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Novell Vibe
Vibe recently was launched into beta mode, but it's easy to see that this may become a very significant collaboration solution. Waltham, Mass.-based Novell appears to have taken the best elements of both Twitter and Facebook and wrapped them into a business-focused, online solution.
Vibe allows users to create business profiles -- as one would in Twitter or Facebook. It allows for the following of others, on-the-fly group creation, message threads, private messages and online file sharing. The file-sharing feature is really nice, designed to allow for the drag-and-drop of a specific file into a field in a user’s main console. Once uploaded, a file can be shared with specific people.
Novell calls Vibe a "social collaboration platform." (Is there any other kind of collaboration?) But unlike other solutions, Vibe provides workspace areas in a user’s console that allow for document and file creation, sharing and contact management. Vibe provides a presence-awareness tool that informs others in your network of your availability.
But what makes Novell's solution work so well is that it appears to have filtered out all of the distraction and nonsense that you'd find in other online collaboration sites. It's also snappy and fast (perhaps owing to the fact that its primary browser of support is Google Chrome and, interestingly, Vibe will not work in Internet Explorer).
When considering collaboration solutions, the Test Center highly recommends examining Vibe's potential and whether it can solve a specific business issue. If it's not lost in the Attachmate shuffle, Vibe could have a nice future.
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