Blog Entry

Submitted by Joetje F (not verified) on 31 October 2007 - 3:16pm.

I'm actually interested in the linux client. I know it does not have the same features of the Bonsai release, but it would be interesting on how I could persuade my manager to purchase a 2.5 year old product (ie linux client) for the full price.

Submitted by Ian (not verified) on 31 October 2007 - 5:30pm.

Thanks for the update Dean.

A couple things. First, you might want to fix the docs link. It has an errant http// in it. Second, what's the difference between email address publishing and synchronizing?

Submitted by John (not verified) on 31 October 2007 - 5:57pm.

The link is wrong Dean too many http:// 'es

Submitted by Marty Harrison (not verified) on 31 October 2007 - 7:38pm.

Your link to the documentation is broken....but easily corrected.

Submitted by Eric Gearhart (not verified) on 31 October 2007 - 11:39pm.

Your link to http://www.novell.com/documentation/gw8/ is broken - you link to http://http//www.novell.com/documentation/gw8

Submitted by Eric Gearhart (not verified) on 1 November 2007 - 12:11am.

Also - is the GroupWise client for Linux basically for people who refuse to learn Evolution? Is that customer base the target?

I've been watching for word of a "native" client for Linux (by native I mean one written in GTK on top of Mono, not something written in Java) and I don't think there's ever going to be one, from what I've seen.

Is Novell Evolution being positioned as the "Native GroupWise client for Linux" I'm talking about basically? Is that something customers want, or are they not interested in learning something new (to them, Evolution is new and scary compared to what they know, I guess).

Or is it more along the lines of "Whatever's kinda like Outlook," because that's what a lot of people "grew up with" and are use to?

Submitted by Sebastiaan Veld (not verified) on 1 November 2007 - 4:44am.

As we see Bonsai as a smaller release, why was chosen to name it GroupWise 8 and not GroupWise 7.5 (which would have made sense)?

Submitted by Dean Lythgoe (not verified) on 1 November 2007 - 6:48am.

Fixed! thanks :)

Submitted by Dean Lythgoe (not verified) on 1 November 2007 - 6:58am.

The Linux Client is positioned for people on GroupWise using Windows who want to move to a Linux Desktop and continue with a similar email experience. No training, familiar with the interface, lower cost.

None of these users ever ask what language the client is written in. They know nothing about C, Java, Native, .NET, VB or any other programming language. They ask about features like Notify, Change To, Home Folder, Categories, Multiple Accounts. We are not planning on making any more clients - seems like we have enough :) The official GroupWise client on Linux is the Linux Client. Not Evolution.

Evolution is a great alternative for those users who are on Exchange or coming from Exchange to GroupWise and they want to maintain a similar experience as Outlook, but use a Linux Desktop. A very similar plan as the GroupWise Outlook Connector. Users who are on Windows using Outlook against Exchange and the company has just switched to GroupWise, but the user wants to keep using Outlook.

Hope that explains it a little better...

Submitted by Dean Lythgoe (not verified) on 1 November 2007 - 7:03am.

We don't see Bonsai as a small release. We think it is a major release that contains major features and updates. I will admit, that the debate about the version continues. Officially, we are still referring to this release as Bonsai and we have not publicly stated an official version number.

In general, about the time we go to Public BETA is when an official announcement will be made.

Dean

Submitted by Dean Lythgoe (not verified) on 1 November 2007 - 9:26am.

Ian,

Some information on address publishing...

The new Publishing feature allows the administrator to configure which addresses are written back to eDirectory when a user is updated or when settings are changed that affect the format or number of addresses. We used to only write the single preferred email address for a user but that has been expanded to provide a list.

Let me know if that answers your question.

Dean

Submitted by Roger (not verified) on 1 November 2007 - 10:23am.

Thats not fair, I've spent the last 8 years having a go at Novell staff on the following GW issues

a) Mailbox size limit only going up to 4GB
b) Lack of PDF indexing
c) Lack of any sort of autosave for work in progress
e) Lack of any sane view of the contact lists
f) Changeable text editor

Looks like I'm going to have to spend some time creating a new list :) now where do I start oh yes APIs and so on.

Thanks for putting together a client that has a chance of standing up against Outlook and I'll see you at the next BrainShare with my new list.

Submitted by Sebastiaan Veld (not verified) on 1 November 2007 - 1:12pm.

