Blog Entry

Submitted by salisburyk on 29 March 2009 - 2:30pm.

...the new features are fine the way they are, IMHO. :-)

It's important that users are trained before rolling out the client anyway, so that these improvements can be discussed in detail *before* they start to use the new client.

I use and recommend Brainstorm for admins who need help training their users on GroupWise 8. (And no, I'm not affiliated with Brainstorm in any way). (Now if only Brainstorm would print those OpenOffice 3.0 Quick Start training cards I need...)

http://www.brainstorminc.com/

Submitted by hnewman on 30 March 2009 - 9:50am.

Dean - the "On accept, continue to display the item in the Mailbox" is a good solution for the users who manage their Calendar in their Mailbox. However, we were somewhat startled to find that the Auto-Accept feature kicked in as soon as we upgraded our POAs, but the clients weren't able to set that option since they were still on GW7. I'm guessing we could work around this by logging into their accounts with a GW8 client and setting the option, but we didn't try that.

Regarding the Selected Text Reply: In general, it works as designed. But we've had reports of two occasional anomalies:
1. It seems to 'read' text on the clipboard and insert that instead.
2. It picks random-length strings out of the middle of the first line, even if they aren't highlighted, and uses them.

I have seen both of these but haven't been able to duplicate reliably enough to open an SR.

Submitted by burlandp on 31 March 2009 - 2:24am.

One can argue the pros and cons of which is the best 'default behaviour' until the cows come home. Ultimately, folks use software in ways never envisaged by the developer. The key of providing good software is to give the user the ability to tweak it to *their* preference (not what you think it should be). The development cost is minimal (the mechanism is already there for personal setting - adding global flags for things like 'Auto Accept Appts to Me' is trivial). In fact, from a development viewpoint, I would expect to see this kind of allowance made for in the 'engine' code and then revealed in the user interface as required by the product team.
However, as the effort now required to put this in the code is too great - I agree that other development takes priority (folks will just get used to the new behaviour.)

Submitted by jhaynes on 2 April 2009 - 10:33pm.

You used to be able to search all these items and find previous conversations but now that seems to be lost. So seeing as I can't search for the outlook connector's fate I'll ask here. Will there ever be one that supports Outlook 2007 or any future version? As groupwise 8 has dropped this feature :)
cheers

Submitted by wigginsc on 7 April 2009 - 5:15am.

Hi there,

I think you should keep it the way it is - Novell has to move on with technology and users should adapt to new ways of doing things ...

I do have another question - when you reply on an email with the original message included, you can still edit the original message. Any way of changing this, according to my users it's very risky and could result in a law dispute ... the 'system' should not allow it. Can this be addressed?

A question on archiving: Can another feature be added to the post office agents to limit users on the size of the archives or somehow allow users to create a new archive on a yearly basis. Reason being that our support staff is having a lot of grey hairs on transferring the huge archives to new workstations, some as big as 15 GB. And then I need to sort out the archiving problems afterwards. If there is a way that we could force users to create a new archive so that the old archive can be written to DVD, the copying part and headaches afterwards could be minimized. This will also prevent users from losing years of emails in cases where the archive becomes corrupted.

Regards
Celeste

Submitted by bbecken on 7 April 2009 - 10:25am.

One feature I'd like to see is an "Archive Agent" that the GW client talks to via tcpip. This would provide the admin with a way to specify where archives are stored and would make it easy to relocate the archive data to different servers. Similar to the Archive agent used by the GWIM.

This would also mean that the GW Admins could override user settings and specify different retention periods for archives by domain, post office, group or user.

Submitted by joebrug on 10 April 2009 - 10:56am.

The Auto-accept and Reply with Selected Text are two great features. I've received only a few phone calls from people who are "missing text" in their replies, and once I explain it , they are fine with it. Keep making steps forward, no need to go back.. especially for these small issues which are easily solved by admins/trainers informing the users of changes. Change is inevitable, and theres always resistance to it. They'll learn.

