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Business White Paper COLLABORATION www.novell.com Novell® Collaboration Vision Driving Higher Levels of Innovation and Productivity

Collaboration vision novell

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Page 1: Collaboration vision novell

Business White PaperCOLLABORATION

www.novell.com

Novell® Collaboration VisionDriving Higher Levels of Innovation and Productivity

Novell Logo1 The registered trademark, ®,

appears to the right and on thesame baseline as the Logo.

Minimum Size RequirementsThe Novell Logo should NOT beprinted smaller than 3 picas(0.5 inches or 12.5 mm) in width.

Clear-space Requirements2 Allow a clean visual separation

of the Logo from all other elements.The height of the "N" is themeasurement for the minimumclear-space requirements aroundthe Logo. This space is flat andunpatterned, free of other designelements and clear from the edgeof the page.

3 picas(0.5 in)

(12.5 mm)

21 3

3

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Novell Collaboration Vision

Table of Contents: 2 . . . . . Executive Summary

2 . . . . . Leveraging New Interactions to Create Business Success

5. . . . . . Open, Enterprise-Ready Architecture

8 . . . . . Secure, Controlled and Compliant Interactions

9. . . . . . New and Innovative User Experience

10 . . . . . Enabling Innovation, Productivity and Success

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The Novell collaboration vision enables organiza-tions to leverage their existing IT infrastructure investments to securely, simply and cost-effectively converge the best of traditional collaboration environments and the latest real-time, social interactions.

Next-generation collaboration solutions play a vital role in helping organizations find new and more effective ways to maximize work-force productivity and business success. For example, many of the emerging real-time and social collaboration tools used by the newest generation of workers in their personal lives present new opportunities for busines-ses. If harnessed properly, these unique interactions have the potential to significantly increase business innovation and productivity. Unfortunately, organizations may struggle to see how they can successfully and securely integrate these new interactions into their traditional collaboration environments and evolving data center plans without introducing higher costs, complexity and risk.

The Novell® collaboration vision enables organizations to leverage their existing IT infrastructure investments to securely, simply and cost-effectively converge the best of traditional collaboration environments and the latest real-time, social interactions. With an open collaboration architecture supported by enterprise-level security and management, Novell will bring together disparate collabora-tion systems, tools and technologies, while delivering a new and innovative collaboration user experience that drives new levels of productivity and business success.

Leveraging New Interactions to Create Business SuccessOrganizations constantly look for better ways to help their people innovate and boost productivity, and collaboration plays a major role in that effort. As organizations evaluate how collaboration can drive innovation and productivity, they begin to identify key market trends that affect collaboration.

The first of these trends revolves around the evolution of the data center. Instead of data centers filled with single-purpose servers running specific applications, the introduction of virtualization has spawned a more service-driven model where multiple applications and services can be flexibly packaged to run on different servers. This service-driven concept has opened the door to the next evolutionary stage: the cloud-computing model where organizations begin to virtualize and orches-trate their service workloads to run on either internal or external clouds. As part of this move toward a cloud-computing model, many organizations have begun to add hosted collaboration applications to their traditional, on-premise collaboration tools.

Executive Summary

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Novell Collaboration Vision www.novell.com

In addition, the popularity and skyrocketing personal use of social networking tools have led to significant inroads in the workplace. The new generation of workers, sometimes referred to as “digital natives,” has never known a world without the Internet, and they leverage it to communicate in multiple ways— primarily using short, real-time messages and socially enabled tools such as Twitter*, LinkedIn* and Facebook. While they might use e-mail for person-to-person interactions, it only makes up a small part of their total collaboration experience.

Since digital natives already use social tools to enrich their personal lives, they expect to use these tools in their work lives as well.

For this new generation of workers, collabora-tion information sources have also expanded beyond e-mail attachments to include videos, blogs, wikis and social forums. In fact, the online workspace is increasingly becoming the preferred “home base” for productive and innovative collaboration, freeing workers from the limitations of traditional desktop tools. Finally, mobile devices, including smart phones and netbooks, have become primary information and collaboration access points for nearly all types of workers. All of these trends put pressure on IT organizations to support a new class of consumer-based collaboration and social networking tools that must be merged with traditional collaboration solutions.

