Workgroup Cool Solutions

DBCOPY Cleanup Tool

soundsolutionsinc — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:30:28 -0700

BACKGROUND:
We use DBCOPY to stage our GroupWise backups to a different location on the server. This function works just fine in the background. The problem is that the files from the target server are not deleted if they no longer exist in the source server. So they will just stay there over time. Until now.

Using a tool called AutoDelete from Cyber-D, you can now schedule the older files to be purged from your staging area. Simply download this free utility at http://cyber-d.blogspot.com/2005/10/cyber-ds-auto-... (yup, free). Configure the paths for the folder structure that you want pruned, set the period of time that you want to search for (since we perform daily DBCOPYs, there's no need to keep anything older than 2 days).

Our DBCOPY kicks off at 8pm and our AutoDelete will kick off daily at 2am, pruning anything older than two days. DBCOPY runs from our NetWare servers, but I am setting up AutoDelete on one of our GroupWise servers running on Windows to prune all of the other NetWare servers.

WARNING:
If we request a restore to the DBCOPY area from tape, the Cyber-D AutoDelete tool will wipe that area clean of old files, so our restores need to be finished before the 8pm DBCOPY and the 2AM AutoDelete.

I initially found this tool to remove files in a folder that were older than 30 days and it has done a great job in doing so. I then used it on a folder that normally gets files deleted after 30 days, but I was finding that it needed to be cleaned out more frequently. Since I could not alter the purging period of the existing tool, AutoDelete came in really handy.

You'll find other uses for this tool in no time!

This is Freeware, please consider donating (I have no affiliation with this product or company). I believing in supporting companies who produce tools that work.

Cool Solutions

Leicester City Council Success Story

coolguys — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:12:36 -0700

Challenge:

Leicester City Council wanted to migrate to a more modern and flexible operating system for core services such as file serving, print management, user management and networking.

Equally, the Council wanted to replace its existing Pegasus Mail solution, which lacked integrated calendaring and collaboration tools, and left users reliant on e-mail to set up internal and external meetings.

Novell Solution:

Leicester City Council opted to migrate its existing network, file and print services to Novell Open Enterprise Server running on SUSE® Linux Enterprise. The Council deployed the software on new HP servers with HP EVA storage arrays.

"Novell Open Enterprise Server running on Linux gave us continuity with our previous ways of working, combined with new options for the future," said Kamal Kotecha, Server Manager for Leicester City Council. "We were able to continue using the rich set of Novell tools to manage our network resources, which meant that the transition and training costs were low."

For its new e-mail and collaboration platform, Leicester City Council chose to implement Novell GroupWise. For all office-based employees and the many staff based in social welfare centres, museums and leisure centres, Novell GroupWise provides a single, integrated personal workspace for e-mail, calendaring and collaboration.

Read the complete success story here –>
http://www.novell.com/success/leicester.html

Cool Solutions

Webinar - The Novell Integrated Help Desk and Free BrainShare passes for eligible purchases

GroupLink1 — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:07:51 -0700

Are you planning on attending BrainShare this year and can't quite get the budget to attend? Are you in need of a help desk that integrates with your Novell environment? GroupLink would like to help you out!

GroupLink's everything HelpDesk solution, the Novell Integrated Help Desk Solution, features critical Novell integration:

- Schedule appointments, tasks and receive email notifications with GroupWise email and calendaring integration
- Manage your assests with NEW! powerful ZEN 10 integration
- Authenticate your users with essential eDirectory integration
- Lower overall costs by leveraging your current Novell technology

If you purchase at least 3 technician licenses of everything HelpDesk before the end of the year, you will receive a free BrainShare pass*. To kick off this great promotion and to learn more about how this solution can benefit your organization we have planned a special webinar. This webinar will feature Angie Veach, from Carrol Consolidated School Corp. She will discuss how this Novell integration has helped her organization be more effective and lower overall costs.

Date: December 3
Time: 11:00 am Eastern
Link: http://www.grouplink.net/redir.asp?id=2009102902

* of for new customers only, cannot be combined with any other promotion or discount.