Submitted by stideswe on 10 April 2009 - 4:23pm.

As mentioned above. The iPhone UI design is clearly very popular/intuitive. If you play with an iPhone (as an IT minded person) it is striking how little you can do to configure the thing. Apple have decided on a UI design and then have left the user precious little ability to tweak the UI configuration to suit their own preferences - and yet they sell very well. I don't believe users want to spend hours tweaking UI's they just want to use them out of the box and they expect the product vendor to design an intuitive UI that can just be used from day one.

Simon

Submitted by campbb on 14 April 2009 - 8:29am.

On the UI issue and iPhone comparision, while I love options as an IT person, as a trainer it is often easier to train someone how to do something a particular way then to explain and train on all of the possibilities. Of course, this requires the UI to be thoughtfully designed as others have already stated.

Now on to one of my biggest problems with Groupwise which doesn't necessarily belong here, but bits are cheap so it's worth the typing:

Please encourage whatever team is responsible for ConsoleOne (or the Novell Client if that is the problem) to support C1 working on Vista at least for managing GroupWise. While being able to manage GroupWise from iManager seems like the better long-term solution, that obviously requires a lot of new development efforts that haven't come to pass yet. As the only GW admin at my institution and as someone who has used Vista on my only computer for 9 months now (with few other problems), I now cringe every time I have to change even the simplest little GW related thing since ConsoleOne is required and it blue screens my computer. It is getting really old to have to spend 30 minutes on what would be a two minute task because I have to borrow a colleagues computer running XP or mess around with a virtual machine.

People love to rant and complain about Vista, but the fact is that it is here and it is MS's current OS. It came standard with the 250 Tablet PCs we deployed last summer, and it worked well enough (once we turned off some of the new security stuff like UAC) that it made more sense to use and continue to move forward with it than try to find replacement utilities and drivers and build an image from scratch on XP.

- Bill

P.S. I tried this Cool Solutions article, which got it to start but C1 now blue screens my computer when I change an object property:
http://www.novell.com/support/php/search.do?cmd=di...

Lastest doc for C1 I can find still just says Vista is not supported:
http://www.novell.com/documentation/consol13/c1_en...
I could accept that in 2007 when the latest version of C1 was released and Vista was new, but it is time to move forward now, and C1 is obviously not dead since we have to use it to manage GW.

Submitted by stideswe on 14 April 2009 - 10:19pm.

I know this is way off topic but ...

As regards C1/iManager - I don't really care. I don't have problems with using C1. C1 runs like lightening on Linux and I tend to run it on the server itself over FreeNX (that way there is less need to share out the domain DB's with the consequent risk of DB corruption that that incurs).

One aspect of GroupWise administration that really irks me though is the lack of transparency in dealing with the message store. The gwcheck/POA log error messages are unhelpful and frequently not documented or poorly/superficially documented. As an administrator if emails within the message store are corrupt/missing attachments etc I'd like to know a bit more about them (e.g. timestamp, sender , recipient, subject) as they were being deleted/reported. And I'd like to have a much clearer idea about what the appropriate DB repairs were to run (or whether I needed to run any) in response to a POA log/client/gwcheck error.

There have been long-standing issues with the GroupWise expire/reduce scheduled jobs leaving tons and tons of debris in the OFFILES directory. Because of this, despite a weekly 90 day expiration job and a weekly empty trash job on all our post offices the OFFILES directory continues to swell out in size with files that are in excess of three years old existing in there. This is, to my mind, a seemingly intractable Novell bug that you show no ability or inclination to resolve but it would be really nice to have better tools to explore this issue. To, for instance, to be able to open up a blob file and view it (as an administrator) so that you could determine what it belongs to. To be able to query "what message does this blob belong to" and to subsequently delete the message and confirm that the blob has also gone. That's the kind of stuff I want. I'd also love for the core issue of the bloating OFFILES directory to be ultimately remedied too. With respect to the latter, I repeat the offer I have made before, I will give you a copy of our main post office on tape (with blobs more than three years old and all of that) for you to explore this issue with (provided you agree to respect the privacy of the data therein). Having some good example data to work from might help you to resolve the issue. Giving the admins better "lenses" to look at the data with might give you more eyes to work on the problem from outside of Novell?