The new generation of workers, sometimes referred to as “digital natives,” has never known a world without the Internet, and they leverage it to communi-cate in multiple ways.

Figure 1. Evolutions in the Marketplace

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Novell is uniquely positioned to help organizations enable these new interactions that drive business innovation and growth, while helping IT fulfill its responsibility to protect and safeguard critical corporate assets.

Forward-looking organizations understand that nurturing these new types of interactions can create significant business opportunities. They can enhance their ability to reach out to the outside world and tap into new communi-ties that provide broader and richer sources of creativity and innovation. They enable a model for more dynamic relationships— a model that fosters new and better ways to solve problems and grow the business.

However, embracing these collaboration trends and enabling these new interactions can create IT challenges in the areas of cost, complexity and risk. How much will support-ing this new breed of tools and interactions cost? Can it be done in a way that maximizes usage of the existing IT infrastructure? How will it mesh with the organization’s data center evolution plans? Can the new tools and interactions be integrated through open standards? What interoperability challenges will the delivery models create? How can the organization mitigate cloud security risks, as well as the security and privacy issues associated with new social collaboration tools? And, perhaps most importantly, can the

business afford to impede workforce colla bo-ration by failing to adopt these new tools and interactions?

Novell is uniquely positioned to help orga-nizations enable these new interactions that drive business innovation and growth, while helping IT fulfill its responsibility to protect and safeguard critical corporate assets. Novell has always been a leader in collabo-ration, and today it’s at the forefront of the space—building out a collaboration vision that drives business innovation and growth in a secure and enterprise-compliant manner.

The key pieces of the Novell collaboration vision include:

An open, enterprise-ready architecture for bringing together disparate collaboration systems, tools and technologies

Enterprise-level security, compliance and management applied to converging traditional and next-generation collaboration environments

A world-class, new and innovative collaboration user experience

Figure 2. New Interconnected Tools

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Novell Collaboration Vision www.novell.com

Open, Enterprise-ready ArchitectureInteroperability is at the core of everything Novell delivers. Novell recognizes that there are many great technologies that can con tribute key pieces to an organization’s collaboration ecosystem. The world doesn’t necessarily need another e-mail system, social network or chat tool. Instead, all those pieces need to be brought together in a secure and compliant enterprise collaboration solution that drives innovation and growth. So, instead of trying to make e-mail and office suites the center of its collaboration strategy as other vendors are doing, Novell is building its next-generation open collabora-tion architecture on modern technologies that leverage its core strengths to bring together the right people, tools and interactions.

The Novell collaboration vision provides a long-term strategy that brings these tools

and interactions together in a way that allows people and technology to work as one—even while the market grows and evolves. To serve as the foundation for this vision, Novell will deliver an open collaboration architecture—one that encompasses all of the other elements discussed in this paper. This architecture will ultimately include a number of new capabilities; however, Novell will be delivering critical elements of its colla boration architecture in the short term as well.

The underlying power of the Novell collabo-ration architecture is that it will provide a secure, robust and flexible framework that enables organizations to leverage their existing IT infrastructures. It will also empower workers to take advantage of all their pre-ferred interactions, harmoniously blending traditional and social collaboration tools in a secure and controlled manner.

The world doesn’t necessarily need another e-mail system, social network or chat tool. Instead, all those pieces need to be brought together in a secure and compliant enterprise collaboration solution that drives innovation and growth.

Figure 3. Novell Open Collaboration Architecture

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Novell delivers fully virtualized and orchestrated workload services that can run on traditional infrastructures, internal clouds or the external cloud.

Core Novell Services Layer

The Novell collaboration architecture is built on top of core Novell services, including SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server, and is managed by Novell workload and business service management solutions. Novell delivers fully virtualized and orchestrated workload services that can run on traditional infrastructures, internal clouds or the external cloud. Utilizing Novell PlateSpin® and Managed Objects™ offerings, the Novell collaboration architecture will also provide organizations with world-class workload management as their data centers grow and evolve. These workloads will be able to run in existing data centers, internal clouds or external clouds. The busi ness service management aspects of the collaboration architecture will enable organi za tions to more effectively monitor and manage their overall IT infrastructures.