Hi Dean,

Regarding the feature in Contact Management adding a photo on a contact. On GWAVAcon we discussed this last week, it was said it is not possible to update this centrally, like updating the GroupWise Address book using ConsoleOne; as it was stated 'and make it a corperate dating service'.

I discussed this with some of my customers and they expressed to me that they do want to update the address book centrally to add all (may be relevant) photo's in the GroupWise address book. For example I have some schools who like to add all teachers and office people's photo's. Also the businesses I spoke to would like to add those photo's centrally.

Sebas

Submitted by Flyingguy (not verified) on 1 November 2007 - 7:26pm.

Novell just needs to aim squarely at Outlook and just OUT Outlook them. They need to dump java and get on the binary bandwagon and make the client feature to feature the same across the board.

Just today I had a user complain ( she was from an outlook shop ) about being able to click on the top of the message in outlook and see the thread of that conversation. I told her GW does threads and then flipped her view to threads then sat there in pain as I watched for a good 3 minutes as it threaded then entire mailbox. I am not terribly familiar with threading in the GW client and I may have done myself a dis-service and missed a way to just thread a single conversation, but it was just painful.

We all know how hard the battle is when someone comes from an Outlook shop. I Bleed Novell Red when you cut me, but you guys are not making our jobs any easier. Stop adding window dressing and make the hard stuff work. Out-think, Out-play, Out-last. The GW dev team has to get their game face on and start swinging for fences. We need compelling reasons when we get into these type of debates with users and managers.

You are shoving V8 out the door, great now turn all that talent up there into to getting the infrastructure fixed. Give vendors compelling reasons to support GW. make it easier, simpler and faster for them to develop for GW. Pictures are not that hard to put into the address list, just do it!

I challenge you guys, give us a decent set of tools. The GW screen designer needs to be resurrected and some latitude built in to create some custom GW message types, that we can then design forms for. Hell if you would publish the for spec i will write a tool to build forms and license it to any GW shop, for a minimal cost $50.00 bucks or less.( I gotta pay my mortgage )!

There are so MANY of us just chomping at the bit to build tools for GW that I cannot tell you.

Give is decent API's give us documentation, give us the ability and we will do it.

In short get it in gear guys!

Submitted by John Yorke (not verified) on 1 November 2007 - 10:22pm.

Firstly, I'm really hoping that the plan for "Tasks" in Groupwise is to provide distributed project management tools. It was mentioned that Bonsai would allow task dependencies and immediately I thought of how sweet it would be to have people update their completion on tasks automatically updating a Gantt chart for a project and for IT execs to look at multiple projects and see the resources assigned to multiple projects.

Secondly, I'm hoping that by the time Groupwise Monterrey (lets call it GW9), Teaming + Conferencing 2, and Open Enterprise Server 3 comes out there is a clearer picture of how all the products can work together without overlap but with useful tie-ins. At the same time it would be nice to see the possibility of customers not using OES3 to get the full benefit of GW9 & T+C2 while using Active Directory, or customers using AD+Exchange to get the benefits of OES3 and T+C2, or customers using SharePoint and OfficeLive to make good use of OES3 and GW9. If Novell is serious about keeping OES around, serious about keeping GW around, and serious about T+C, then the solution with all the products needs to be perfect, and the standalone product as good as if not better than the competition.

Thirdly, all the components need an installer which is equivalent to the "installer for Dummies" that the competition provides. If during an install a user selects all product components to be installed then, from that point on, clicking Next to the end should give a working install. It should be as optimal as can be expected having provided no extra info, and the user should be able to easily fix the defaults to something better afterwards. It would be nice to see this in OES, GW, and T+C.

Lastly, downloadable Xen VMs for "Digital Airlines" with all the OES3, GW, and T+C components working for quick demos to customers so we can sell these things to users and management.

Submitted by Eric (not verified) on 2 November 2007 - 6:29am.

Just a thought, as GW is still tied to eDirectory, why could it not pull down photos stored in the associated eDir accounts photo/userphoto attributes? Wouldn't it just be another admin-defined field mapping to that attr? That would be especially cool for people who have existing investments in eGuide or IDM User Application and have already been using the photo/userphoto attributes.

Submitted by Ian (not verified) on 2 November 2007 - 2:21pm.

Great post.

