Novell’s ‘Rev’ reaches out further to his flock

Giving Novell’s Ted Haeger a project is a lot like giving a dog a bone. When he was named director of Novell User Communities last year, I expected new and exciting user-involved activities. And, as usual, the man they call “the Rev” didn’t disappoint.

As he put it in an e-mail last week, “As part of the overall user community program, I’m doing some things to get more tech to the people.” And the way he’s going to do that is to adapt the latest communications mechanisms to the task of spreading the Novell word. The first step is a user community podcast called Novell Open Audio, which was expected to go live last week. The first episode is a fairly broad overview, but according to Ted, “Over time, I hope to make it a community-owned technical info source – that ties to a couple other cool programs.”

Well, of course there’ll be a couple of other “cool” programs. This is Ted Haeger, after all.

The Rev went on: “One of the other programs will be called ‘Cool Blogs’ [which could debut this week]. That will put blogs from product experts like Martin Buckley, Jason Blacket and Mark Schouls on the Cool Solutions Web site. As with Novell Open Audio, our goal is to make these not only an informal, outbound voice for the technically-inclined, but also a way that people can dialog with Novell’s superstars through comments.”

This is all part of the revitalization of Novell Users International (formerly NetWare Users International), the worldwide users group that Haeger started last year. So listen to the podcasts, read the blogs and – if you go to BrainShare next month – stop by the Novell Users International booth and see what other surprises the Rev has up his sleeve.