The last few months I have actively engaged in projects where the customers were seeking a collaborative platform that is easy to implement, easy to use and easy to support. After much debate we finally recommended Novell Vibe OnPrem (or Novell Teaming as it used to be known as).
As with any new type of technology adoption within organisations where the staff is often not as computer literate as you want them to be, you expect to go through some growing and adoption pains. Let alone end-user resistance to a new platform, new way of working, and far more important, if it is not from Microsoft, how can this be good?
How wrong I was. Or did we just have the right approach to tackle these projects? I was scheduled for a follow-up workshop with one of my customers this morning for about two hours. The meeting only lasted about 5 minutes, and it was more the customer who in all excitement could not wait to show me what they have achieved. (The meeting ended before it was scheduled to start as I was early.)
The best part is how the customer managed to master the way of working within Novell Vibe in a very short time, and now cannot wait to start to do tackle new projects inside Novell Vibe.
It has been a long time since a relatively new technology on the block managed to get adoption this quickly. The way you can utilise concepts from social networking and employ those principles to get people to work more effectively and communicate far more regularly, and not via e-mail, is one of the key reasons why Novell Vibe is a technology that will have a great future.
It also does not cost a fortune, and you do not need software developers to implement the system. Your business users will drive this inside your organisation.
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