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Preparing for Bonsai Beta while taking on a new role

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12 July 2007 - 3:59pm
Submitted by: dlythgoe

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Greetings!! As many of you know, I am now the Director of GroupWise Engineering. This is an opportunity that I am very excited about and very dedicated to. However, this opportunity has come at a cost. The cost of having Ken Muir move onto a new responsibility. It has been a pleasure working with Ken over the last couple of years and I look forward to continued contact and advice as he helps GroupWise while helping to direct the greater Novell. I will miss the daily interaction with him. I join with many of you in wishing him well!

Now GroupWise... GroupWise is nearing BETA. I am thrilled with this release and about the features the engineering team has created.

I want to start my blog where Ken left his - introducing some of the lesser known enhancements and changes that you will find in Bonsai. My recent background has been with the Windows Client, the Linux/Mac client, Administration and Install. That is where this discusion will begin...

Windows Client
1. Simplification - The Windows engineers have done several things in GroupWise to simplify the user-experience. One of those things is removing unnecssary dialogs. Here are a few you WONT see in Bonsai :)

- Unsent settings on exit
- Create folder wizard removed from right click
- Delete folder just says yes or no.
- No more prompt to sync passwords
- Automatically process remote sessions - no prompt
- View vs Open attachment prompt - gone!
- Delete Items Auto Date - removed extra prompts

2. Vacation Rule (This tool will allow you to provide 'text' for your auto-reply, will automatically block out your calendar AND will auto expire)

3. Left-click access to categories, including set category, remove category and find items with same categories.

4. Category background color

5. With the folder list hidden, drag n drop to the left edge of the view pops it up (instead of having to go up to the header control).

6. In checklist, completed items automatically sort to the bottom of the list. Plus you can hide completed items: immediately or the next day after the item is completed.

7. Panels will now resize proportionately; Panels now painted with drop shadow. Customize panels is accessible from any panel drop down menu. We will now support more than 2 columns for panels view.
8. Can now send display settings to other users. Like the configuration of your Home Folder.

9. Personalize received email with notes and/or attachments

10. Auto-accepting your own appointments. Meaning - if you schedule an appointment and include yourself, the appointment will automatically be 'accepted'. It can still be viewed in both your mailbox and/or your calendar.
I hope that these things will add to the anticipation and excitement that seems to be growing around the release of Bonsai. I know there are probably many other things that you would like to see, but we have to have something to do in the next release. :)

Next topic will include the Linux Client.





User Comments

Axel Larsson's picture

What about the reply options

Submitted by Axel Larsson (not verified) on 12 July 2007 - 9:05pm.

What about the reply options dialog? This is one that we get frequent complaints about and I think is fairly unique to GW. Should be able to do a reply to sender with quoting with one click.

Axel Larsson's picture

One other major pain point

Submitted by Axel Larsson (not verified) on 12 July 2007 - 9:13pm.

One other major pain point with the GW UI--excessive use of modal dialogs. Tools > Rules is where we get the most complaints. Power users want to be able to easily copy/paste snippets from messages into rule criteria or be able to see multiple rules open at once for comparison/copy-paste purposes.

FlyingGuy's picture

Fantastic!!! - Incredible!!!

Submitted by FlyingGuy (not verified) on 12 July 2007 - 10:10pm.

Fantastic!!! - Incredible!!! - its got the "WOW" (tm) M$ thing happening!!! and welcome to one of the most thankless jobs at Novell, DON'T panic and hang on to your towel, your gonna need it!

So now that the pleasantries are done with...

Not to burst your bubble but:

1. Will the multiple Personal Calenders **actually** share this time and the colors all work nice together?
2. Will the POA, MTA and GWIA, And WebAccess stop barfing their guts all over the server?
3. Will we have an *actual* API ( not all that OLE junk but *actual* shared Libraries that we can link in on both Unix and Windoze) as well as SOAP ?
4. Will Bonsai not look like the red headed step-child of Outlook?
5. Is it going to be *at least as fast* IF NOT FASTER then the current 7.0.2 client? I am here to tell you if its not, its DOA before it even gets out the door.
6. Are the clients going to be even all the way across the spectrum of OS-X,Win32 & Linux?
7. Are we going to be able to get out of "remote" when starting it up mode without editing the registry?
8. Is the Address book going to be something resembling as good or better then the Outlook one?
9. Are you going to make the address book something that Lots of systems can get at? I was in the Apple store today and was looking at an I phone. I didn't buy one because all my contacts are in my GW address book and guess what, not supported. So PLEASE tell me you guys are HOT HOT HOT writing a plug-in for iTunes so the hottest selling gadget on the market TODAY can sync to GroupWise.
10. And least, but not certainly least, have you goes reverse engineered or at least licensed code so GW can suck in Outlook stuff without having outlook installed?