I have recently explored the possibility of a third party archiving solution. During this process I found that having the data stored in a database (e.g. MySQL) that I can write simple queries against, and having the blob files unencrypted and stored as flat files on the server was a real boon, it allowed me to see all the data and be able to manage it accordingly. I know that GroupWise developers will want to protect user privacy from the eyes of a snooping, nosey administrator but to have better visibility of the inner guts of the message store would be really really helpful to assist administrators in managing their systems (such as with the OFFILES debris issue).

Simon

Submitted by bbecken on 15 April 2009 - 8:35am.

I really do not like the GroupWise 800hp1 installer. I just ran the installer with the intent of creating a local SDD that would later be copied to the server (prep work for updating a remote system on a slow wan link).

My complaints:
1) the interface is not intuitive as it was in previous versions.
2) trying to figure out what options to select just to install the SDD was not intuitive at all.
3) When I wanted help and clicked on the Installation help, it download a copy of the entire gw8_install.pdf from the internet... pretty ugly over a slow internet link (why not bundle the pdf in the package?).
3) I tried researching exactly what was copied if I selected the "install administration" (which refers you to the gw8_install.pdf) and could not find an explanation of the option. I did find a screenshot on Page 260.
4) the installer forces me to use a network drive for the SDD.
5) the installer forces me to use 8.3 formats. Previously I could create a directory named something like "software.800hp1" which would later be renamed or the contents copied into the "software" directory.

Don't get me wrong, I love using GroupWise, I just found these items annoying.

Submitted by emsandberg on 15 April 2009 - 2:45pm.

In my (humble) opinion, I think serious users of previous GroupWise versions who didn't want to receive appointments or emails sent to themselves simply set up rules to handle these items. This being said, I think it's a good idea to have self-sent appointments auto-accepted, but perhaps make it a default rule that can be turned off? That way people (and my company has several) who rely on the messages showing up in their inboxes can have it their way too.

Submitted by itangast on 24 April 2009 - 9:06am.

I am all for the change but have received one complaint. If you schedule an appointment and did not check your schedule first, it will auto accept and not notify you of a conflict if one exists. Has anyone else seen this? Is this something that can be fixed?

Submitted by hamline on 27 August 2009 - 1:04pm.

i'm sorry to respond to a thread that's a bit old, but we just upgraded to groupwise 8, and ran into the issue with the appointment auto-accepts. it's created a lot of confusion for our users, and we have some people that use it as a means of tracking who's accepted an appointment.

so, my vote, is change it to a user configurable option, at least for this release, to allow people to ease into the transition.

anthony.

Submitted by dougdeden on 6 October 2009 - 6:58am.

Please count me as a vote for a feature request. While I can see how selecting text before replying could be handy to those who find it difficult to just hit Reply and then edit the text they are replying to, it needs to be optional. I don't even mind if it is the default -- just give us a way to turn it off. I often select and copy something from a message for other uses, and when that text is still selected when I hit Reply, it is either noticable, causing me to cancel, unselect, and reply again, or I don't see it, which changes the context of my composition without my being aware of it. We've got lots of users calling our Helpdesk to report "a problem". We'll probably end up making a wide-spread announcement to explain it, but it would be oh-so-much nicer if we could tell them how to turn it off.

I'm not a fan of the

Notice: something just happened.
[ ] Don't tell me this again.

-style messageboxes, but at a minimum, you should pop that up whenever this "feature" triggers, so people know what's happening until they get used to it and turn off the messagebox. Changing default behavior with absolutely no communication is just rude. If this isn't the right place to make a formal request, please let me know the proper channel.

...doug