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Stubbing will be introduced in the new GroupWise 8 product. Developed in conjunction with a Novell GroupWise partner, there are a lot of questions about what stubbing really is and should a GroupWise admin deploy it. Here is an attempt to explain.

Stubbing takes a GroupWise message, moves it out of the GroupWise message store and places it in a 3rd party repository, usually an email archiving system.

Then, a tag/flag/stub is left in GroupWise that appears in the GroupWise client. When a user clicks on the message in their client, the stub redirects the client to pull the message from the archive system, rather than from the GroupWise message store.

Stubbing became popular with Microsoft Exchange because message stores within the Exchange system became to large, introducing instability. Stubbing was seen as a means of reducing the message store but keeping the enduser experience the same.

Now Microosoft has begun to recommend against stubbing. The promise of more stable systems has become offset by a new set of problems. Here is the link for Microsoft recommending against stubbing.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc671168(EXCHG.80).aspx

Be very careful when deploying a stubbing solution. Stubbing is not for everyone and can have some unexpected side-affects that can impact your GroupWise system.

1. Stubbing is only available in the GroupWise Windows client.
This means that a stubbed message will appear in the Windows client and the message body will be able to be retrieved, but users of the Mac or Linux client will not be able to access the message in GroupWise.

BlackBerry users and those using GroupWise mobile server will not be able to access the message.

WebAccess users will not be able to access the message.

2. Irreversible - If you stub a message or a large number of messages, those messages are removed from the GroupWise message store and placed in a 3rd party repository. If the decision is made to no longer use stubbing, those messages cannot be put back.

Kudos to Novell to keep GroupWise current with Exchange, but a warning to GroupWise administrators. Be very careful about using stubbing.

Richard Bliss
More comments can be read at http://gwbliss.blogspot.com

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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.