Cool Solutions

Early Bird Discount: Save $300 on BrainShare

mattclayton — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:31:43 -0700

Novell has taken steps to make BrainShare more affordable by dropping the full price of the conference from US$1,895.00 to US$1,695.00. You can save an additional $300 with the "early bird" registration. The "early bird" rate of US$1,395.00 will be available until February 19, 2010. Learn more at http://www.novell.com/brainshare

Cool Solutions

Stubbing confusion - It just doesn't work that way

richardbliss — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Stubbing. The issue continues to be discussed with a lot of claims being made. Stubbing is a function of email archiving. You can't stub unless you have an archiving solution. All, 100%, every single one of the GroupWise vendors offering archiving solutions support stubbing in GroupWise. But, just because they support it doesn't mean that it is a good idea.

Jay Parker, a very skilled and distinguished engineer for the GroupWise team asked me today why I keep beating up on stubbing.

Here is my answer:

Why do you stub? Mainly you stub in the hopes of reducing your GroupWise message store. You want to reduce your GroupWise message store so you have better performance, faster backups, and more stability.

That is all good. But what do you have to do in order to achieve this level of success with stubbing. Ah, here is the question and the core of the confusion. Recently a vendor claimed that stubbing can possibly reduce your GroupWise mailbox by 80-90%. The claim in based on attachments taking up the majority of your mailbox size and if you stub out the attachments, then presto, your GroupWise message store is reduced. NOT!

Look, GroupWise is an extremely scalable, robust, stable product for a reason. It has something called Single Instance Storage. This means if you have 100 users on a Post Office and send them all a file that is 10 MB in size, you don't end up with 1 GB of disk usage (100 users x 10 Mb = 1 GB), instead you simply have a single copy of the file at 10MB with everyone pointing to the file.
This is the simple part. It is clean and easy.
Now, let's stub that 10 MB file attachment and see if we achieve a 80-90% decrease in our message store for GroupWise.

First, who is going to be stubbed? Who makes this decision? Does everyone have the same policy, or is the their a hierarchy of needs where some people in the organization don't want to or can't use stubbing?
For example. Mobile users on mobile devices can't see their messages if they are stubbed. Web Access users can't see their files. Mac and Linux client users can't see their files, only Windows clients.
Is their an age policy of files with exceptions for Executives?

With all of this now decided, let's look at what happens to the file that is being stubbed.

100 people received the 10 MB file. There is only one copy of the file in the message store. The decision is made to stub everything older than 60 days, or bigger than 5 MB, or whatever reason.

Okay, off goes the stubbing and pulls it out of the GroupWise message store and places it in an archive that also has single instance storage. This means even though multiple users are moving in their data, only 1 copy exists in the archive. Ideally, the 10 MB file should be out of GroupWise and in the Archive, thus reducing GroupWise by 100% for this file, or 10MB.

BUT WAIT....did 100% of the 100 users meet the stubbing requirements? Are 100% on Windows, do 100% not need access via WebAccess, and are 100% in the same archiving policy group, meaning no one is an exception.

Because if even 1 person is an exception, for whatever reason, then that 10MB file stays in GroupWise, with ZERO reduction in the message store. You now have a 10MB file in GroupWise AND a 10MB file in your Archive. You didn't reduce your disk requirements, you actually increased them. And at the same time you introduced a level of complexity to your message system without any of the benefits of a smaller GroupWise system.

The claim that 80-90% of your message store can be reduced with stubbing is flat out wrong and irresponsible to suggest. The requirements to meet this number are so strict and confining that it is nearly impossible to achieve.

You can't stub a single mailbox and reduce the message store significantly unless certain situations are met.

First, the majority of the files with attachments are sent to a group inside the GroupWise system that ALL are stubbed together.

Second, a large number of files with attachments are sent outside of the GroupWise message store.
These two circumstances will allow you to drastically reduce your GW system, but again, one person, one user, one exception, and it all is for nothing.

