dlythgoe's blog

7.0.3 Public BETA is now available!

Please download, install and provide feedback on Public BETA of 7.0.3. We will now be working on FCS (First Customer Ship) of 7.0.3 - currently scheduled for the first week of March!

You can download it from http://download.novell.com. Select GroupWise as the product, and look under the "Beta" tab.

Dean

GWAVACon is this coming week....Sunday January 27th through Tuesday January 29th, with a Bonus Day on Saturday - January 26th.

This show will be the 'Collaboration' event of the year for GWAVA, Novell and its Partners. As many of you know - Ron Hovsepian will be presenting one of the keynotes. In addition, several other key Novell executives will be there. Kent Erickson - VP and General Manager for the WorkGroup Business Unit, John Delk, the VP of Sales for WorkGroup Americas and Andy Fox - CTO for Sitescape - just to mention a few. In addition, Ken Muir has promised to make an appearance. I will be there with several of my engineers (Scott Brown and Scott Clayton), Alex Evans, the Product Manager for GroupWise as well as Phil Karren and Daniel Shelley for Novell Teaming + Conferencing. Of course, the marketing guru - Gregory Webb - will be there as well!! Novell IS&T, NTS and Technical Specialist will be on-hand to answer questions, give advice and present sessions.

Please register and come support one of our great partners - GWAVA! They, along with several other collaboration partners will be demonstrating some of the latest solutions and innovations from their engineering experts.

However, maybe one of the best reasons to come to GWAVACon is that you get to meet hundreds of fellow GroupWise administrators, users and trainers. GroupWise networking at its best!! The true experts, feet on the ground kind of advice you will only find by participating in events like GWAVACon - where so many like-minded folks come together and talk shop!! You will never meet a nicer group of people that are so willing to help you solve your problems, provide valuable advice and make lasting friendships!!

PLUS - its in San Diego!! What could be better?! Hope to see you there and talk some Bonsai and T+C!

GWAVACon - San Diego

Current status. As many of you know,  the GroupWise Engineering team has been engaged in two major GroupWise deliverables. 7.0.3 (Public BETA and Release) and Bonsai (Authorized BETA). These two projects are significant engagements that the engineering team has been working on over the last several weeks - since my last blog :).    The engineers have made significant progress in both of these areas and I wanted to give everyone an update on when and what to expect.

7.0.3 (Public BETA and Release)

We are currently meeting everyday to determine our ability to ship Public BETA of 7.0.3. We have about 6 outstanding BETA stoppers and once we have those resolved we will be announcing and shipping 7.0.3 to public BETA. Our exit criteria consists of making sure that testing has run a number of test cases and scenarios at a passing rate. In addition, we roll out 7.0.3 to several internal, corporate, post offices and the engineering team's own post offices.   Currently, we have Linux and NetWare corporate post offices updated and running. We also have updated MTAs, WebAccess and GWIA. Once our quality control team has had enough time and has run enough validation on the code, we will release it publicly. We expect that to be this week or next. After we ship Public BETA, we will be soliciting feedback. In addition to general availability, we will be talking to all customers who reported a defect that was addressed in 7.0.3 to validate that we did indeed fix their issue. In addition, we will continue our corporate roll out and respond to any serious regressions before we SHIP 7.0.3. We are expecting to release 7.0.3 in February.

Bonsai (Authorized BETA)

Upon shipping Authorized BETA on November 28th, we have been focusing a lot of effort on a refresh. We have several input sources for this effort. Of course, the first feedback comes from the BETA sites, the BETA Newsgroups and weekly BETA calls. Their input on UI, functionality, and stability is invaluable in measuring our readiness for Public BETA.   We also solicit feedback on how well we have implemented the new features of Bonsai. The weekly conference calls have been fantastic and very helpful! We have already discussed Installation, Contact Management, Favorites Folder, Calendar Publish and Subscribe. The feedback on these features has been very positive. We have also learned a great deal and are working to make adjustments and improvements in our implementations.

Another input source is our own IS&T department. They always work very closely with us as we roll out new products and they have already updated one of our corporate post offices with Bonsai. It is running on Linux, it has about 200 users and we have not had any reported problems or down time with that Post Office since deployment in early December. Of course, it is still early, but this is a very positive sign.