Also, iManager snapins would be nice also... ;)

Submitted by Logan (not verified) on 3 November 2007 - 4:28pm.

can someone explain to me (as noted in a previous comment) why you are calling this release GroupWise 8, and see it as a major and not minor release, if you are STILL using ConsoleOne even after the new zenworks is now using its own web based management solution. GroupWise "8" is exactly the same as GroupWise 7 in terms of management after reviewing the online documentation, apart from a few features in the clients, except for webaccess although it has a new login screen and better ajax support.

I believe the GroupWise bonsai should be GroupWise 7.5! it is mind boggling on how in the past 2 years since groupwise 7, that this is all that youve come up with.

I mean i really think that novell has done some good acquistions in the past with in terms of security (i.e senforce, sentinel, etc) but i think novell should good some acquistions in the collaboration space more. My dream acquistion for novell would be to acquire the lotus division from ibm, and although it would take a couple of years to integrate products and migrate users, the name groupwise that novell have developed so close to everyones heart, would have some chance of being a REAL competitor to exchange.

Also i would of liked to of seen some enhancement to GroupWise Messenger, which the new messenger looks and works the exact same as groupwise messenger 2, that said i think while you have tie-ins with teaming and conferencing into the groupwise client (mostly the teaming part of it anyways) it would be nice to see the conferencing part more integrated with groupwise messenger (e.g. VOIP, etc).

All of these are good ideas, and although you have spend the last 2 years practically doing all the work of groupwise on the clients (i.e linux clients), you still need to do a lot of work in the backend feature set. you have neglected this for as long as groupwise 6/6.5 (i.e imanager plug-ins and stop using consoleone, major improvements to messenger, etc)

In ending i seriously think bonsai SHOULD be groupwsie 7.5 and not 8. altough i wouldve thought that it wouldve been groupwsie 10 by the way you up'ed zenworks to 10 with configuration management, most likely to co-inside with the suse linux enterprise versioning. But going to 10, you wouldve had to of have a whole lot more improvements (as sugguested above) to be a reasonable version up-ing.

In recent times, novell have done a lot of work on suse linux enterprise and the migration from netware, zenworks with configuration management, but you guys "have left groupwise in the dark"

Submitted by Sebastiaan Veld (not verified) on 5 November 2007 - 10:35am.

"Also i would of liked to of seen some enhancement to GroupWise Messenger, which the new messenger looks and works the exact same as groupwise messenger 2, that said i think while you have tie-ins with teaming and conferencing into the groupwise client (mostly the teaming part of it anyways) it would be nice to see the conferencing part more integrated with groupwise messenger (e.g. VOIP, etc)."

...that should have been done, but unfortunately there are no enhancements for NM in the Bonsai release...

Comes to mind: Sing Sign On for the GroupWise Messenger? Still not... have discussed this 'simple' feature for years.
Please keep voting and express your needs :)

Submitted by Sebastiaan Veld (not verified) on 5 November 2007 - 1:24pm.

That's what I would like to accomplish. It's already there, so why not leverage it? This is in my opinion a perfect good example where different product groups from Novell do not really work together to get the solution (take OES + GroupWise) to a higher level. On one side we are able to accomplish what we want using eGuide (it's a pity there's no version/replacement for that in OES2) and on the other hand a product group that does the opposite, where the corporate (GroupWise System) address book cannot do exactly that same thing, cause Product management says 'customers do not want that'. Or is the idea that if we want to have a picture we need to go into T+C and search in -that- address book and then send the email I wanted to. So, I suggest to let ME choose whats good for MY customers. Keep things SIMPLE and CONSISTENT between product groups and in my opinion that's key to be able to sell Novell solutions in the first place.

Submitted by Grant Nickle (not verified) on 5 November 2007 - 1:24pm.

I think you need to spend sometime and get the admin of Groupwise into iManager. This is where Novell seems to be going and now that Border Manager is managed there it looks like Groupwise is the only thing left. This may be a big project but if Novell is going to move forward with Groupwise the time needs to be spent and it should have been spend on this release. We need one place to manage things.
Thanks

Submitted by Flyingguy (not verified) on 5 November 2007 - 7:41pm.

I must respectfully disagree. iManager has proven itself to be both fragile and inscrutable along with the rest of the entire web based tools. I have a client that had a great server, that ran like the dickens except *someplace* deep in the bowels of Tomcat with all the various things that it tries to run there was a memory leak someplace and it would run the server out of memory in about 1.5 weeks. So I put service pack 7 on it and now the memory leak has stopped, but now half of the stuff that tomcat runs have stopped working. Someplace in the maze of XML files, server.xmls files, applet config files where nothing makes any sort of sense unless you have devoted half of your working career to the intricacies of the java/Apache/omcat mashup you pretty much zero chance finding the root cause of the problem.

