Attendees at next week's will be the first to get access to the beta preview version of Pulse, which Novell plans to launch in final form in the second half of this year.

"We'll provide them over the course of the following weeks, in a controlled manner, with an account to the Pulse preview system and give them five invites for colleagues," said Ken Muir, chief technology and strategy officer of Novell's Collaboration Business Unit.

The idea is to give customers a chance to try out Pulse and provide feedback to Novell as the vendor prepares the general-availability version of the product, he said.

Pulse lets co-workers collaborate on documents in real time and set up employee profiles, while giving IT staffers administrative controls to establish usage policies and security safeguards.

In addition to having static information about employees' areas of expertise, the profiles also let them post status updates and broadcast other action notifications to their co-workers.