Blog Entry

There continues to be a lot of questions around GroupWise's support for things like NetWare, eDirectory and ConsoleOne. I would like to clarify what is happening with all of these technologies, how they will be supported in Bonsai and what to expect in future releases.

GroupWise and NetWare. Many GroupWise customers continue to run their POA, MTA, GWIA and WebAccess on NetWare. Bonsai will continue to support the NetWare server platform for these agents. However, more and more of our customers are understanding and following the overall Novell strategy to move to Linux. Open Enterprise Server 2 (OES) shipped last fall and is one of the best server platforms available in the market today. Robust, secure, scalable - all the usual buzzwords :) We will continue to encourage our customers to move to Linux through the OES and SLES offerings. Linux is the future and it is increasingly important that the GroupWise community and customers embrace this platform by making plans to move off of NetWare and on to OES. Future versions of GroupWise will discontinue support for NetWare versions that are in the 'end of life' phase of the product life cycle. Bonsai will support NetWare 6.5.x. We have as one of our reference platforms, NetWare 6.5 with the latest support pack.

GroupWise and eDirectory. GroupWise continues to have a dependency on eDirectory. Bonsai will continue to require and leverage this robust directory service. However, our road map does include allowing customers to substitute other directories in addition to eDirectory. We envision a version of GroupWise that will allow customers to have a very tight experience if they choose to run GroupWise with eDirectory. However, if the customer chooses, we plan to provide a LDAP connector that will essentially allow any LDAP-enabled directory to be the underlying directory. Better with eDirectory, but available with other directories will be our goal.

GroupWise and ConsoleOne. Bonsai will still have a dependency on ConsoleOne and ConsoleOne will be the administration tool for the Bonsai product. Looking forward - this is a real debate! One that has been discussed in the comments of the 'What's New in Bonsai' blog a few months ago. Check it out if you want to see some great back and forth and some very valid insights, concerns and suggestions. The only sure thing that will happen with our administration story is that we will be moving away from ConsoleOne. ConsoleOne will be entering an 'end of life' phase as a product and GroupWise must move to another strategy. iManager has been a consideration, but not a final decision. However, we have been actively working on a platform for administration and there are some definite objectives. We plan to provide a SOAP enabled administration interface. It may also have Java and C++ bindings. We are leaning towards a rich web interface for administration. Current plans have this targeted for the Monterrey release - (the release after Bonsai).

I hope this discussion provides some insight into where engineering is at and what we are planning. Looking forward to your comments and suggestions on each of these topics.