So now I have lost a lot of everything - nothing is listening on port 8009

You want me to trust my GroupWise administration to this product? Ohh please.

I have said it before and I will say it again. iManage and the entire boat of stuff that is dependent on the Tomcat/Apache/java mashup are just DOA if the tomcat servlet engine is broken. We need either ConsoleOne to be re-done or NwAdmin to be re-done, because while we are waiting for the *Web is perfect for everything* fan boys to figure out what they broke, we still have a network to run and administer.

Submitted by Dean Lythgoe (not verified) on 5 November 2007 - 9:01pm.

Bill,

Thanks for the pep talk - we need it and we appreciate the passion. We are certainly on the same wave length about APIs and enabling partners, integrators and developers. We have committed a significant effort to this in Bonsai and we will commit to a significantly more effort to this in Monterrey.

Side note on the 'Conversation Thread' - that is a new feature of Bonsai. Two ways to get there.... When you are reading a message, there will be a new 'tab' at the top that will display all messages related to the one you are reading. You will also be able to get to it by simply double-clicking on the "forward/reply' indicators in the message list.

Thanks again for your support!

Submitted by Dean Lythgoe (not verified) on 5 November 2007 - 9:03pm.

It is certainly something we will consider in a future release as demand dictates, but this is not going to happen in Bonsai - Sorry!! As Roger said above, we have to have something to do in the next release :)

Dean

Submitted by Dean Lythgoe (not verified) on 5 November 2007 - 9:05pm.

Wow! Thanks for the input and suggestions. We will consider them all and I will forward your insight onto our Product Management Team.

Dean

Submitted by Nick (not verified) on 6 November 2007 - 2:23am.

Now when we are on the topic off administration tools I would like to ask Novell this:

Have you meet one single customer that is happy with ConsoleOne and/or Imanager ?

I work as a consultant and I havent not meet a single one that is happy with the tools you provide, according to my expericense more or less everbody dislike (C1 is more disliked than Imanager) them and now we have to stand ConsoleOne to at least next version of groupwise that probably is probably at least 2 years away.

Is Imanger the tool for the future or are you plannig something else ?

The last decent admin console you had was nwadmin, maybee you should restart development for that !

Submitted by Daniel Hedblom (not verified) on 6 November 2007 - 5:08am.

Nice to see some development on groupwise at last. To bad not that much work was put into the webaccess. I see more and more users who use Gmail or other webmail starting to prefer webaccess. The lack of any ability to sort mail by date/sender/subject is very sad and really something that most users complain about. Webaccess is where "its" at and neglecting it is a sure way of being left in the dust.

Its also a tad annoying that groupwise still doesnt use iManager.

Submitted by Ian (not verified) on 6 November 2007 - 8:10am.

Flyingguy,

I've had my share of iManager issues for sure. It's far from perfect. It's a pig in terms of performance even running on a recent server and tomcat is among the most hair ripping packages I've ever touched. But at least for administration, I feel more comfortable with iManager. The biggest reason why is the error trapping(whether that's a design issue or a C1 issue is above me) and general "buginess". I can get away with breaking an iPrint object and just recreating it. Messing around with GroupWise objects and databases is a bit more critical than printers. I've had C1 eat itself and leak memory into oblivion countless times producing horribly vaugue error messages leading me to trouble shoot in the wrong areas. I'll get errors that come up simply with NULL as the description. To properly rebuild a domain, I have to close the domain, close C1, open it back up and then I can actually rebuild the domain. Sometimes I need to reboot my entire workstation because C1 has thoroughly screwed itself up.

I agree that Novell needs to pick one and really roll with it. Maybe they could even open source the framework and let people hack on it and Novell can provide their proprietary modules themselves. Personally, I've had more success with iManager not acting stupid which is why I lead towards that direction. I'm not a huge fan of the web interface's inherent usability issues, but I'd rather the tool work properly.

Submitted by Eric (not verified) on 6 November 2007 - 9:37am.

This is not surprising given that the Teaming and Conferencing product seems to supercede Groupwise Messenger in many ways. Unfortunately there does not appear to be any sort of entitlement to T&C for existing Groupwise & GW Messenger customers.

Submitted by Logan (not verified) on 6 November 2007 - 9:37pm.