Engineering has been executing the test runs and they have been working towards stated quality objectives. We hope to refresh the Authorized BETA in February as well. Each subsequent release builds upon the quality metrics and test case executions that were made on previous releases. We expect each release to be substantially better and be deployed deeper into our own organization as we work with our beta sites and make continued improvements.

This is the part of the software development cycle that seems to crawl along. The user does not see many significant changes at this point, but they do see quality improve and usability enhanced. Our marketing manager, Gregory Webb, was recently upgraded to Bonsai. He is so excited about all of the new functionality that he wants to announce its availability to the world! That is very exciting for engineering, but we continue to put on the brakes until we have adequately deployed, scaled and performed in all of the expected customer environments and configurations. Bonsai is the most anticipated end-user focused release of GroupWise that I can remember. We want that anticipation met with high quality.

GMS on Linux

There is one more project that is nearing completion. We do expect to release this month, January, GMS on Linux. We have been in public BETA with this release and we are close to shipping. Watch for announcements soon!

Well that is it for now! I will continue to update you on our progress and look forward to your comments and feedback!

Last Wednesday, November 28th, we released Bonsai Authorized BETA.   This is a significant milestone in the development of this product.   It took a little longer to reach this date because we spent some extra time making sure that many of the issues surrounding Install were tested deeper.   As part of Bonsai, we moved to the latest releases of our Install tools, InstallShield, DemoShield, etc.   We are now on the latest releases for those products and we needed to make sure that upgrading and system creation tasks were tested in several different environments.

Speaking of Testing - I wanted to share some of the statistics/metrics we used for this first Authorized BETA and discuss our expectations for final release.

Across all of our components (POA/MTA/GWIA/WebAccess, Windows/Linux/Mac Clients, etc),  we ran all of our our P0 Levels test cases.  All components passed at 100% except Calendar Publisher and Monitor.   They passed at 89% and 78% respectively.   Our P1 test cases (1576 of them) were also run.   Each component passed these tests at a 70% range to 100% range.   The lowest being the GWIA on Linux at 72%.  The POA on Win and the POA on NetWare passed at 100%.   We have over 4000 P2 level test cases - we were able to run about 3000 of these test cases with pass rates mostly in the 80% average range.

As we get to each milestone in the release cycle, we will expect the product to be able to run more test cases at a higher pass rate.   We also know which areas we need to focus our efforts on and which areas need the most improvement before we ship.   This also helps our BETA sites to know which components to pound on and spend some extra time with to shake out the issues.

As far as defect fixing....We use a 'Severity' model and we have metrics around our threshold of defects with a particular severity.   For Authorized BETA, we fixed 85% of the defects found in Bonsai with a 'Critical' severity.   We fixed 68% of the Majors, 65% of the Normals and 27% of the Minors.

Before we release, we expect these numbers to be the following:   100% of Criticals, 95% of Majors, 90% of Normals and 85% of Minors.   We believe this will set a bench mark for a quality product.   It also allows us to do better escape analysis when a defect is reported by a customer.   Did we not have a Test Case for the scenario, or did we not run it or was it one that we knew about and shipped anyway?
As you can see, we are not ready for release yet :) - but it is these metrics that we will measure ourselves with to determine when the final ship date will be!    In the end, we want to ship Bonsai with great quality because we already know it has the features everyone wants.   What a great combination!

Travel Log....

I had the great opportunity last month to be in Europe and to meet with several customers, partners, resellers and Novell employees. I wanted to briefly tell you about the trip, the interesting products we saw and describe a little about our experience.

GWAVA puts on a great event! There was a couple hundred people who spent three days learning about Novell's Open Collaboration, GroupWise (Bonsai), Novell Teaming + Conferencing, ZenWorks AND all of the great products produced by our Partners. If you have never been to GWAVACon, you are missing out! The next one is in San Diego, California in January.

Check out their website.

A lot of our partners were well represented and provided some great solutions and additions to the Novell offerings. I will not try to mention them all here because I will forget someone and get whacked! However, we did have over 200 people spend time at the Novell Booth and walk through self-guided demos of Bonsai and Novell Teaming + Conferencing. Some spent hours asking questions and playing with the new features and new products. They also met with several of our partners and one of our customers - Nintendo. Nintendo was a big hit as they had Wii Consoles for everyone to play on. Greet beat everyone at boxing....