I'm not bashing Stubbing, I'm bashing the misinformation that is being pushed as a reason to adopt stubbing. If you are implementing this feature, be very sure that you realize how you must configure your stubbing to limit the exceptions. Otherwise you are simply creating a bigger problem than you are solving.

I have created a short video that explains what I'm talking about. You can find it at:
http://richardbliss.typepad.com/richardblissblog/2...

Workgroup Cool Solutions

GWAVA to Support Pulse

GWAVAComm — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:01:52 -0700

GWAVA, a Novell Collaboration Partner, is planning support for Novell Pulse, the recently announced real-time collaboration initiative that supports Google Wave protocols. GWAVA's focus on collaboration data security and its long history of expertise with Novell technology means that communication security and data management will be available when Novell Pulse ships in 2010.

GWAVA has worked with Novell to provide data archiving, anti-virus and anti-spam, disaster recovery, and ediscovery tools for Novell Teaming and Novell GroupWise. Nearly 50% of the worldwide Novell collaboration market relies on a GWAVA solution.

“There is a strong need for security in the new real-time collaboration space,” stated Charles Taite, CTO for GWAVA. “Novell's involvement with Google Wave draws upon the greatest strengths of both organizations. GWAVA intends to continue our support of this market.”

Cool Solutions

Ken Muir, Novell CTO For Novell Workgroup, to Keynote GWAVACon Las Vegas 2010

GWAVAComm — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:00:16 -0700

GWAVA is pleased to announce that Ken Muir, Chief Technology and Strategy Officer for Workgroup at Novell, will be the keynote speaker at GWAVACon in Las Vegas 2010. Mr. Muir, responsible for Novell’s Collaboration Strategy, will discuss Novell’s role in the future of collaboration in the enterprise. Mr. Muir’s presentation will be given on January 24, 2010 at the Marriott Renaissance in Las Vegas.

“Ken Muir is a dynamic speaker, bringing a new level of energy to the Novell community,” says Richard Bliss, GWAVA Vice President of Marketing Worldwide. “The recent Novell Pulse announcement with Google demonstrates the leadership that Mr. Muir has brought to the Novell community. We couldn’t ask for a better speaker for GWAVACon attendees.”

GWAVACon presents an important opportunity for Novell and its partners to communicate updates, strategy and releases to its community. Previous GWAVACons have been held in Berlin and Munich, Germany; Sydney, Australia; Dallas, Texas; San Diego, California; and in 2009 Las Vegas, Nevada. Keynote speakers have included executives from Nokia and RIM, as well as John Dragoon, Chief Marketing Officer for Novell, Volker Smid, President of Novell EMEA, and in January of 2008 in San Diego, Ron Hovsepian, Novell CEO.

GWAVACon is the conference with total access to the top engineers and experts in the world on GroupWise and GroupWise solutions. Novell employees who work at the heart of GroupWise, GroupWise gurus and GroupWise expert speakers and vendors from around the world join GWAVA to offer attendees the most up-to-date information about GroupWise. In addition to the GroupWise focus, additional tracks on Novell ZENworks and SUSE Linux are offered. It also features hands-on advanced technical training for GWAVA products such as Reload, Retain and Vertigo. GWAVACon will be held in Las Vegas January 24-26, 2010. To register for GWAVACon, go to www.gwavacon.com.

Workgroup Cool Solutions

PortaMail Live

Quartz Development — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:25:25 -0700

PortaMail Live is our new PortaMail product. It enables users to finally synchronize their GroupWise Calendar, Contacts, Tasks and Email directly with their device over the air without the need for third party server software or desktop PC.

It's so simple to use, ask your administrator to switch on SOAP on the GroupWise server and note the SOAP port used, configure PortaMail Live on your device and sync.

Supports secure sockets if the server supports them, security certificates can be created by a Console One plugin and need to be applied to your Post Office for SSL to work.

