Novell Pulse and Google Wave: Demonstrating Inter-company Collaboration

Ian Roughley is an architect on Novell Pulse, a new real-time collaboration environment for enterprises that federates with Google Wave so users of both products can work together using their tool of choice.

For Novell Pulse, it was a pretty easy decision to adopt the Google Wave Federation Protocol. For many months before Google Wave was announced to the world, we had been working on solving exactly the same problems: how to collaborate instantly and on‑demand; how to make collaboration easier for groups; how to expedite document workflow; and how to do it all in real‑time. We had also come to many of the same conclusions, and if you look at the products side‑by‑side you can see this reflected through the interfaces. Not exactly, but certainly the big decisions.

The Google Wave Federation Protocol excited us, because for the first time since email, it provided a way for collaboration systems to cooperate in a non‑silo'dway . The promise is that each organization can choose what product to use and the communication will flow unimpeded between the different systems, in the same way that people on different email systems can send and receive messages to each other today. This is a collaboration revolution we wanted to be a part of.

From a technical perspective we've leveraged the code Google has open sourced by integrating Google Wave's operational transformation algorithm and the federation parts of the FedOne implementation into Novell Pulse. This allowed us to quickly get the core federation protocol features working. We have developed our own editor, which provides compatibility with a large number of browsers, and provided a mapping from the Google Wave Conversation Model to our own internal structure. Along with the Google Wave Federation Protocol, we also support the Wave Gadgets API and are working to support the Wave Robots API. This allows extensions built by 3rd parties to work seamlessly with a mix of users on Novell Pulse and Google Wave.

Check out this video to see a business use-case of federation between Novell Pulse and Google Wave.

We're excited about the opportunities for open collaboration that utilizing the Google Wave Federation Protocol will bring to both the users of Novell Pulse and Google Wave, as well as a growing ecosystem of extension developers that now have broader distribution opportunities. For more information on Novell Pulse, visit www.novell.com/pulse.

Posted by Ian Roughley, Architect, Novell Pulse