Blog Entry

Submitted by paulgear on 1 July 2009 - 2:14am.

One thing that might make GroupWise attractive to existing Linux shops who don't want to use Exchange, is support for running it on RHEL and derivatives. Surely that wouldn't be a big ask...

Submitted by newbd001 on 9 July 2009 - 11:00pm.

I am read with interest that Novell do not test against the top 6 browsers in use as a matter of routine For example; http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
demonstrates that nearly 15% of browser usage is IE6 whilst even the 3% of users who use Safari is a significant number. In terms of web access this method of accessing their mailbox is invariably used by home users who may infact use Safari or other variations of browser than the corporate PC norm.

Also given that a significant and potentially growing number of customers will have either Terminal Services / Citrix I would also have thought that more rigourous testing is employed against these platforms.

Submitted by ukrause on 25 July 2009 - 6:27am.

Hi Dean,

excellent news. Thanks for this article. As I am one of the probably rare MAC users, I would like to see Support for Snow Leopard. Currently I understodd, that 8.0.1 will not support it, as there is the Notify Problem. Is there a workaround for endusers to get it running or was this only done testing and 8.0.1 will generally not support it. This means I have to switch to WA :-(

Submitted by dlythgoe on 13 August 2009 - 9:41am.

This is challenging issue and one that is discussed a lot both internally and externally.

Although, I can't disagree that Outlook has become the defacto email client for a lot of businesses - those business do not include the ones who do not use it :) Novell, IBM, Google, Yahoo, Zimbra, Oracle all have email clients that are NOT Outlook. Although - some of them do allow you to use Outlook with their product - including GroupWise.

Novell does have more of a challenge here because creating an Outlook Client/Plug-in simply does not work well with our GroupWise back end. We have tried to move in the direction of Exchange in some areas, but in others - it would require some sort of migration. We continue to think about and research different ways that would allow for Outlook and a GroupWise POA to better co-exist. We have not given up - but it is currently not a priority either.

The bottom line is that it is very expensive. We have built an Outlook Connector three times and each time it has failed to meet the expectations of our Outlook users. No matter how good it is, it still is not the exact same experience as Outlook/Exchange - so users are ultimately disappointed. While spending even more time and resources on that problem could conceivably yield positive results at some point, the question for us has been - at what cost? In GroupWise 8, we found that it was much better to spend our time improving the user experience in our own clients than try to force Outlook to behave with GroupWise. A lot of Outlook lust observers who have objectively used/learned the GroupWise Windows Client have found it to be as good as or better than Outlook. Once they get past the 'change' part of the argument, most have been very satisfied and have become even more productive as a result.

Therefore - we did not ship a new Outlook Connector for GroupWise 8. We do not have any current plans to enhance our current Outlook Connector - although we continue to look for innovative ways to solve this problem another way. Many companies have solved this problem by creating an Exchange-like backend - instead of making changes to Outlook. This is an approach we will continue to research and investigate. There is no committed deliverable for this solution.

In addition, we are seeing lots of other trends in the industry that over a longer period of time are making Outlook less critical as a supported client. Things like web clients, mobile devices and social networking are pushing more and more people out of Outlook and to other alternatives. We will continue to monitor these trends and see if any of them have sustaining power.

I hope that give some perspective...

Dean

Submitted by ianfret on 14 August 2009 - 2:40am.

We are a law firm and want to stay with GroupWise for all the good reasons that have been argued, but our mission critical Case Management System only integrates with Outlook. The current performance of the Connector puts us between a 'rock and a hard place' in trying to persuade users that they need to use both to get all functionality. We have recently merged with an Outlook/Exchange firm and although cost is a factor in the argument for staying with Groupwise engine, it becomes difficult to sustain in terms of business process. We had heard that Novell were going to try to mimic the Exchange server and we were hanging on this. From what you say it seems that there is only a slim chance that we will be able to run a fully functional Outlook client from a Groupwise engine in the future.