization. Meanwhile the social aspect of a Yammer-like employee feed is enough reason to keep staff interested and engaged. And for those groups who are still committed to Wave, Pulse will also offer Wave integration via Google Wave’s Federated protocol. For more info on Pulse check out the demo site.