Personally, I dont see how T+C would ever replace groupwsie messenger. i dont think it was ever meant to, T+C is "suppose" to replace Virtual Office, and thats it, thats why they removed it from oes2. i see groupwise messenger as a product that is essential to any platform, especially when you look at the other "enterprise" class instant messenging products (lotus sametime, ms live comms server, etc.)

Submitted by Logan (not verified) on 6 November 2007 - 9:58pm.

I agreed with a couple of the previous post by flyingguy and nick about imanager and the future of groupwise management. As i said in my first comment, this was my first dissappointment to groupwise bonsai, and totally bid me dues to nick about his comment on using consoleone: "and now we have to stand ConsoleOne to at least next version of groupwise that probably is probably at least 2 years away." - Nick

All of this novell products and services now use imanager, and have phased out consoleone with zenworks config management.

I would say that groupwise bonsai would be a client focused release in terms of especially the linux client, but with that said i think 2 years between releases and no imanager support and no "real" big improvements to webaccess and messenger is a real let down. As ive said before as much as i am a loyal fan of groupwise and novell, groupwsie bonsai is a real disappointment.

I think the only way that groupwise can have all of the features that are so simple to everyone else using other email providers and systems is through acquistion. As i mentioned before ibm lotus would be a great buy for novell, which is a whole portfolio of products that compete with gw and have a whole lot of advantages over gw, especially when ibm are making so many acquistions in the unified communications space.

Submitted by Roger (not verified) on 7 November 2007 - 1:03am.

C1 has a number of issues, one of the key ones being that the framework design happened
before Java became a stable set of parts. This can be seen in the source code as its
design is all pre java bean standards, this shows up a lot in the way that screens are
designed as there is no sign of GUI build tools - everything is hand coded.

The real problem for C1 is the rest of Novell's products. For a console to work in a secure
way its got to have access to correctly secured APIs. C1 on the other hand got stuck with
things like the GW DLL's from NWAdmin being wrapped and ported to within C1 java environment.
To operate these DLLs need full read/write access to the GW database files and between C1 and
the DLL's a lot of file handles get left open that can cause all sorts of problems.

The DLL problem is also why there is no sign of a GW admin module for iManager - until the
GW team releases a service side admin API that has the feature set of the DLL's we seem
stuck with the current lash up.

Roger

Submitted by Walbert (not verified) on 7 November 2007 - 2:43am.

SSO for Groupwise Messenger, We would like to see this as an option to.
Asked many times before, but still nothing seen from Novell.

Submitted by Flyingguy (not verified) on 7 November 2007 - 11:28am.

Hey Ian,

when Tomcat was first developed I thought it was a cool idea. I still think its *kind* of a cool idea, but not for critical administration issues. The basic problem as I said, is that if the Tomcat or Apache software crashes, you have almost no hope of administering your tree and that is 100% unacceptable.

C1 is just he biggest POS ever to come down the pike. The whole "JAVA is KING" was ( as I understand it ) pushed from the top and that was a bad thing. Java is not meant to be a desktop development language, at least in my opinion.

They need IMNSHO to go back to NwAdmin. It is a native binary and talks directly to NCP which is where the action is. We don't need pretty pictures, we need a solid tool that will let you do what you need to do. Hell you could use the Lazarus project, *today* to write NwAdmin and compile it to native binary for Mac, Linux and Windows. Lazarus is based of Free Pascal which is completely FOOS software. Pascal can call any function in any C or C++ Lib ( dll if you are talking windows ).

Personally I long for syscon.

Submitted by Flyingguy (not verified) on 7 November 2007 - 6:17pm.

Why do you find messenger to be a let down? Lots of my clients use it and it is very effective. It is contained, reasonably secure.

Submitted by Ian (not verified) on 7 November 2007 - 9:07pm.

Assuming you have at least two servers, you can run at least two iManagers in the event that one goes arse up. You also have the option of running the mobile version, although I've found it slower than molasses, but that might be an isolated issue. It's the same theory that if your only nwadmin instance broke, you'd be SOL too. For what it's worth, I'd prefer a "real time" binary tool as well, but at this point I'd be happy with GW snapins on iManager.

Roger, thanks for the explanation.

Submitted by Flyingguy (not verified) on 7 November 2007 - 11:10pm.

Roger,

That is why I resoundingly advocate simply just junking C1. Delete the source code, just erase it, all of it, every last bit & byte of it. My other posts make my position clear on iManager and its ilk.

