Blog Entry

Submitted by muleboy9t9 on 21 May 2008 - 11:34am.

Yes...we are one of the organizations that currently has a mandate of No IE7 / No Vista. (Local Gov't in the Pacific Northwest across the water from Microsoft).

Thanks,
John

Submitted by kennonk on 21 May 2008 - 12:39pm.

A large state agency here in California that I support has a no IE7 mandate as well. No idea when it will be lifted.

Submitted by tse7147 on 21 May 2008 - 12:55pm.

Dropping IE6????? You gotta be kidding, right?

Ok, all levity aside, that would be a very baaaaad decision. The mandate at my current customer is IE6 only. So much so they have their inventory scanner nag the living daylights out of the user if it finds IE7, assuming they can somehow get it installed in the first place.

Submitted by ukdtom on 21 May 2008 - 1:14pm.

75 % of my customers are running IE6

The remaining 25 % are the good guys, that upgraded to Firefox

Submitted by jtanen on 21 May 2008 - 2:03pm.

Errr... was dropping IE6 a joke?

Submitted by thsundel on 22 May 2008 - 11:53am.

It will be a problem for us if IE6 isn't supported, and we ain't gonna push out IE7. We are in the process of implementing Firefox but I guess it will take about a year before everybody uses it as their default browser.

Submitted by jhaynes on 25 May 2008 - 6:15pm.

I'm confused is OES 2 an operating system. I thought it used SLES 10 as it's operating system. If maybe you were trying to indicate supported file systems then I can understand you putting OES 2 in your list(maybe).

Submitted by edp on 26 May 2008 - 5:44am.

90% of our clients use IE6! And probably will shift by mid-2009...

Submitted by preycor on 26 May 2008 - 10:31am.

IE6 is still widely used by our customer base. Dropping support for it would be a very bad idea.

Submitted by RogerIThomas on 26 May 2008 - 10:46am.

The platform OSes are just fine, but the idea of dropping IE6 is a step to far. While only a small company or standard platform is still IE6 and don't have IE7 installed as an upgrade on any system.

Roger

Submitted by tbp on 26 May 2008 - 12:44pm.

I dont get it. Netware is clearly not an OS you wanna support in the future, so why let GW8 run on it?

Lots of customers are still hanging on to Netware because thats what they know from the past, but you'll never get people to migrate if you keep putting out new products that still supports it. I found GW8 an excellent opportunity for Novell to help people migrating to SUSE. Its where people will need to go very soon anyways.

Only thing you'll accomplish with it, is people still hanging on to netware and then suddenly getting migrated to microsoft because netware has no future. Okay a bit harsh, but you get the picture ;)

Its still not too late since its only in beta, so please drop Netware support ;)

Submitted by salisburyk on 26 May 2008 - 12:48pm.

Still using IE6 here. IE7 causes us significant grief.

We will re-consider FireFox 3 after it comes out of beta.

Submitted by aevans on 26 May 2008 - 2:38pm.

Ok, so from the comments on here it is clear that the world is not ready for us to drop IE6 support. We will look at adding it back into our support matrix.
Thanks for all the comments

Alex

Submitted by MFaust on 26 May 2008 - 8:02pm.

I don't think it is a big community but some people want to check their Webaccess also from a public Internet access like an Internet Cafe.
A lot of the public Internet stations are not up to date and depending on the country the hardware can't even run IE7... If IE6 is dropped some people at remote location who need to answer an email for whatever reason will be stuck and normaly these people make decissions if GroupWise is ok or not...

Submitted by kees51 on 27 May 2008 - 4:32pm.

You should make sure that webaccess works on any browser. It may not work at full capacity, but it should at least show something usable to the user, even if only the small smartphone/pda interface. There are people using Opera, using Macs, using a smartphone that doesn't talk to GMS, or want to check their mail while they are visiting a friend who only has an old computer, you don't want to shut any of them out.

Thanks for keeping Bonsai running on Netware. We want to migrate to Linux eventually, but we want to do it on our own time, not being forced to it because Netware support is dropped too soon.

Submitted by KeithCraig on 27 May 2008 - 4:33pm.

I would second Roger's comment about Mac support. The site where I work is 80% Mac at the desktop and we are trying to reduce the Windows workstations. Non-windows client platforms have taken second priority in the past with Groupwise - things have improved recently, especially with Novell now focusing a lot of attention on Linux. At a client level Mac outnumbers linux but given the similarities of the OS's leveraging the work done on one can help with the others.

Keith

Submitted by georgearmstrong on 27 May 2008 - 5:07pm.

As a k-12 school system we have 2000+ Macs. Most use the webaccess because of the mac client. We are just starting to push IE7 but many PC's still have IE6.

Running GW on SLES 10 OES1 will that be supported or do we need to jump to OES2?

Submitted by stideswe on 27 May 2008 - 5:34pm.

I can't help but feel that continued support of NetWare is a BAD thing.