Email
You can include attachments.
You can synchronize either today's emails or a previous number of days worth of emails.
Select the actual mailboxes you want to synchronize.
Filter either un-read or read messages.
Calendar
Select the sync window for the amount of data you want to keep up to date.
You control the amount of data that stays on your handheld device.
Synchronizes device repeating calendar items to GroupWise.
Contacts
Select multiple Address Books within GroupWise. Select the default GroupWise Address Book for new device Contacts to be created.
Tasks
Select the sync window for the amount of data you want to keep up to date.
You control the amount of data that stays on your handheld device.

System Requirements:

Windows Mobile 5.0/6.0/6.1/6.5 + touch screen device.
Microsoft Windows® 9.x, ME, NT 4, NT 2000, 2003, XP, Vista, Windows 7.
Microsoft ActiveSync version 4.5 and above or Windows Mobile Device Center.
GroupWise 7.x/8.x.

download url:
http://www.quartzdevelopment.com/Trial/PortaMailLiveSetup.exe

Cool Solutions

Heads Up! Novell Pulse Coming Your Way

ssalgy — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:28:47 -0700

Novell just announced the first real-time collaboration platform for the enterprise, called Novell Pulse. Novell and Google jointly announced that they are working together to enable Novell Pulse users and Google Wave users to seamlessly work together across both systems. Novell is the first collaboration provider to integrate Google Wave.

What is Novell Pulse?

Novell Pulse is the first enterprise class, real-time collaboration platform that unites communication, authoring and social messaging tools. Novell Pulse helps drive enterprise productivity and innovation by making it easier to communicate digitally, generate ideas and share information. People continents apart can share and edit documents, jointly browse websites, and have a digital conversation, all in real-time. Individuals can also manage content overload by filtering for people and topics to follow as well as storing files—both native and office type—along with their related groups and conversations.

What can you do with Pulse?
Novell Pulse is an enterprise real-time collaboration solution. Real-time collaboration tools allows people to easily share and work together on documents, have real-time conversations, interact using social media tools, and much more.

Novell Pulse was designed specifically for the enterprise user, so it includes robust security and management capabilities. Novell Pulse will also interoperate with other real-time technologies like Google Wave, as well as existing collaboration solutions.

How would you use it in a business setting?

Communication. Say you have a project that requires input from 5 people. Before Novell Pulse, you would email those 5 people and receive separate responses—some of which would be responding to your email, while others would be responding to other emails from the distribution list, depending on when each was composed. Then you'd have to aggregate all the responses, synthesize them, and begin the cycle of emails all over again.

With Novell Pulse, you send one, synchronous message, and all 5 people can respond to you and each other in real-time. No aggregation, missed information or repetition of efforts—and if you make the conversation public, you may get valuable input from someone you weren't expecting.

Intra- and Inter-company Collaboration. For example, you plan to issue a product datasheet jointly with one of your partners. You work in different document publishing environments such as OpenOffice and MS Word. Before Novell Pulse, you would have written the press release and sent it as an OpenOffice attachment to everyone on your team within your company for input, then aggregated all the input, edited it down for redundancy, and then converted it to MS Word before sending as an attachment to your partner for input. Then you'd begin the cycle again for every round of edits.

With Novell Pulse, you and your partner could simply collaborate on the document in real-time and then both companies could export the document into their preferred format when it's final. This also works seamlessly if you are using Novell Pulse and your partner is using Google Wave.

Breaking Through the Clutter. Information overload is a serious concern for companies today. Users are hit with information from all directions—email, instant messenger, blogs, micro-blogs, social networks, calendars. By unifying all these information mediums into one, easy-to-use interface with folders, filtering and search, Novell Pulse enables users to make sense of it all and focus on what's really important.

Working With Google

This is a technical collaboration between Google and Novell to bring federation to both systems, using the Wave Federation Protocol. We're the first company to show federation using the WFP, and we're the first collaboration solution to integrate with Google Wave. Novell Pulse and Google Wave systems can operate in tandem so that users of the two platforms can work together in real time, each using their preferred tool.

What does federation with Google Wave involve?
Federation involves using a protocol call the Wave Federation Protocol to enable messages (or Waves) to be shared in real-time, character-for-character, as they are being created or edited between two or more separate systems.