Collaboration Services Layer

Many of the architecture’s collaboration services will take advantage of technolo-gies found in current and future versions of existing Novell product lines, including Novell Open Enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Technologies such as Novell Storage Manager and Dynamic Storage Technology will provide data location and life- cycle management services that deliver policy-based file distribution, enabling organi zations to optimize the way data is stored and accessed. Novell caching technologies will provide the foundation for enabling offline collaboration experiences. And the architecture’s indexing and discovery capabilities will be key to allowing users to quickly find relevant information within the system, across corporate data repositories or from the Internet.

Additionally, Novell soon plans to deliver Novell DataSync, a key element of the archi tecture that also resides at the collaboration services layer. Novell DataSync is a bi-directional, many-to-many synchronization engine that connects disparate collaboration solutions, business-critical applications and mobile devices. Novell DataSync will play an integral role in seamlessly bringing together the people, tools and interactions that drive greater innovation and productivity.

To accomplish this, Novell DataSync enables seamless back-end synchronization of e-mail, calendar items, tasks, events and any other collaboration data to multiple systems. It will allow data from external enterprise applications such as CRM, ERP and other business solutions—along with content from traditional products like Novell GroupWise®, Novell Teaming, Exchange and SharePoint*—to be synchronized across systems. As changes occur in these systems, Novell DataSync stores the changes in real time and allows other connected systems to access them.

Figure 4. Novell DataSync Synchronization

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Novell Collaboration Vision www.novell.com

Additionally, through the Novell DataSync software development kit and its open API, Novell partners will be able to deliver custom connectors for their own systems as well as other third-party solutions. This will enable users to share relevant content from an even wider variety of collaboration and enterprise systems, including CRM, ECM and docu-ment management systems; cloud-based social applications; and even competing collaboration solutions.

Novell GroupWise ConnectorThe Novell DataSync connector for Novell GroupWise leverages the SOAP interface to synchronize e-mail, tasks, calendar data and contact information across collaboration sys-tems. The GroupWise connector is provided as part of Novell GroupWise.

Novell Teaming ConnectorThe Novell DataSync connector for Novell Teaming synchronizes personal calendar and task information across collaboration systems. In the future, the Novell Teaming connector will also synchronize information

related to teams, contacts and groups. The Teaming connector is provided as part of Novell Teaming.

SharePoint ConnectorThe Novell DataSync connector for Microsoft* SharePoint will synchronize team calendar data, team task data and team documents between SharePoint and Novell GroupWise. The connector will also synchronize all team-related data between SharePoint and Novell Teaming.

SugarCRM ConnectorThe Novell DataSync connector for SugarCRM will synchronize e-mail, meeting, call, task and contact data between the open source SugarCRM solution and any connected system.

Salesforce.com ConnectorThe Novell DataSync connector for salesforce.com will synchronize event, task and contact data between the salesforce.com CRM solution and any connected system.

As a multi-source, multi-target synchronization engine, Novell DataSync is not necessarily tied to any specific collaboration solution. However, its integration benefits will first be seen through connectors for Novell GroupWise and Novell Teaming. In addition to the Novell GroupWise and Novell Teaming connectors, Novell will soon release connectors for SharePoint, SugarCRM*, salesforce.com and ActiveSync*. Novell also plans to release connectors for Documentum and SAP in the near future.

Figure 5. Novell DataSync Synchronization Engine

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By leveraging the strengths of enterprise-proven Novell security and compliance

capabilities, the Novell collaboration architecture will enable workers to take

advantage of all their preferred interactions— whether traditional or next-generation—in a

secure and controlled manner.

While a single Novell DataSync engine can run multiple connectors, the solution’s scalable architecture enables organizations to deploy multiple synchronization engines running multiple connectors to help admin-istrators appropriately manage the service’s workload.