NwAdmin was & is the correct way to do things. I know there are rumblings to just replace it with the likes of some Identity Manager style of thing, and that would be just as wrong as well since we don't need yet another 300 megabye memory hogging bit of java bloat to do what can be done far more effectively and just A portably in native binaries.

Some of the worst moves novel made were pulling things off of the server console and putting them into external software, and the trend continues with OES as they fail to port important NLM's to the Linux Kernel and try to shove more and more into tomcat/apache.

Even those fools in Redmond know better then to do that.

Submitted by Nick (not verified) on 8 November 2007 - 12:49am.

What bother me most is that Novell has to know that the admin tools are very disliked (I assume they are not both deaf and blind) and they do nothing about it. Even when I meet my local Novell represantatives and I mention C1 they get embarrased.

It will probaby hurt a lot of feeling inside Novell but someone has to step up and do something about this soon, we have waited long enough.

Maybe we should start a "bring back nwadmin" campaign :)

Submitted by Sebastiaan Veld (not verified) on 8 November 2007 - 1:43am.

Well I may have some points to add to that :)
-Single Sign On, and no I do not want to save my password locally or buy SSO. Even the iPrint client has SSO built in.
-Last time someone in eDir changed it's Surname/Givenname and Fullname, we needed to restart NM and get the users out of the Messenger contact list and put it on again to get the change reflected.
-Connect multiple NM servers, for example to hook up different locations or connect with my trusted customers/partners/..
-Webaccess component? Would be verry welcome to be able to have some web chat, or now: good T+C integration and not just another chat/messaging system that's loosly connected.
-Integration with other Novell services? Beside GW and see who's online when sending a message, have good integration points with other services in other product groups. Just to have one other example, NM was shipped with ZFD7... but can we initiate remote control leveraging ZFD from NM?
-Combined search from GW and NM to seach in mail as well in the chat history. Going forward: extend the Seach Server in OES2 to to able to do a combined search and have access to all these indexes. An yes, access this search from T+C instead of again another totaly seperate web page.
-Telephony anyone? Integration points with VOIP solutions (This goes as well for GW)? Let's hook this stuff up with Asterisk. That would really add to the openess of the overall solution (GW, NM, T+C)

Submitted by Sebastiaan Veld (not verified) on 8 November 2007 - 2:12am.

My opinion is that web based is the long term solution. Not iManager plugins but a 'seperate' portal like Zenworks Configuration Management has. This has several advantages;
-No dependancy on iManager itself (which is good enough for OES/eDir administration)
-As what goes for ZCM a GW comparable administration console will (should) reflect what's important to a -GroupWise- administrator.
-How much time do we actually spend in such a console/ConsoleOne/(NWAdmin) to do GW -Administration-... could be make this even less. So -automate- much more stuff and create what's promised for years a out of the box 'policy driven' network. The pieces are there within Novell, only the product groups need to work more together to create a SOLUTION instead of a buch of loosly connect (of not at all connected) PRODUCTS. We have DirXML/IM why not have the ability to create a mailbox in GW when an account is created in eDir?!
-A huge advantage would be (and please do not shoot me) we would not have to tie GW anymore to eDir (it's -again- loosly connected anyway), but we could build in an identity broker that we point to any, including multiple, directory(s) like Active Directory and OpenLDAP. That would be a huge improvement for those running GW in an AD environment and would make GW also a more obvious choise running other LDAP directories. It would make a end to any discussion as 'we need to maintain two directories, so we move to Windows). There would still be enough room for 'works better with eDir' when combined with out of the box DirXML support writing back data from the GW database to eDir or setting up stuff in GW leveraging that/real time technology. Thinking of 'disable account'. The ZenWorks team recognised that being tied to eDir only is a problem when trying to get (or stay) into Microsoft environment. GW already runs on Windows... it's a matter of choise, and that's what Novell markets todat: CHOISE.

