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Now EDIT all aspects of your sent appointments without having to ‘resend’ and without cluttering up your attendees in-box everytime you make a change.

Getting the most out of the new features of GroupWise 2012 is simple and so easy to use. Making sure your end-users know about the changes will make sure their productivity remains high as they transition to a few important changes.

What happened to Resend and Retract in GroupWise 2012?

The Resend feature has been replaced by Edit and Duplicate.

Use Edit to change information in an appointment that you have already sent. The existing appointments in users’ Calendars are updated with your changes, so you do not need to retract the appointment that you originally sent.

In fact, all you have to do is right-click on any appointment that you have scheduled and choose Edit….no more Resend….make the necessary changes, for example: add/remove an attendee, add an attachment or correct that embarrassing spelling mistake…..then simply push Send….missing is the Retract action that you may be used to.

Once you Edit and send your new appointment, there is no longer a Retract prompt. All of the changes are made and replicated to all of the recipients. In addition, in most cases, the changes do not require that the attendees receive a new appointment or force them to Accept the changes.

Note: If you modify the Date,Time or Place of your appointment, attendees will receive a new appointment in their inbox that they can Accept or Decline.

Some might ask, how are the attendees of one of the appointments notified of the changes made to the appointment if they were not required to accept? Great question….

Once an appointment has been edited by the sender, the item in the recipient's calendar is turned bold again as if it was marked Unread. When the attendee opens the appointment, there will be a small yellow banner at the top of the appointment that spells out the changes that were made to the appointment. For example: the banner might say: Appointment Modified: To List; Subject; Message, Attachments. The attendee can then inspect those areas of the appointment to see the current state and the changes made.

Duplicate

Now there is one other use case that we have exposed with GroupWise 2012. Some users schedule appointments by leveraging an already scheduled appointment as a template. With previous versions of GroupWise, users would choose Resend, make their modifications, send and NOT retract. The process is similar with GroupWise 2012, but now it is called Duplicate.

Use Duplicate to leverage an existing appointment as a boilerplate for a new appointment. Because you are creating a copy of an existing appointment, modifying it, and then sending it, the original appointment is not affected when you duplicate it.

Also – there is no prompt to Retract. Since you are duplicating the appointment, it is treated as a brand new appointment leveraging the text and information from the original appointment.

Of course, if you simply want to Retract an appointment – you select the appointment in the ‘Sent Items’ folder and you will find the Retract option that removes the appointment from each recipient’s calendar.

This particular feature change went through some healthy debate during design, development, Customer Council, Beta and during internal rollout. We found that end-users may need some coaching in a couple of areas.

- First of all – they may be concerned/confused that there is no Resend on the menu. Simple point them to Edit or Duplicate depending on what they want to do.

- Second – they may be concerned that they were not prompted to ‘Retract’ after an Edit/Duplicate action. It simply is no longer required.

One less thing :)

Also know that this information is also applicable to Notes/Tasks/All-day events….in other words, all calendar item types.

Now changing topics....RIM and Vibe.

GroupWise: New BES Promotion

“Research In Motion has a limited time offer available to customers looking to deploy BlackBerry Enterprise Server v5 for Novell GroupWise for up to 10 users at no charge. The offer is available to new customers only who have not purchased a BlackBerry Enterprise Server before. If interested, send an email to bes4groupwiseoffer@rim.com with all of your contact details.”

Vibe Desktop and Vibe Add-in available via Public Preview

The Desktop and the Add-in are now available. Download here!

Novell Vibe Desktop provides a local, synchronized file store for Vibe files, allowing users to work on Vibe files in offline mode, then save them back to the Vibe site.

Novell Vibe Add-In allows users to work on Vibe files without ever leaving their familiar Office apps (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint).

This beta code is to be tested in a test environment only. We do not support beta code that is installed in a production environment.

You will need the following:

• Vibe Desktop
• Vibe Add-In
• Vibe 3.2
• Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 or 2010

Video Demos

Vibe Desktop

• Introduction

Vibe Add-In

• Introduction
• Opening Documents

Documentation

• Vibe Desktop Quick Start
• Vibe Desktop Readme
• Vibe Add-In Quick Start
• Vibe Add-In Readme
• Vibe 3.2 Administration
• Vibe 3.2 Documentation

These features, which require Vibe 3.2 on the back end, have been through component test, i18n and l10n test, integration test, three authorized beta releases, and limited internal rollout. Now we're looking forward to hearing from our broader customer base via the Public Preview.

Dean

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.