Like I said, you are now the man with the concentric circles on his back and we are all going to fire at will.

Good luck, and I am looking forward to the beta client. My SLES 10 box is waiting.

- Bill

Jesse Pretorius's picture

An update of the quickfinder

Submitted by Jesse Pretorius (not verified) on 12 July 2007 - 10:14pm.

An update of the quickfinder engine would be wonderful. The GW client version is *really* old, slow and can't search inside many modern file types (like PDF's). I believe this would involve a major overhaul of the client though, so perhaps this could be pushed to the next revision - but definitely no further. We've been asking for this for over 10 years now.

Dean Lythgoe's picture

Yes - I forgot that one.

Submitted by Dean Lythgoe (not verified) on 13 July 2007 - 5:47am.

Yes - I forgot that one. We are changing the reply paradigm a little. You will now have two default buttons on the toolbar for reply. Reply and Reply to All. No popup intermediate dialog and text will 'always' be included. So - not only reply to sender with quoting with one click, but also - Reply to All with quoting and one click. Thanks for reminding me. There are soooo many :)

Dean Lythgoe's picture

Sorry - this is not one of

Submitted by Dean Lythgoe (not verified) on 13 July 2007 - 7:09am.

Sorry - this is not one of the ones we tackled. There were several, but we will have to get to this one later.

Chris's picture

Dean - so when is the public

Submitted by Chris (not verified) on 13 July 2007 - 7:19am.

Dean - so when is the public beta then?

Kenny's picture

Will the "Website:" field be

Submitted by Kenny (not verified) on 13 July 2007 - 10:40am.

Will the "Website:" field be available for use in the Global Address Book like it is in the Personal Address Book?

Thanks.

Bob Jonkman's picture

I just want to say how happy

Submitted by Bob Jonkman (not verified) on 13 July 2007 - 12:11pm.

I just want to say how happy I am about a simplified vacation rule! Thi-i-is happy :-)))

Will there be an admin-managed option to prevent vacation-rule-generated messages from leaving the GWIA?

--Bob.

FlyingGuy's picture

Speaking of an actual API as

Submitted by FlyingGuy (not verified) on 14 July 2007 - 8:54am.

Speaking of an actual API as I noted in my last note....

A lot of law firms still use NetWare & GW. I have one law firm that is clamering for a calendering system. These have a back end database that contains all the various court filing deadlines, etc. etc. A bunch of information to say the lease. No I don't expect GW to be able to handle all the reference material; however, it would be nice to have an *actual* API say that a tool could be written that that would pump things into the GW message store, create task items, calender items etc etc.

SOAP is an interesting technology, but its slow, and the overhead of making calls to the GW message store exceeds 100 to 1! This is why people like *me* like to have an actual binary API. As bad as OLE is, even with early binding, it is far better then SOAP IMO.

There is SO MUCH potential in GW that is just not being tapped that sometimes I just want to cry I get so frustrated. I have to sell GW every damn time someone shoes up at one of my clients and starts carping "You don't use Outlook!" Once again it is just my opinion, although it is probably a shared sentiment that GW could take the world by storm is we just had decent API's to get at the message store with so that we could build the great volume of 3rd party products that are just begging to be built!

Some Examples:

1. Rules processing -

There is SO MUCH potential in rules processing. How about a having a way to do rule processing based on content? How conditional processing? How about access to the message object or new message object so that you could do something like:

C - Style

if(CurNsg.RcptList.Count > 10){
CurMsg.Folder := FolderList['suspicious']
}

or something a bit more complex like:

- Pascal Style
if CurMsg.RcptList.Contains['helpdesk'] then
begin
NewMsg.Create ;
NewMsg.RcptList.Add('fred');
NewMsg.Subject := 'Fred you need to see this';
NewMsg.Text := CurMsg.Text ;
NewMsg.Attachments := CurMsg.Attchments ;

Try
NewMsg.Send ;
except
On E:Error do
begin
if E.Code in [1,3,7,488] then
// do something
end; // try except
end; // if

The above code is an approximation, but I mean it is something that would completely set GW apart from the rest. No writing practically unintelligible shell scripts, no having to crank out the thousands of lines of SOAP that it would take to do something like that. The Trusted Application notion is a GREAT idea, but having to use OLE just makes the whole thing crawl, and on top of that it means we can't port to Linux.

