About Following Team and Project Progress

Keeping track of tasks, people, and projects can be a challenging,
full time job, especially if you are in charge of one or more projects.
Even if you are not in charge of the projects that you work on,
it's important to keep track of what your team members are working
on and when they finish certain tasks.

Challenge

Managers, project leaders, and team members need an easy way
to keep up-to-date on the people they work with and their teams'
progress and activities. You need instant updates when changes happen
in tasks, projects, and areas of interest. This becomes extremely
difficult without an effective way of communicating changes on a
project.

While some organizations rely on instant messaging services
and e-mails to stay up-to-date, these are not effective methods
for keeping projects moving without delays or interruptions. It
just takes a missed e-mail or IM message to keep team members in
the dark about project updates, changes in assignments, project
delays, and other key information vital to moving a project forward.
Keeping all people up-to-date becomes even more difficult when the team
members are out of the office or on the road.

Additionally, the lack of a centralized team storage location
also makes following project progress difficult. When team members
store work-in-progress documents on their own computers or local
servers, it blocks other team members' visibility into changes being
made to the documents, as well as the overall progress of the documents'
development.

Novell Solution

Novell Vibe makes it easy to keep team members updated
on the progress of projects, people, and other areas of interest.
In Novell Vibe, you can follow any person or place that you have
access rights to follow. When you follow people, folders, or workspaces,
your personal dashboard displays any changes that occur with those individuals
or places. Your dashboard also keeps you updated with what is going
on with your teams, as well as activities that affect your entire
organization.

To let you quickly see what changes have occurred since the
last time you looked in a folder or workspace, each folder and workspace
in Novell Vibe has a “What's New” and “What's Unread” section.
The What's New section lists everything that has changed in the
entire workspace, including all of its sub-folders and sub-workspaces.

Novell Vibe also provides feeds to let you stay current on
the happenings of the people you follow. Feeds keep you updated
on what's going in your tracked places and microblogs as well.
To allow you to keep up-to-date on what people are doing even when
you are logged out of Novell Vibe, Novell Vibe supports Web
feeds.

Through the support of standard RSS and ATOM readers, Novell Vibe
lets you receive Web feeds of changes to your Novell Vibe folders.
To make this possible, Novell Vibe assigns an RSS URL and an
ATOM URL to each folder in Vibe. Once you enter the appropriate
URL into your reader, you are then able to view any changes or additions
to your folders even while logged out of Novell Vibe.

For quick access to specific areas of interest, users can assign
desired workspaces and folders to their Novell Vibe“Favorites”
menu. This lets team members quickly navigate to team workspaces,
or other places associated with projects or people of interest,
allowing them to instantly view status and progress.

Folders and workspaces in Novell Vibe also have an area
where individuals can subscribe to receive e-mail notifications
or e-mail digests. This allows people to keep up-to-date on everything
that is going on in their areas of interest through e-mail.

As an alternative to individual users subscribing to e-mail notifications,
folders and workspaces can be configured to send out e-mail notifications
to all groups, users, and teams. These notifications would include
any changes that occur to a folder or workspace. Notifications
of changes or additions can be sent out in a variety of formats,
including individual messages, daily digests, and other formats.

Novell Vibe also makes it easy for mobile users to stay current
on the people, projects, and places they're following. The mobile
UI in Novell Vibe lets users follow what's going on no matter
where they are or how they connect to the Internet. As a browser-based 
environment, Novell Vibe lets users access the information
they need, when they need it and with any Internet-ready device.

Novell Vibe also provides basic to advanced workflow capabilities
that give organizations even greater power and flexibility to keep
people up-to-date and projects running smoothly. Workflows can notify
team members of status or prompt them to take certain actions. Every
stage in a workflow process has the ability to send out multiple notifications
to multiple individuals.

Results

Novell Vibe significantly improves the ability for individuals
and teams to “stay in the know” with what is going on within the
organization and key projects. It eliminates the need to continually
e-mail team members about status. It provides persistent team workspaces
that let all team members see what other team members are working
on, project progress, assignment changes, progress with team documents,
and anything related to the projects or people that they need to
follow. Novell Vibe makes it easy to keep track of teams and
other users in a way that increases productivity, improves quality
of team deliverables, and saves money.