* Novell offers interactive demo of Virtual Office
One of the new features of NetWare 6.5, and which is also part of Nterprise Linux Services and slated to be in Open Enterprise Server, is Virtual Office. Many of the elements of Virtual Office, such as iFolder, iPrint, eGuide and more, aren’t new in themselves but the “office” metaphor as well as the user interface is new. All that makes working with these interesting and useful technologies easier for your non-techie users (and isn’t that most of them?).
While I’ve extolled the various elements individually to you a technically savvy audience, getting users, especially those who control the budget and the purse strings, to feel this enthusiasm has been difficult. They’ve got to see it in action before they’ll believe how useful it is and how easy it is to use.
It’s been a classic chicken and egg problem – no money to buy the upgrade until they’re convinced that Virtual Office is worth the expense, but no way to look at Virtual Office until you do the upgrade. Novell (and quite possibly its much-maligned marketing department) has now provided an interactive demo of Virtual Office which is sure to ease your path to the corporate coffers so you can pry loose a few dollars/euros to allow you to purchase the upgrade.
The demo is done with Macromedia’s Flash, which ordinarily is enough to give me pause before looking at it, but this one appears to be well designed with little extraneous “fat” but lots of real information. Head over to https://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/netware/features/trenches/tr_brainstorm_vo_demo_nw.html and see what I mean.
This very useful (to me) demo was created by Brainstorm, Novell’s neighbor down the road in Orem, Utah. It’s a company you might think of when you’re planning for training since it can bring the training right to your door. It has trained people on Novell products and solutions for many years and if its training service is as good as this demo then the company could be right for you.
Even if you aren’t in the market for training, but are in the market to upgrade to NetWare 6.5 (or Open Enterprise Server, later this year) take a look at the demo and then show it to the decision makers at your organization. Tie it in with a presentation on all of the benefits of NetWare 6.5 and you just might be surprised at how well received your upgrade plans can be once folks realize all that it can do for you.