The simple answer is to just make the API available, its not that hard to accomplish. JAVA is not the answer for this. I know that JAVA is the holly grail for you guys, but its not for this type of work which has the great potential to put GW front and center as THE collaboration Suite to use regardless of platform.

I already have 6 *different* JVM's on my system, because Eclipse requires their own tweaked version, ConsoleOne requires its own tweaked version and 4 other release specific version for a 4 other apps, and i am quite sure that Bonsai is going to require yet ANOTHER tweaked version of a JVM to work and I am already into the Java equivalent of of DLL Hell.

I desperately want to develop 3rd party tools for GW, but at this point it is getting to be a pretty much an impossible task. You are having to build the libraries for Linux, there are the DLL's for windows and there are the libs for OS-X, we need a consistent programming interface that is tight, small and clean. The call interfaces exactly match platform to platform, the inner workings of the call interfaces are can be whatever is requires platform to platform.

If Bonsai resolves the user interface across platforms then the programming interface needs to do that as well, regardless compilation target.

Jared Pickerell's picture

I'm really looking forward

Submitted by Jared Pickerell (not verified) on 15 July 2007 - 10:39am.

I'm really looking forward to the next release of GW! Sounds like there are some good things coming. Taking from a post on the Novell Open Audio blog when Bonsai was discussed, hear is something that is near and dear to my heart about the address book.

"If given permission, you should be able to update the GroupWise distribution lists just as easily as you can your personal distribution lists. Along with this is is the inablility to add external users to these system-wide address lists. The way it is now, unless I’m wrong here, you have to create a fake external domain, post office, and account before adding external users to a GroupWise address list. The only way this works is to get the GW administrator to set it up and maintain. Updating this functionality would be a HUGE improvement!"

I think I said that back in January. Any insight into if any of that type of functionality? Is in the upcomming version? That would be soooo big for at one of my deployments.

Another one from me dealing with the address book, which others have commented on before, is the ability to do mail-merges from the GW address book. I would just croak if the GW team would rease say an ODBC driver for the GW address book system.

Welcome to the new position Dean and keep the great work coming our way!

Ian's picture

What are we going to be

Submitted by Ian (not verified) on 15 July 2007 - 7:18pm.

What are we going to be using for the management tool? Are you guys finally getting on board with iManager, or will it still be console1?

Dean Lythgoe's picture

We do not have a schedule

Submitted by Dean Lythgoe (not verified) on 15 July 2007 - 8:38pm.

We do not have a schedule yet for Public Beta, but we should be in private beta early this fall - September is currently the target. So far, this looks pretty good.

Dean Lythgoe's picture

What a tall order!! I

Submitted by Dean Lythgoe (not verified) on 15 July 2007 - 9:16pm.

What a tall order!! I would like to say YES to every one of your suggestions. Let me see what I can do :)

1. Sharing multiple Personal Calendars - The difficulty has been the clash of two concepts - personal and shared. The data is easy to share - actually shared calendars is simply a shared folder - something GroupWise has done for years. The personalization of data - like colors is more difficult to 'share'. Categories is another example. How do we know that your 'personalization', once it is shared does not clash with the personalization of the people with whom you shared. In Bonsai, we have improved the sharing of Calendars including allowing you to overlay shared data from shared calendars with your other personal calendars. You will have to let us know through the BETA if there is more than should be done.

2. "barfing their guts all over the server" is such a technical term :) I assume you refer to the reliability of the agents. We will continue to work on and improve the quality of GroupWise. Without specifics it is difficult for me to give a more accurate response - sorry.

3. We did develop and continue to develop a Client API. The Linux/Mac client was built on top of this API. In 7.0, we moved the Windows Client on top of this same client engine. We are trying to get it ready for developer consumption. Bonsai might be a little aggressive. Potentially, this API would have Java, C, C++ and .NET bindings. Currently it has Java and some C/C++. Bonsai is not currently the target for the release of this API. Still working on a few plans here.