ActiveSync ConnectorThe Novell DataSync connector for ActiveSync will provide the mobile support foundation for Novell GroupWise and Novell Teaming moving forward. The mobile support Novell will provide with this connector will bring users even more capabilities, performance and device flexibility than they’ve enjoyed with Novell GroupWise Mobile Server. Novell will continue to support GroupWise Mobile Server until the transition to ActiveSync is complete.

The ActiveSync connector will synchronize e-mail, contact and calendar data, and will work with any mobile devices and operating systems that support the ActiveSync protocol, including iPhone*, Windows* Mobile, Palm* OS, Symbian, Android, BREW* and J2ME*. To deliver this wide range of support, Novell is working closely with a number of partners including Notify Technology, Toffa International and OpenHand. Novell will also continue its strong partnership with Research In Motion to deliver comprehensive BlackBerry* support.

Novell DataSync AdministrationWhile a single Novell DataSync engine can run multiple connectors, the solution’s scalable architecture enables organizations to deploy multiple synchronization engines running multiple connectors to help administrators appropriately manage the service’s work-load. These engines and connectors can be managed through a central interface, which facilitates usage of the synchronization service. While not required, Novell DataSync can leverage an LDAP directory to further

facilitate administration of user and group management. Additionally, the solution allows users to log in and manage their own connector-specific settings.

Secure, Controlled and Compliant InteractionsDesigned for on-premise or cloud-based environments, the Novell approach securely blends traditional and social collaboration tools by wrapping them within the safety of Novell security solutions. By leveraging the strengths of enterprise-proven Novell security and compliance capabilities, the Novell collabo-ration architecture will enable workers to take advantage of all their preferred interactions—whether traditional or next-generation— in a secure and controlled manner. These capa bil ities will work hand-in-hand with the architecture to safeguard interactions, meet compliance requirements, and allow collabo-ration tools to work harmoniously with robust identity and security services.

For example, Novell Identity Manager automates user provisioning and account management by synchronizing users’ iden-tities between systems, such as corporate applications and collaboration tools. To facilitate security and compliance within the next-generation collaboration sphere, Novell will extend this capability to include Web services such as social networking systems. Within these identities, administrators will be able to store all the policies that control how, when and where users interact. As a result, with just a single identity, users will be able to access all their different systems— whether they are enterprise or social, and whether they are on-premise or in the cloud.

Novell DataSync will leverage content policy and identity controls to ensure that only relevant and authorized external content is synchronized to and from the platform. Relevant data from personal e-mail, Twitter, Facebook and much more can also be synchronized based on identity and policy.

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Novell Collaboration Vision www.novell.com

As another example, the collaboration solu-tions could leverage Novell Access Manager™ to allow users to invite people they trust to join their teams. Novell event monitoring technology could also be used within the framework of the collaboration architecture to enable authorized agents to track everything that takes place online. As part of the Novell collaboration architecture, all of these core identity and security services will be delivered seamlessly across enterprise installations—whether they’re located on-premise or in the cloud.

New and Innovative User ExperienceAt the interface layer of the Novell Collaboration vision, Novell plans to intro-duce an innovative new user interface that is completely extensible and designed to interact openly with third-party applications. The new interface will deliver a revolutionary user experience that blends all of the elements of authoring, collaboration and communica-tion in a simple and powerful way.

As a real-time, unified social and document collaboration environment, the user experi-ence delivers:

A unified in-box for e-mail, social networking tools, chat and documents that blends personal, business, team and social interactions

“Easy as e-mail” team creation and greater awareness of team presence

Real-time commenting, activity monitoring and notifications

Instant, fail-safe, real-time document co-browsing

Collaborative authoring Synchronization and filtering of

information from enterprise and consumer cloud services to deliver “live,” relevant information from many sources and formats

The new user interface addresses head-on the growing problem that organizations and users face in having to use a multitude of collaboration tools. People often end up switching between a rich desktop application for e-mail and calendaring, to a browser for workspaces, and back to other desktop appli-cations for creating documents, presentations and spreadsheets. To join an online meeting or instant message, they switch to a different rich client. Then they switch to yet another client or browser to access their enterprise applications. This frequent change in environ-ment drains productivity and increases the risk of errors. The new interface eliminates this application switching by providing a single, unified context where users can access all the tools, people and interactions they need to be productive.

