A few months ago I wrote about Novell GroupWise, their collaboration and productivity application (see Novell GroupWise 8 Brings Enterprise 2.0 Capability to Personal Productivity Functions). GroupWise allows for sharing tools such as calendar, task management, and email.

Recently, I spoke again with Novell about their companion product Novell Teaming. It allows for such capabilities as online secure team workspaces, document management, expert identification, and process automation. I wrote about an excellent case example of Novell Teaming at the Kempinski hotel group (see Novell Teaming Brings Kempinski Hotels into Enterprise 2.0). Now Novell is releasing a new version of Teaming with a number of new and upgraded features. Travis Grandpre, Product Marketing Manager, and Tracy Smith, Product Manager walked me through the changes with Novell Teaming 2 and their plans for the future.

Travis first said that Novell has a plan for bringing its GroupWise, Teaming, GroupWise Instant Messenger, and Conferencing applications together. So far the first three are integrated. They will also be providing bidirectional data integration of GroupWise with SharePoint, Sugar CRM, and Salesforce.com later this year. Then future iterations will have integration with ActiveSync enabled devices, Documentum and SAP.

I asked Travis about the SharePoint integration. He said they will enable file exchange for people who want to use GroupWise for collaboration and SharePoint for document sharing. Next year, you can also migrate WSS, the free version of SharePoint that comes with Windows Server, into Teaming to retain any work done in WSS.

We went over the capabilities that come with Teaming 2. There are customizable workspaces, enterprise search and social networking tools, user-based access control, business automation, file sharing, and a library of templates. The templates allow for quick starting specific use cases. They have thirty so far and are adding two to three a week. Examples include: bug/issue management, daily time card, employee help desk, expense report, injury report, medical history, meeting minutes, and pricing proposal. I think these are a great idea. You can use them as a starting point for customized versions without having to re-invent basic features. Down the road, the Teaming Library will include examples of Landing pages, articles, customization and integration examples.

Future plans for Teaming include further user interface enhancements, business application integration with Novell DataSync, enhanced mobile device support, cloud based offerings and integration with other applications like MS Office, Open Office, Outlook, Notes, Documentum, FileNet and more. Travis covered the Kablink Open Source Community that feeds development of Novell Teaming. It was launched in 2008 with downloads and activity continuing to increase.

Tracy next walked me through a demo. There are two core concepts: workspaces and entries. There are three versions of workspaces: personal, group, and global or enterprise. I like the concept of a personalized workspace. Tracy said that one of the main applications of Teaming is for knowledge management. In the past applications that supported personal knowledge management were generally nonexistent so this really appeals to me. You can make content in your personal workspace private. There is a relevance dashboard that provides a filter to all the activity in the system. You can see what’s new in the teams you belong to through an auto-generated stream of actions. Access controls allow you to only see what fits your access profile. You can select the people and teams to monitor [relevance dashboard is a productivity tool in the Personal Workspace].

The team workspace is where most activity occurs. You can see members and their profiles, post discussion items, and create content folders. There is also a separate micro-blogging capability. You have the option of adding the auto-generated activities flow into the micro-blog stream along with what you enter manually. Workspaces can contain shared files, wikis, blogs, discussion groups, surveys, shared calendars, project tasks milestones and more.

As you move through activities and parts of the Teaming application, you see a history of your actions so you can easily go back to prior work. This is a nice feature. They also added a series of brief video tutorials to cover key features. In the future they are going to add greater ability to customize landing pages with drag and drop organization.

Tracy said that the top application of Teaming is knowledge management. You can also create forms or use templates for forms and then align them with workflow to both automate and knowledge enable work processes. This is my preferred type of knowledge management, embedded in work processes rather than as standalone repositories. I like these improvements and see Teaming as an excellent support for both personal and team productivity. It embodies principles of enterprise 2.0 and furthers the early visions of what knowledge management could and should do.

Teaming, was also recognized as a leader in the August 2009 Forrester Research, Inc. report, The Forrester Wave: Collaboration Platforms, Q3 2009. I have seen the reports and will be writing about it soon.