4. We hope the new look and feel of Contacts, Task Management, Home Folder, RSS support, etc. will help this perception.

5. We will improve performance in Bonsai.

6. Not all features are available in all clients. Windows has had a HUGE head start, but we are making progress in both WebAccess and Linux/Mac. The Windows Client will continue to lead the pack in Bonsai.

7. There are a couple of ways to start the client in a particular mode. I'm sure you know all of these, so I must be missing something here. Need more details.

8. Our strategy has been to introduce new Contact Management features and capability in the Contacts Folder. The Address Book as a stand alone application will continue to provide limited functionality. Look to the Contacts folder for improved features, look and feel and capability.

9. We are adding several import/export formats to the Address Book in Bonsai. Including CSV, vCard 3.0 and we will continue NAB. We also have added easy drag/drop of contacts and making it easy to 'send' contacts.

10. Do you mean importing PST files? We have the Exchange Migration utility.... not sure if you are looking for something more or need more details on these utilities.

A blog is not the easiest place to discuss all of these topics...but hope to help the discussion along anyway.

Thanks for your comments.

- Dean

Gerhard's picture

Hi, sounds good! But what

Submitted by Gerhard (not verified) on 16 July 2007 - 3:36am.

Hi,
sounds good!

But what about the promised "Birthday-Feature"?
I would like to have a checkmark near the birthday field of the contact and if checked I want to see the birthday in the calendar. That shouldn´t be such a big point to realize.

Alex Evans's picture

ConsoleOne it is - there are

Submitted by Alex Evans (not verified) on 16 July 2007 - 6:37am.

ConsoleOne it is - there are a lot of technical hurdles to overcome to get GW snapins in iManager, though it is in the plans.

Ian's picture

Fair enough. Thanks for the

Submitted by Ian (not verified) on 16 July 2007 - 9:45am.

Fair enough. Thanks for the update.

FlyingGuy's picture

The very though of that

Submitted by FlyingGuy (not verified) on 16 July 2007 - 12:25pm.

The very though of that makes me cringe. Its to the point where I pretty much ignore NDS for configuring GW. I use to the fullest extent possible the overrides available in the postoffice.poa domain.mta and gwia.cfg files.

iManager IMNSHO simply does not have the facility to replace a well thought out GUI design using the available controls that are present in the GUI's of Win32, OS-X and Gnome/KDE.

Quite frankly you could do better then iManager in both the Management tool framework available in Native Netware or TurboVision ( which some of you may remember as AppWare & AppBuilder ) that was developed by Borland years ago and has no been made open source and is X-Platform.

Right now ConsoleOne is the lesser of two evils. but at least it doesn't have to really on a mashup up java, tomcat, and whatever other frameworks have been tossed in to pull iManager to the point where it is today.

Imagine yourself is a single server environment were you can get the server up and get NCP up and running but tomacat is still non-functional. Without something at least like console one you have an NDS tree that you cannot manage, and it doesn't take much to cause the tomcat interface to fall apart.

And with the advent of pushing as much configuration information into the NDS Tree as you guys can, no control over NDS = no control over lots and lots of things.

I like progress, I like technological advances but at some point, at least in my opinion you need a place to fall back to with proven technology that will still work when all the new "Ohh Gosh" stuff falls apart.

Michael Gorn's picture

Do you subscribe to the ngw

Submitted by Michael Gorn (not verified) on 16 July 2007 - 1:25pm.

Do you subscribe to the ngw list? It's a great place where you can get the exchange of ideas much better than at this blog...

Re: A blog is not the easiest place to discuss all of these topics…but hope to help the discussion along anyway.

0/0's picture

At first I thought FlyingGuy

Submitted by 0/0 (not verified) on 16 July 2007 - 8:27pm.

At first I thought FlyingGuy was a little over the top, but he's right on a number of things. And before I get started, let me say that this is the sort of gripe session that one goes on about something that he loves, that is slipping away out of his control.

The company that I left a bit past 6 months ago is migrating from GW to Exchange. The company that I work for now is going to be migrating in the next 12 months, decided before I got there. When I was looking for a new job, the only comments or hits about Novell in general, much less GW specifically, were questions about experience migrating it to MS. It seems that my beloved GW, that just works most of the time, has allowed the world to pass it by. As excited as I am about the great things in Bonsai, I am afraid that I may not have the chance to use them after all. And I believe that it is purely due to shortsightedness on Novell's part, and on the part of your predecessors.

