Big Blue and Red Hat have lowered the barrier for organizations interested in trying out IBM Workplace Services Express 2.5 on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, but aren't yet ready to spend money on it: a 90 day trial. The trial comes as a preinstalled version of the collaboration software and operating system in a VMware environment, packaged as a virtual machine for download from Red Hat Network. Although not limited to SMBs, the two companies believe this combination will appeal to SMBs looking for a collaborative, Linux-ready solution without investing significant time or IT resources.
Workplace Services Express (WSE) provides team rooms, instant messaging, document management and portal capability in a single, integrated interface, and serves the collaborative needs of organizations with a limited amount of users, including SMBs and departments in large companies. With WSE, organizations can deliver and manage business applications, plus share and integrate information internally with employees, and externally with contractors and partners. Its portal capabilities let organizations integrate business applications, providing collaboration in the context of the applications familiar to users. Because you can run all the collaborative capabilities of WSE on a single Red Hat Enterprise Linux server, total cost of ownership is lower and administration is streamlined.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides an open source, reliable, secure, scalable platform with strong performance. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is designed for heterogeneous IT environments, and comes with built-in graphical tools so non-Linux experts can install and administer their Linux systems. Each subscription to Red Hat Enterprise Linux includes Red Hat Network, a Web-based system administration tool designed to streamline system management for IT administrators. The Red Hat Network also includes additional tools and capabilities that make it easier for system administrators to manage, deploy, and provision systems, without having to add resources.
"Workplace Services Express is designed to meet our customers' collaboration needs without eating up a lot of IT resources, and IBM's multi-platform approach helps our customers avoid the vendor lock-in they experience with other collaboration platforms," said Ken Bisconti, vice president, Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software, IBM. "And by offering a trial copy of Workplace Services Express with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we're teaming with one of the industry's leading Linux providers to give SMBs an additional choice for their collaborative computing platform to help them manage costs while increasing performance."
"Working with IBM, Red Hat is looking forward to introducing small to medium organizations to a highly reliable and affordable solution for Linux," said Tim Yeaton, senior vice president of marketing at Red Hat. "IBM Workplace Services Express features a wide range of office and collaboration functionality while Red Hat Enterprise Linux presents itself as a great platform alternative for the SMB."
The download will be available from the Red Hat Network (http://www.redhat.com/software/rhn/) on September 1, 2005. You can downlod the software to run this pre-installed IBM Workplace Services Express and Red Hat Enterprise Linux evaluation environment on the VMware Technology Network (http://www.vmtn.net/technology/vm).