Don't Novell want to drop that legacy platform asap? Don't you want to provide strong incentives to your customers to move to Linux? We run GroupWise on Linux and it has improved stability over NetWare 5.1 immeasurably.

Wouldn't it benefit Novell to rationalise their platform support a little so that they can focus on improving their code and functionality instead of spending time trying to support multiple platforms? If I was in charge I'd be aiming to provide platform support for SLES 10 and nothing else. I'm sure Microsoft don't waste programmers by trying to support even Exchange 2007 on Windows Server 2003 for instance, why would Novell handicap themselves by being the good guy and giving the customer all sorts of options that they don't really need?

Simon

Submitted by RogerIThomas on 28 May 2008 - 1:06pm.

>>Exchange 2007 on Windows Server 2003 for instance

Microsoft does just that, Exchange 2007 is supported on Windows Server 2003 (64bit version).

As for why Novell would support NetWare, simple they need people to upgrade their current email environments not debate the rollout of new environments. Any such debate will result in alternatives being discused which would be a bad thing for Novell.

As for stability many people are very happy with NetWare 6.5 as its a far better platform that the 5.1 environment you had to maintain in the past.

Roger

Submitted by paulvandercruyssen on 28 May 2008 - 2:50pm.

Hi Alex and all other readers,

indeed a rumour/myth/urban legend, that I (via Erno) did send to the GW-team last year (and sorry Alex, people cannot read in Antwerp :-), but in the rest of the country they can) but, this year that rumour/myth/urban legend was also in the press in The Netherlands (not sure if they can read... :-) )

My plan was to contact the author to ask him where he did get that info... but never did it. Now you're opening the debate again, so maybe I still have to get the answer,
BUT I think he/they just made a mistake with ZCM, because that was launched at the same time as the rumour (no NetWare, no eDir, only LDAP, ....)

If the author sends me a reply, ... you'll get it!

see you!

Paul

Submitted by jmarton on 2 June 2008 - 6:39am.

I really think Novell needs to consider supporting RHEL in addition to SLES. Let's face it, in the US, Red Hat has the biggest chunk of the Linux market share. It would be easier to get GroupWise into the door of Linux-only shops if RHEL was supported in addition to Novell's own version of Linux (SLES). Heck, GroupWise 6.5 I believe was supported on RHEL. I know RHEL support was dropped in GW7 but there's no reason to not pick it back up in Bonsai.

Joe

Submitted by heikkikyles on 2 June 2008 - 1:04pm.

No IE7 here, our Student Info. System does not support it.
also, would like to see a better Mac OSX client.

thanks!

Submitted by dspoole-novell on 3 June 2008 - 4:51pm.

Got a no IE7 mandate in our company as our core business application does not support IE7. Funny thing is, the company that wrote the app is a Microsoft Solutions Partner.

Submitted by jwillia1 on 4 June 2008 - 4:39am.

Another representative of State government here, and I am glad to hear the news. NetWare is a very, very stable platform for GroupWise and I am absolutlely loath to give it up in the future, although we do have plans to migrate over to Linux one day. The ease of remote management, the ability to automatically reboot on Abend, knowing when I go to sleep at night that I will not be awakened at night because a server has "blue screened", all help this administrator stay cool, calm and collected 24/7.

Thanks for the product and the update.

I think just about everyone here has moved on to IE7, although a handful of the more stubborn admins insist on running Firefox, myself included.

Submitted by mdeering on 5 June 2008 - 4:57am.

We are a very large school district who needs to use IE6 for our web-based apps...especially our student management system. Dropping IE6 support would be deadly.

Submitted by paul_woodward on 6 June 2008 - 12:44am.

You support Netware, Windows, and Linux. Thats good.

Only supporting one flavour of Linux, well, that's bad. RHEL has a large installed base, and is broadly similar to SLES (RPM based, similar release cycle). Why limit GW that way?

Our organisation has issues with a few "web" apps which are in fact only able to run with IE6, this has prevented a switch to IE7. Having said that, webaccess use in the office itself is very limited, and home users often use Firefox anyway.

Submitted by DAFoxFL on 13 June 2008 - 7:51am.

As a small consulting business, we run Netware on our two servers and I'm very pleased with the performance and stability (routinely get nearly 300 days without reboot). But I'm looking into SLES when I replace one of the older boxes.

We have stayed away from IE7 mainly due to some vendor software compatibility issues. We think VISTA is just another WinMe and will try to hold out with XP until the Next Big Thing comes out of Redmond ... then reconsider. I'd love to make the jump to all LINUX/OpenOffice workstations but with the wide variety of software used by our different clients, that looks impossible for now.

Dave

Submitted by sixminutemile on 19 June 2008 - 2:39pm.

Please dispell the myth that there is no release date for Groupwise 8 and the Outlook connector. When will the next version of Groupwise be generally available?

Submitted by ppatterson on 18 July 2008 - 6:58am.

We too are one of the organizations that currently has a mandate of No IE7 and Vista as a last resort. Many of our users have adopted FireFox as their default browser (thank goodness).