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Hello.

My name's Wendy Steinle and I'm the director of marketing for Novell's End User Computing solutions and products. My friend Dean thought you all would appreciate getting a sneak peak at some of our marketing objectives, strategies and plans for making the upcoming release of Novell GroupWise a hit in the market.

Let me first say that if the cool and quality factors of the technology alone could drive market success, I believe we would be at the top already! The GroupWise engineering team is expert at understanding and observing human needs and behavior; they truly have delivered a product that is uniquely capable to think and work like each person (I promise Dean didn't pay me to say that.)

Alas, technology alone can't create market success – and that's where the GroupWise marketing team comes in! Our job is to build awareness, generate sales leads and enable our direct and partner sales teams to solve customers' workforce productivity challenges with collaboration tools that deliver next-generation innovations, interoperability with other IT choices and compelling total-cost-of-ownership. (ehhemm...a little blatant GroupWise messaging there...)

Starting from the top, our objectives for awareness center around generating mindshare with and through industry press and analysts, generating discussion in relevant blogs and driving interested people to our Web site. Lead generation objectives center around downloads of our open beta release, generating sales leads to pass to our partners and creating opportunities to have a direct conversation with customers and other interested parties. Now, “enablement” (a fluffy marketing way of saying “teach,” “learn,” “know what the heck you are doing!”) objectives for the GroupWise launch focus on ensuring proper depth of sales and technical training for partners at the right time so they are ready to talk with their customers about how GroupWise can help them be more productive.

Our strategies are simple: Take our excitement and confidence out to the market, create a discussion between IT and business, and build awareness for our partners. (Oh, and while we have you and your organizations in mind first as we design marketing activities, we are also taking GroupWise straight to new customer audiences as well.) We have an exciting line-up of activities planned that leverage these strategies and are aimed at collectively helping our customers and Novell achieve their objectives with and for GroupWise. Here are some of the highlights:

● Free training promotion – share GroupWise Story and receive access to both Technical and End-User training for FREE
● Executive-to-Executive Movie Mailer – Novell executives send a video highlight DVD to top customers showing how the innovations in GroupWise 8 help executives be more productive
● Multi-city Collaboration Partner Tour - Novell is the main sponsor of the GWAVA Partner Tour, along with NotifyLink and GroupLink
● Customer and Partner Briefings held in conjunction with two tradeshows in EMEA: GWAVACon and Burton Catalyst
● Ongoing print ads, CIO roundtables, videos, customer success stories, web seminar series, blogs, podcasts, whitepapers, etc. on GroupWise, Collaboration and Unified Communications (see sample web site resources)
● GroupWise 20th Birthday Party Celebrations along the road to BrainShare SLC in 2009

Later this fall I'll ask Dean if I can pop in on his blog again with details about additional activities you may find useful. Meanwhile, whether your interest is administrator or end-user training, simply understanding what's new in GroupWise 8, what 3rd-party integrations are available or how you can help your CEO “get” the value of GroupWise, please check back at the GroupWise Web page at www.novell.com/groupwise for the latest.

Thanks for your interest in GroupWise and in what we marketing people are up to as we take our passion for this product out in to the market to help drive its success!

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.