The lack of a proper, cross-platform API is a perfect example. There are some really fantastic open source email systems out there. Scalix and Zimbra come immediately to mind. One of the most important things that has killed GroupWise is the lack of 3rd party bolt-ons and integrations. If you would simply create and put out an open-source, cross platform API (or more importantly, if it had been done five years ago, or even as recently as when Novell bought SUSE), GroupWise would be THE collaboration platform. Period. I say simply knowing that it isn't a simple task, but honestly, it should be THE task. It should have been the ONLY task, if it came down to that. The lack of vendors and integrators knocking on the door asking for them hasn't been because they weren't needed, but because they have gone elsewhere!

IF the programming interfaces were available, especially in open source form, the bolt-ons would have taken care of themselves. As Flying Guy said, there are lots of people just aching to add functionality and tap into the potential of GroupWise. Tons of people. And the open source community would have made most of them available at least in part for free, boosting sales of GroupWise in the process.

Alas, this wasn't done, and it seems as though most SMBs are moving away in droves. It would be really nice to see it happen soon, so that we can halt the disintegration of customer base. I want my GroupWise back. And I'd rather learn sendmail than have to administer Exchange.

Sebastiaan Veld's picture

Think that's in there.

Submitted by Sebastiaan Veld (not verified) on 16 July 2007 - 11:45pm.

Think that's in there.

Sebastiaan Veld's picture

I think GroupWise will get a

Submitted by Sebastiaan Veld (not verified) on 16 July 2007 - 11:50pm.

I think GroupWise will get a ZenWorks Linux Management/Configuration Management like management interface, that has just a link to get to in iManager. So, there (hopefully) will be no dependance on iManager/Tomcat itself.

Roger's picture

Any improvments to the

Submitted by Roger (not verified) on 17 July 2007 - 7:13am.

Any improvments to the search dialog?

Just allowing users to do some basic things would help such as

1) Allow a sticky config to be set to allow a user to select which folders to search.
2) Allow the Trash folder to be unselected (I'm on GW6.5 so this maybe fixed in GW7)
3) Have the date range fields large enough to accept DD/MM/YYYY fully
4) Allow the searching of the subject/body without searching attachments.

The search engine also needs work

1) The searching of PDFs
2) The indexes being structured so that they seach backwards from the latest email,
rather than forwards from the oldest email.
3) Better control over how many emails are indexed at a time in remote/caching mode
as 1000 per session is not enough.

As for other issues

1) The viewing of PDFs via the Adobe reader rather than inside-out viewer.
2) Interface for Google search to index emails

Thanks

Dean Lythgoe's picture

I do subscribe to ngw list.

Submitted by Dean Lythgoe (not verified) on 17 July 2007 - 2:59pm.

I do subscribe to ngw list. Agreed. Blogs are not the best discussion model. But not a bad way to share information. So - I'm sharing.

Dean Lythgoe's picture

We are updating our

Submitted by Dean Lythgoe (not verified) on 17 July 2007 - 3:01pm.

We are updating our searching capability to include PDF files. In Bonsai, you should expect to be able to search/find more modern file types like PDF.

Dean Lythgoe's picture

We have added more admin

Submitted by Dean Lythgoe (not verified) on 17 July 2007 - 3:04pm.

We have added more admin control for both rule generated replies and forwards. However, there is nothing special about a "vacation" rule generated message. They would be handled like any time of 'rule' generated reply or forward.

Dean Lythgoe's picture

The ability to edit/manage

Submitted by Dean Lythgoe (not verified) on 17 July 2007 - 3:08pm.

The ability to edit/manage System Distribution lists was added as part of GroupWise 7.0.1. The ability to add external users to a dist list without creating an external user in the system has not yet been implemented and is not currently planned for Bonsai.

We are adding support to the Address Book to improve import/export formats including CSV. However, we have not added ODBC support or a simple mail merge functionality yet. This will continue to be on our list because we have heard it a lot. Sorry - not yet.

Dean Lythgoe's picture

This is not intended to be

Submitted by Dean Lythgoe (not verified) on 17 July 2007 - 3:10pm.