Submitted by Logan (not verified) on 8 November 2007 - 4:22am.

to anwser your question, GroupWise messenger is not a let down, "GroupWise Bonsai is a let down", when you consider 2 years of development only being put into the desktop clients, they could of redesigned messenger and gave it a few more features (a few more features to webaccess wouldve been nice as well... major ones that is (which in my opinion now that groupwsie webaccess is now using the support of native file type clients shouldve been used from day dot)), especially with the big omission of voip/unified communications in the messenger client and system tie ins with novell conferencing, when they only integrated a bit with teaming inot the groupwise client.

to note and make make my opinion clear, messenger is not a let down, the whole release of groupwise bonsai is a let down, which includes my opinions above about the lack of development for the other parts of groupwise other than the desktop clients (i.e webaccess (and also support for using apache on windows), messenger updates, and imanager plugins (discontinue using consoleone), which is a pain to support with java and plugin problems, and not to mention the sear aging of the product.

Submitted by Roger (not verified) on 8 November 2007 - 6:07am.

I have to disagree with a lot being said about the different consoles (just for the record)

NWAdmin is a dead end as its Windows only and does not provide a complete framework for third parties to extend (including Novell teams). What is does do, it does well (and fast), but much of that is due to the fact that the development team had the ability to fix what was wrong over its life time.

C1, the biggest problem (now) with C1 is that there was never a V2 rewrite to fix the issues found in the first release. Time and hardware improvements have removed original issues such as memory and CPU load, but even simple changes to the C1 code could reduce the bloat. C1 has failed because Novell jumped ship to 'web' solutions before they had spent time on C1. The result is everyone being dependent on a console that has only had basic bug fixes for over 5 years.

iManager, now if you have every tried to program to this you will know why the only people to write modules are Novell, why in general the modules are so basic and why teams such as ZMC have done their own thing. iManager is the original mash up solution (before that was considered to be a good thing). Under it's web 1.0 look and feel is a copy of Novell portal servers (remember that?), with a set of basic display/service portal modules. All addins are in turn written to work against the basic portal modules. The whole process is painfully slow and the results make you wonder why you bothered and the only Novell team to do it well are the Identity Manager group.

The real problem is that Novell has never made the commitment to do any type of management tool well, this would not just involve work at the console but also a large amount of work in providing application based admin APIs, which in turn would reduce the bloat at the console.

As for the 3 different consoles we have non of them seem to have a future as a central tool for controlling environments with many of Novell's products deployed, but I do expect Novell to notice this problem for years to come. Instead we are going to end up with many consoles and having to purchase Identity Manager so that changes made within one console are replicated to systems controlled by other consoles.

Submitted by Flyingguy (not verified) on 8 November 2007 - 8:46am.

Hey guys...

Ok I am going to leave the NWAdmin/C1/IManager part aside, I think everyone knows my opinion on that debate and focus on Messenger.

I like it that NM is small, I like it that it is not integrated with things like VOIP, I like it that it is pretty secure unlike, YIM, MSN, AIM, etc. Just by having it I have cut off debate in whole companies when people have been saying we should be able to have YIM on our desktops to make us more productive.

Some things I would like to see changed:

1. Adding contacts is ghastly: You *must* search by something? You should just be able see everyone in your defined scope and be able to filter to reduce the number you see while adding.

2. Not have to restart he messenger server if you give someone the ability to search the archive.

Some things I definitely don't want to see happen:

1. Do not try to make it a unified messaging client. If a company wants to do that let them use something else like Trillian.

2. I don't want VOIP integrated, VOIP is a bandwidth hog and a serious potential attack vector.

3. I dont want drag and drop file transfer or anything like that. E-mail them a file, pop it into a shared directory on the server, whatever.

Other things:

1. I can see utility in having a client side built into GW Web Access ala Google chat when on your g-mail account.

2. I want a damn SDK, I can think of lots of applications where a software event that triggers an IM would be great.

I am sure I could think of other things to write, but I need to get the kid ready for school.

Submitted by Logan (not verified) on 8 November 2007 - 5:19pm.

just to make a reply to your comment flyingguy,

1. I don't know what you think unified messaging or unified communications platform actually is, but Novell messenger is a ENTERPRISE class messenging service and not things like trillian or yim. trillian and yim have got nothing to do with unified messaging. Unified messaging is a system where your email client/system have tie ins or be integrated into your pabx/viop systems (cisco callmanager, etc.) so you can read and listen to vioce mail messages right from your email inbox.

Now this can be addressed not only in a groupwise client, but the groupwise messenger client as well some how with video conferencing in the messgaing client (video and or internet chat... a bit like skype in some ways). To see what comparsions im trying to make here go and see what MS are doing with Live Communications Server (LCS)and the Office Communicator client, which also is on the Windows Mobile platform or even Lotus Sametime with their acquistion of WebDialogs, which is their new add-on to sametime which is called Sametime Unyte.

