I've blown hot and cold about Novell's "Cool Solutions" over the years, although mostly about how Novell treated the amalgam of tools, tips and tidbits rather than with what the site itself was doing. Still, in the 15 years I was a volunteer helper (a.k.a., Netwire Sysop) on the various forums that first Novell marketing and later Novell support sponsored, there always did appear to be a bit of a "culture clash" with the people involved with Cool Solutions. Or maybe it was just me. Cool Solutions was started by people in Novell's GroupWise organization - and you probably know how I feel about GroupWise (I've never liked the product).

Last month at BrainShare, I heard that the Cool Solutions folks were thinking of starting their own support forums. Well, you know how rumors are.

The Web site has, as far as I know, no connection with Novell. Except that the folks who run it are the same ones who run the Novell Cool Solutions areas.

Not only are Cool Solutions and Novell support not going to war over who has the dominant support forums, but they're actually cooperating to enhance the support, community and experience of all Novell product users.

Cool Solutions has started a number of Wikis. If you aren't familiar with Wikis, see my colleague Mark Gibbs' Web applications newsletter article "All about Wikis".

Novell's support forums have never been a great place for conversation and community building - they're for support, and anyone not specifically asking for or delivering support is politely redirected to the single forum (Community Chat) where discussion can take place. To ensure that the level of traffic is within reason, support questions are specifically forbidden in Community Chat. Still, it's the most used forum in Novell's forum area and there's a large amount of chaff to wade through to find a little bit of "wheat".

The Cool Solutions Wikis will fit neatly in between the support forums and the chat forum, because they are designated as the place to talk about (but not really expect support for) Novell products.

But wait, there's more.

Not only will there be clearly defined places to chat, to discuss and to ask for support but (finally) those places will all be linked from the Novell product home pages. Take a look here, for example. A form to query the technical information database; a tabbed form for the support.novell.com pages (including the support forums); a tabbed form for Cool Solutions (including a link to the wiki for the product). There are also links to patches, security alerts and documentation - all in one place. It's great.

Now if Novell would stop renaming products (seemingly weekly) so that we could easily find the product pages, life would be good.

RELATED EDITORIAL LINKS

NW200: Novell's one-two punch Network World, 04/25/05

To contact Dave Kearns:

Dave Kearns is a writer and consultant in Silicon Valley. He's written a number of books including the (sadly) now out of print "Peter Norton's Complete Guide to Networks." His musings can be found here.