This is not intended to be an exhaustive list of features - in fact - the list I supplied and the one Ken Muir talked about in a previous post - was intended ONLY to list a few things that are 'minor' or that have not been headliners for the Bonsai release.

Having said that - YES - It just so happens that Birthday and Anniversary will be fields in the Contacts that once checked will also appear on your calendar.

Mark Rancic's picture

Will it still run on Netware?

Submitted by Mark Rancic (not verified) on 17 July 2007 - 4:40pm.

Will it still run on Netware?

Alex Evans's picture

Yes it will - NetWare, Linux

Submitted by Alex Evans (not verified) on 17 July 2007 - 9:56pm.

Yes it will - NetWare, Linux and Windows.

Alex Evans's picture

Whilst it is unfortunate

Submitted by Alex Evans (not verified) on 17 July 2007 - 10:16pm.

Whilst it is unfortunate that you have worked at two companies that are migrating away we have seen a large upswing in the number of customers migrating to GroupWise. I think that there will always be a state of flux - some leave us and some come to us. I do not mean this in the sense that we are resting on our laurels and accepting this fact - we are doing everything we can to make it a net gain in our favour.

You mention APIs - it is a simple irrefutable fact that since we released SOAP we have had more 3rd party interest than ever before. If you have attended Brainshare it cannot have escaped your attention that there are more GW partners than any other. We have the big 2, GWAVA and Messaging Architects, that travel the world spreading the GW word. Many of our other partners also maintain just as an active role in the GroupWise community and are very successful.
Gone are the days where the API's could be as simple as mail.open, mail.delete. There are many properties that can be set on mail items, folders, view settings etc that developers want to tap into. In addition, we decided to go for the server side API instead of the client side API (which is still available incidentally) as this makes for true cross platform, multithreaded access to the POA. Can it improve? Of course. And that's what we are working on.

And as for SMBs - NOWS is an incredibly successful product that is aimed exactly at the SMB market - it is still in it's infancy but has been sustaining growth.

Alex Evans's picture

Oh, and just so there's no

Submitted by Alex Evans (not verified) on 17 July 2007 - 10:35pm.

Oh, and just so there's no confusion - Macs still have a client.

Dean Lythgoe's picture

Great ideas! Let me see

Submitted by Dean Lythgoe (not verified) on 18 July 2007 - 11:34am.

Great ideas! Let me see how many we address :)

Basic things...

We have redesigned our approach to Find/Search. We have expanded the idea of 'simple' find and hopefully improved the UI and the dialogs. You will still be able to get to the 'advanced' find you are used to, but that will not be the first interface. We are attempting to bring the ideas of 'filter' and 'find' into just 'Find'. You will probably have to take a look at the BETA to know if we met all of your criteria.

Search Engine
1. Yes - we are indexing PDFs in Bonsai and you should be able to search these types of attachments
2. This is not changing in Bonsai.
3. We are not changing control, but we are changing the fact that in caching mode, if you are behind in your indexing...everytime you sync another 1000 will be updated instead of just everytime you start. That change is happening in Bonsai.

Other Issues...
1. This will be an option in Bonsai. You will be able to use native viewers for Adobe, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, Apple QuickTime, Macromedia Flash and AutoVue.

2. As mentioned above - we are changing our interface so that you have a 'search field' and you can just type and it will find. Filter and switching to 'Find' automatically. We hope this goes a long way in meeting your expectations.

Some good, others are still on the stove cooking for a future release

Blaine's picture

How about the ability to

Submitted by Blaine (not verified) on 19 July 2007 - 9:48am.

How about the ability to reply to an email within the archive?
How about dragging email from the live post office to the archive?
How about an Out of Office Assistant?
How about the ability to work with a Validation Authority server such as Tumbleweed?
How about selecting which address book to use for autocomplete through web access?
What about the ability to have a display name like Exchange where an email will go out displaying the "Full Name"? This is very useful for military members.
How about setting space limitations on an email account independent of the email client they are using?
How about encryption working between the Groupwise Client and the Outlook Connector?

FlyingGuy's picture

Ok, so I have one comment

Submitted by FlyingGuy (not verified) on 19 July 2007 - 10:31am.

Ok, so I have one comment about this and then I am going to shut my mouth, because quite frankly I don't think anyone wants to hear it but I am going to say it.