Unified Messaging and Communication is implementations of both VOIP and Video conferencing through VOIP networks (such as Cisco Callmanager as previously said) integrated into your email system.

2. integrating VOIP is the way the industry and companies are going, im sure if novell did this there would be an option to not deploy this if you dont have VOIP in your enterprise. even if you did and still didnt want it well im sure that you would be able to. Simple: If you dont want it then dont install it! your not given choices for nothing.

3. Maybe as well as extending instant messaging, you could go as far to do what MS did with LCS and make a web-based counterpart for groupwise messenger, which is MS Communicator Web Access, or maybe somthing like GroupWise Web Messenger, which could be a stand alone portal, and built into the groupwsie webaccess.

Submitted by Roger (not verified) on 9 November 2007 - 2:18am.

The biggest issue is not what could be done with Messenger, rather that the Novell teams have decided to do nothing for the moment.

The real killer is that third parties are also unable to extend Messenger for the simple reason that Novell has lost the 'public' SDK and do not seem in any hurry to re-release it and without the SDK you can't extend Messenger.

Roger

Submitted by Eric (not verified) on 9 November 2007 - 8:36am.

Novell used to have a web-based instant messenger. It was called Virtual Office.

Submitted by Flyingguy (not verified) on 9 November 2007 - 2:57pm.

I have LOTS of clients in single server environments. If you have less then 500 employees, a SINGLE NetWare 6.5 box can handle all of them and GroupWise as well.

All of them run Netware 6.5 for file & print, Routing and Groupwise on a singe server and they run quite well.

As an example:

I have an acounting firm. They run 6.5 on a Dell Server with a single Dual Core Processor and 4 gigs of ram, a little over a terabyte of disk storage, GroupWise 7, NDPS runs 9 tcp/ip attached printers, it has two nics and acts as the gateway for 75 employees who surf the web and do everything else.

I am looking at Monitor right now, it is running along at 268 days of uptime, loafing along at 0 to 3% utilization.

They have no need of another server. I just want a non fragile, not based upon a mashup of 10 or twelve frameworks of java/tomcat/apache administration tool.

Id that so much to ask? I mean really, is it?

Submitted by Dean Lythgoe (not verified) on 11 November 2007 - 1:24pm.

Looking forward to the next list!

That is exactly what we want to hear - we solved the most important problems of Today and we are making progress on new features to make you productive.

Submitted by Dean Lythgoe (not verified) on 11 November 2007 - 1:34pm.

I have not responded to each comment about Messenger or about the discussion around Administration. However, I am reading them and using them to help confirm our strategies for these two areas of the product.

They are both obvious places to get attention in the future. Administration will be a major effort in Monterrey - the release after Bonsai. It will not be ConsoleOne and it will probably not be iManager. We have spent a significant amount of time in Bonsai creating an Administration API. This API we will use internally and we will expose it to our partners. It is Java based, but can easily be SOAP-enabled as well as other bindings, like .NET, C++. It will be the base of our Administration story moving forward.

Messenger is a great feature of GroupWise and a great product on its own. I use it everyday. We really need to noodle this one a lot more before we make any decisions. It is simply premature to announce anything at this point.

Thanks for your comments and insight - they are valuable and very useful. And if they are really good - I reserve the right to claim them as my own :)

Submitted by Flyingguy (not verified) on 12 November 2007 - 12:13pm.

Hey Dean,

Sorry about the rant, but I fail to see why the most simplest of solutions are being overlooked when it comes to consoles. Here is a simple way to administer the tree with nothing but an interpreter/parser:

NDS is a database of objects, great so here is a simple example of a def file for an object in suedo XML even!

Now even as much as I hate XML that would simply just need to be fleshed out, to make a complete definition for a program to simple parse and display and allow editing of an NDS objects attributes.

Third party products as long as they are contained in NDS can be handled exactly the same way. All a third party has to do is provide the def file for their objects. The program to drive this can be simple, small and compiled to any platform Novell supports. They don't have to compile anything, they don't have to ship binaries, the file could be encrypted, and they provide a key. Top it all off with aimple update method that allows the 3rd party def to check and se if its def file has been updated and simply pull it down. It is the simplest of programs to build and maintain, since all it does is parse a text file and build the form objects on the fly. No tomact. no apache, no httpK stack required, it just works.

Please help me and the rest of the folks here understand why this cannot be done.