The new user experience also enables new collaborative interactions with a broader set of participants. Rather than relying solely on a push model that sends information to an explicit audience, the interface lets organiza-tions easily identify the most relevant and helpful target audiences. It also enables the quick, ad hoc creation of distributed teams comprised of members who offer unique and innovative insights, expertise and experience.

For example, the user interface will provide an environment for ad-hoc swarming to solicit inventive solutions from customers, partners and suppliers when an urgent crisis or difficult business issue develops. This can enable productive new interactions among the right people inside and outside of the business.

Reducing reliance on the antiquated and bloated “attach-and-send” document col-laboration model, this innovative interface enables users to share, co-browse and co-author documents in the cloud without requiring a Web meeting. It can also quickly render and scale PDF, Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org documents within the user’s browser.

The new interface will deliver a revolutionary user experience that blends all of the elements of authoring, collaboration and communication in a simple and powerful way.

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To reduce information overload and minimize the time and effort people spend finding the information they need and ignor-ing the information they don’t, the new user experience leverages context filtering to enable a user’s most relevant and critical information to rise to the top. It allows users to get the information they are interested in by following people, groups and tags. They can monitor people and groups for updates—similar to the way they would monitor presence in chat.

Enabling Innovation, Productivity and SuccessAll of the efforts Novell has put forth in the collaboration space focus on driving inno-vation and productivity to new levels. Novell fundamentally believes that the formula for business success is rooted in bringing people, tools and interactions together in simple and secure ways. When organiza-tions bring these three elements together successfully, they will achieve new levels of innovation, productivity and success.

Through its collaboration vision and strategy, Novell is uniquely positioned to deliver the next-generation collaboration

environment that best delivers this result. Its open and extensible synchronization service seamlessly ties together the diverse collaboration solutions, business-critical applications and mobile devices that users want and need. Novell is infusing roles, identities and policy controls into its enter-prise collaboration architecture to provide services that are open and compliant. Thearchitecture will also incorporate content discovery, distribution and correlation services to make information agile and accessible from anywhere, while leveraging data center and collaboration trends that lower costs, improve responsiveness and enable flexibility.

Underpinned by this open architecture and wrapped in these security and compliance capabilities, Novell is bringing an entirely new and innovative user experience to the enterprise. This new model enables interac-tions that are more intuitive and designed for the way people collaborate today. Through the execution of its collaboration vision, Novell will continue to bring together the right people, tools and interactions—empowering people to collaborate as one and achieve the highest levels of innovation, productivity and success.

www.novell.com

Contact your local Novell Solutions Provider, or call Novell at:

1 800 714 3400 U.S./Canada1 801 861 1349 Worldwide1 801 861 8473 Facsimile

Novell, Inc.404 Wyman Street Waltham, MA 02451 USA

462-002129-001 | 08/09 | © 2009 Novell, Inc. All rights reserved. Novell, the Novell logo, the N logo, GroupWise, PlateSpin and SUSE are registered trademarks, and Access Manager and Managed Objects are trademarks of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

*All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Novell Logo1 The registered trademark, ®,

appears to the right and on thesame baseline as the Logo.

Minimum Size RequirementsThe Novell Logo should NOT beprinted smaller than 3 picas(0.5 inches or 12.5 mm) in width.

Clear-space Requirements2 Allow a clean visual separation

of the Logo from all other elements.The height of the "N" is themeasurement for the minimumclear-space requirements aroundthe Logo. This space is flat andunpatterned, free of other designelements and clear from the edgeof the page.

3 picas(0.5 in)

(12.5 mm)

21 3

3

Through the execution of its collaboration vision, Novell will continue to bring together the right people, tools and interactions—

empowering people to collaborate as one and achieve the highest levels of innovation, productivity and success.