The sharing is based on addressing. You place addresses ( which look just like e-mail addresses) from potentially different domains on a message or Wave, then the message is live and any edits made by anyone will be automatically shared in real-time.

How is Novell Pulse different from Google Wave?
The design point for Novell Pulse is the enterprise user, so we've placed a strong emphasis on features such as security and management controls. We've also drawn on our 20+ years experience in the enterprise collaboration space with products like GroupWise, and worked to address enterprise and business use-cases.

Novell Pulse is a key component in Novell’s collaboration strategy and open collaboration architecture, working standalone or in concert with Novell’s broader product portfolio. Novell Pulse is very complementary to Google Wave and to our existing collaboration products such as GroupWise. Key features, which draw on the best of e-mail, instant messaging, document sharing, social connections, real-time co-editing and enterprise controls, include:

Security
Provisioning, sign-on and permissions leverage enterprise identity and access management systems, directory servers and audit tools to integrate with established processes, keep data safe and support compliance requirements.
Real-time collaboration
Collaborative editing and document sharing enables users to get work done with other users in real-time, from co-editable online documents to the ability to share and comment on traditional office documents in real time.
Unified Inbox
A single interface allows users to see, sort and filter all their personal and professional content from various social messaging services, email, Wave, etc. all in one place.
Enterprise social messaging
Social Blog allows users to share, follow and comment on topics and ideas.
Real-time awareness and chat
Allows users to know exactly when their colleagues are available via people, group and message activity monitoring.

Novell Pulse will be available in both cloud and on-premise deployments.

Is Novell Pulse designed for the consumer or the enterprise customers?
Novell Pulse is focused on the enterprise customers. It addresses the needs of a global, knowledge-based workforce and gives enterprises the confidence to embrace real-time collaboration technologies. Novell Pulse leverages Novell's expertise and experience developing enterprise collaboration and communication tools, as well as industry leadership in creating strong identity and security management solutions.

Is Novell Pulse open source?
No.

When will Novell Pulse be available? What will it cost?
Novell Pulse will be generally available in the first half of 2010 in a cloud deployment, and with an on-premise deployment option in a subsequent release. Pricing will be announced at general availability.

How can I get access in when this goes to beta availability?
We'll be announcing that later this year.

Where can I see Novell Pulse in action?
Novell Pulse was demonstrated on Nov. 4, 2009 during the Integrating Google Wave into the Enterprise keynote at Enterprise 2.0 in San Francisco. We'll be giving previews of the technology over the coming weeks via Novell blogs and video. Stay tuned. A select beta is scheduled for early 2010.

Where can I get more information about Novell Pulse?
You can find more information at www.novell.com/pulse . We'll be previewing more of Novell Pulse over the coming weeks too.

End-User Computing

Gradenko, ActiveSync, GroupWise, Teaming and a Webinar!

dlythgoe — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:03:24 -0700

The engineering team is working on several product releases over the next several months. It is important that we keep you informed about our progress and what is coming. It also allows you to participate in the many activities surrounding a product release. Those activities include product requirements, design reviews, BETAs, Lighthouse programs and final shipments. So here goes:

Gradenko (DataSync):

Gradenko is currently in authorized BETA. We have had several beta calls including beta calls for the SDK. Gradenko includes the following components:

- Sync Engine
- GroupWise Connector
- SDK
- Salesforce.com Connector
- SugarCRM Connector
- Sharepoint Connector

BETA2 is scheduled for later this month. Engineering is focused on installation, configuration and scalability. We are listening to our beta sites and gathering input from our internal testing and superlab experiences. Gradenko is the foundation for ActiveSync and for all of our 3rd-party integrations. Continue to watch this space for updates on our progress, schedule and final release.

ActiveSync

First of all, I refer you to Alex Evans' blog. This was posted back in September and provides some excellent background on the feature set, architecture and what will be available in this first release. http://www.novell.com/communities/node/9006/active...