Anyway - here is a list of a 'few' of the cool new Partner products I saw...

-Ceedo Personal - GroupWise on a memory stick, plug it in, use it, pull it out and nothing is left on the machine. Ceedo Personal allows you to enjoy the convenience and productivity of your personal computer on any host PC.

- GWAVA's Vertigo - Centralized management of GroupWise client mailboxes

- Advansys Filing Assistant - helps you manage the email flow and the many folders you many have.

- SKyPhone - Unified Communications plug-in for Voice integrations with GroupWise.

Just to name a few....

After Berlin, we traveled to Nuremberg to visit the Novell SUSE office and give them demos of the Bonsai Linux Client. They have been hearing about the new Linux Client, but this was their first opportunity to see it. They went wild over the Multiple Calendars and Alternate Time Zones. We then went to Frankfurt to visit customers and meet with the Novell Sales office. We had a great visit with a major Novell OES customer but who has been running Exchange for a long time. They wanted to learn about Novell Teaming + Conferencing and after we talked to them about all of the cool features of T+C, we were able to talk to them about GroupWise and what it offers. T+C will open lots of doors for all of Novell's Collaboration products.

We then rented a car and drove to the Netherlands. The drive was fun - cruise control at 150km/h and four of us crammed into a Volvo. We visited the Novell Office in Capella and was able to meet with that team and talk about Bonsai.

Not sure if all of this is all that interesting - but wanted to share that there are GroupWise customers, partners and future clients all over the place. Our Partner Community is growing, our customer base is expanding and the GroupWise ecosystem is healthy.

There is a lot of interest and excitement about Bonsai. As we consider our authorized BETA plans, I thought it would be a good idea to give a more definitive and complete list of 'What's New!'

Thanks to our fantastic documentation team, in particular - Jill - I will point you to our online documentation for Bonsai. The documentation is not in its finished state, but does contain just about everything that is NEW. Not only the Headliner features like Task Management, Extended Calendaring and Contact Management, but also lots of the smaller features like Discussion Thread Search, Birthdays in the Calendar, RSS and Auto Save. The document is not only a list of features, but also provides some descriptions about the feature, the extent of the functionality and the experience users should expect. It covers each of the clients - Windows, Linux/Mac (Home Folder, Notify and POP/IMAP Support, WebAccess (Virtual Lists, HTML Compose and Multiple Calendars) and Outlook Connector. It also covers administration, agents and install.

Here is the link: http://www.novell.com/documentation/gw8 Check it out!

Now - as you know - Bonsai is code complete. We are working on going to BETA and preparing for internal roll outs and meeting our Ship Criteria. I invite your comments and suggestions on what 'else' GroupWise should do. However, I want to set your expectations appropriately and say that we are 'locked' down for Bonsai and any new enhancements will have to wait until the release after Bonsai - code named: Monterrey!

Switching gears slightly....

Engineering - some insight into what Engineering is up to. We are fixing BUGS! We are engaged in two major endeavors. We are trying to get Bonsai to Authorized BETA and we are trying to get 7.0.3 to Public BETA. Like any major software project, there are defects to fix, but even more important there are test plans to execute. We have an awesome Quality Assurance team and they are executing on current processes and working to create and implement newer/better ones. Automation, Test Cases, Priority Level and Regression Testing are all part of our strategy. This past spring, we invested heavily in updating our validation lab, the software and the machines. We are in the middle of organizing and implementing quality assurance procedures to better provide metrics and insight into the code coverage and validation objectives. We hope that this will pay major dividends in the quality of our code in Bonsai and in our support packs. The engineering team is very proud of Bonsai and we want our customers to feel confident that it will be solid. We are starting with our BETA program. With help from our partner, BrainStorm, we are creating some downloadable 'demos' of the newest features in Bonsai. We hope this will provide better understanding of the features as well as help our users/administrators know how best to use GroupWise as their Personal Productivity Assistant!

Next Blog - maybe in a day or two - will be about GWAVACon Berlin and our customer visits in EMEA!!

Happy Halloween!