Why did they welcome SOAP with such open arms? Well i will tell you why, because IT AT LEAST WORKS, and isn't implemented in OLE/COM! But lets face facts, SOAP is S-L-O-W and the overhead of doing ANYTHING in SOAP is massive, and its based on XML which is a LARGE economy side PITA and its the biggest bandwidth hog this side of YouTube.

I mean DUH! If you let your binary API's wither, you keep them connected to a really garbage interface like OLE, yeah they are gonna be happy they have something that at least works!

How many YEARS did you keep all the server side API calls a total secret? How long have you kept the binary API's crippled! How long did it take you to come up with the trusted application!

I like the way you threw GWAVA in there. HA! I have talked to the GWAVA programmers, they had to BEG you guys to get access to the server side stuff!

And you guys sit there and wonder why you lose market share! I mean come on, the Outlook API may be the biggest swiss cheese this side of the Atlantic, but they have a published API and vendors write a MASSIVE amount of applications that use it to route documents, mail, etc. etc. etc. all through the system.

Go to any accounting firm thats using Engagement, Pro Systems, Best Systems etc. etc. and what are they all using, Outlook. You mention GroupWise and all you get are blank stares.

All you Java and XML ( how does one say "fanboys" in a non pejorative manner ) thinks its the end all be all, and its not, its a tool like all the other tools and it has its realm of appropriate application, but at the client level, which is where 90% of the action is, its just wrong and the sooner you realize that, the sooner you guys will clean up the client side API's, make them work well, as in NOT OLE/COM, the sooner the rest of the world can start writing the tools that will make GW a popular integration tool with other systems, extend it's capabilities by oh say, 10,000% and get it back on the map.

Ok, I am done, I will shut my moth now and drink the coolaid, sorry to be a bother.

Bob Jonkman's picture

When I had to opportunity to

Submitted by Bob Jonkman (not verified) on 19 July 2007 - 11:40am.

When I had to opportunity to speak with some GW insiders I requested client-side programmability as well. I suggested that the SIEVE language be used for rule processing. See http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3028 for the spec.

--Bob.

Ben's picture

Currently GW has a problem

Submitted by Ben (not verified) on 21 July 2007 - 1:39am.

Currently GW has a problem when trying to drag an attachment to a WEBDav location. The problem being that it can't. Will this be something that is addressed in Bonsai? Throw me a bone and say it is.. please!

As an aside, I saw your presentation at GWAVACon in Sydney this year Dean and I was impressed by your enthusiasm.

Habib Datoo's picture

Will there be an outbox

Submitted by Habib Datoo (not verified) on 13 September 2007 - 9:58am.

Will there be an outbox feature in the new client. This is the feature most missed from outlook by our users.

Dean Lythgoe's picture

Habib, Sorry - but I am

Submitted by Dean Lythgoe (not verified) on 13 September 2007 - 1:48pm.

Habib,

Sorry - but I am confused. GroupWise has this type of feature. It is called 'Sent Items'. It has had this feature for about 15 years. Is there something about the Outlook 'outbox' that you expect in the GroupWise 'Sent Items'?

Dean

Habib's picture

Dean, The Outbox feature I

Submitted by Habib (not verified) on 6 October 2007 - 6:12am.

Dean,

The Outbox feature I was looking for was that like in evolution where the message waits before sending, ie Messages pending to be sent. I'd like to see groupwise have both Outbox and Sent Items. The reason for this is a number of applications use the default mail client to send out emails. With this hapening I'd rather be able to see whats being or going to be sent rather then seeing it once its been sent. It also allows the user to modify and apend to an email before its left to reduce the much too often case of when you get multiple emails from one person appending to previous messages due to furthur thought or lack of foresight.

Habib

GWCheck.log » Blog Archive » Dean’s First Cool Blog - Welcom's picture

[...] out Dean Lythgoe on

Submitted by GWCheck.log » Blog Archive » Dean’s First Cool Blog - Welcom (not verified) on 21 October 2007 - 7:49am.

[...] out Dean Lythgoe on Novell Cool Blogs, now the Director of GroupWise [...]

andersonlee1102's picture

Address Book search in Chinese-Traditional character is fail ?

Submitted by andersonlee1102 on 17 July 2008 - 5:41am.

Address book search is very important function for common GroupWare system,
But it can not work normally in GroupWise7 always,
Hope it will be much better in GroupWise Bonzai version.

Anderson,

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