ActiveSync BETA is scheduled for this month as well. Great progress has been made within the team over the last several weeks. The ActiveSync project is being head up by Jay Parker and they have implemented several aspects of the agile development model. As part of this methodology, the team demonstrates to interested team members the progress made during each 'sprint'. On Thursday, October 22nd, the team provided a demo of their Sprint 5 work. Several iPhones and iTouches were handed out to the audience and we were given several tasks to complete. Scheduling an appointments, sending an email, accepting an appointments, creating a contact, etc. There were a few delays and a few hiccups as several in the audience were all using the same account, but overall, things went very well. Engineering is now focused on performance, scalability, install, troubleshooting and documentation. We are anxious to begin the beta process and work out the final details.

GroupWise 7 and GroupWise 8

GroupWise 7.0.3 HP4 was released in September. Feedback so far on this release has been very positive. We do plan to release GroupWise 7.0.4 and that will be our final release of the GroupWise 7.0.x product line. We expect to release that final version of 7.0.x in roughly 6 months or so. GroupWise 8.0.1 was released in August. We are currently evaluating and planning a Hot Patch for 8.0.1. Our next support pack for GroupWise 8 will be 8.0.2. This is currently scheduled about mid-year 2010.

The vast majority of the feedback on 8.0.1 has been very positive. We continue to listen and evaluate the progress as our customers adopt and roll out this significant version of the product. Support has brought 6-10 issues to our attention, which we have addressed and provided specific customers relief. We plan to make these and other fixes available in a Hot Patch currently scheduled for December/January.

Cortez (Teaming 2.1)

Cortez is the next major release of our award winning product Teaming. As you may know, Teaming is a product that we are pushing as a 'rapid release' product. We plan to have new versions of this product available every 6-9 months. Teaming 2.0 was released in July and Teaming 2.1 was currently scheduled for January. It has a very specific and finite set of features and will be entering BETA also in the month of November. To see the design documents, participate in the user interaction mock ups and provide your input, please visit the project on kablink.org. A full list of the changes, features and roadmaps are all available as we engage our customers and partners in this project. Cortez includes:

- Import and Export capability
- Undelete
- Data quotas
- Mobility access
- Landing Page Editor
- Extension Administration
- Task/Calendar Improvements
- maybe a couple more :)

So watch for the BETA, check out kablink.org and download the 20 user Starter Pack.

Last note: There is a Webinar this Thursday, November 5th, "GW8 & M+Archive: Your email collaboration solution" I will be presenting with Messaging Architects. They will be presenting their stubbing solutions and I will be talking about GroupWise, Teaming, DataSync, etc. Tune in!

Here are the details:

GW8 & M+Archive: Your email collaboration solution - November 5, 2009 - 3:00PM EST

Both leading IT publications and end users alike agree GroupWise 8 brings collaboration to the next level with next-generation web technology and the latest productivity-enhancing tools featuring a highly customizable email client, as well as improved calendaring, contact and task management. Besides the enriched email client, one of the most important improvements in the GroupWise 8 release is a new Stubbing API that enables tight integration of GroupWise with email retention solutions and gives end users transparent access to their archives.

During this Webinar, Dean Lythgoe, Director, GroupWise Engineering, will discuss GroupWise 8 features, roadmap futures, mobility direction and the new DataSync technology. He will give a sneak peak at what is available today and what exciting new things are on the horizon in 2010.

Ranjit Sarai, Product Manager for M+Archive will then demonstrate the stubbing feature of M+Archive, currently the only product that offers this feature for GroupWise. After attending this Webinar, you will know how GroupWise with M+Archive will help you achieve an enterprise-class secure and compliant collaboration environment while helping you reduce overall cost, increase system performance and ensure a superior end-user experience.

BONUS: Registrants will receive a complimentary white paper written by Novell and Messaging Architects, which will give you more in depth information about how GroupWise works with stubbing.

Date: Thursday, November 05, 2009
Time: 3:00PM EST / 12:00 PM PST
Speaker(s): Dean Lythgoe, Director, GroupWise and Teaming + Conferencing Engineering at Novell & Ranjit Sarai, Product Manager for M+Archive at Messaging Architects

Register Now: https://messagingarchitects.webex.com/messagingarc...

Dean