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Submitted by Sebastiaan Veld (not verified) on 15 February 2008 - 8:55am.

A ‘long’ expected accouncement and a verry good decision. So, now the word is out, can we expect Teaming (al least) to become a integrated part of the Open Workgroup Suite, so it will finally form a new basis as the one single portal solution for all the Novell products instead of the now like 20 solutions out there (eg eXtend/VitualOffice/NPS/NetStorage/eGuide/..) to access services?

Submitted by Alex Evans (not verified) on 15 February 2008 - 9:53am.

That is one of the things that we are considering yes. Though don't forget that customers that have purchased NOWS get discount pricing on Novell Teaming and Novell Teaming+Conferencing

Submitted by Eric (not verified) on 15 February 2008 - 10:33am.

Perhaps now Novell can shed some light as to why the development of Groupwise Messenger has stagnated (sounds like Messenger is unchanged with Bonsai), and whether Messenger's development is being discontinued in favor of T&C.

Submitted by Sebastiaan Veld (not verified) on 15 February 2008 - 12:04pm.

True you get a discount, but Virtual office is NOT a part anymore of OES2 where OES1/Netware did have (ok, crappy) Virtual office. Novell is in need of committing to ONE portal solution after introducing portal after portal which were incompatible with each other version after version. Teaming is a nice and (reasonly) easy to implement migration path for existing environment, providing exactly what my customers need today. Besides showing commitment as being part of the suite, implementing Teaming binds existing environments to the solution instead of shopping around for other solutions. I believe if all products default to the Teaming portal, that will easier attract more 3th party portlet development and enable customisation of the portal by customers themselves. This would make the install base grow much faster and create even more momentum. Also I believe customers that will (are forced to) migrate to a more Windows environment will keep a yet implemented Teaming (+C) environment inn place instead of just ripping all Novell stuff out and start from scratch what we see quite frequently. So 'giving away' something today may provide us long term commitment from customers to the solution.

Submitted by Eric (not verified) on 15 February 2008 - 1:06pm.

Just want to chime in about the need for a Virtual Office replacement. That was a pretty shoddy thing for Novell to do.

Submitted by Ian (not verified) on 16 February 2008 - 8:43am.

Alex,

Has there been any talk about Cisco CallManager support as part of the Unified Communications?

Submitted by Flyingguy (not verified) on 16 February 2008 - 10:41am.

Alex, what kind of garbage is THIS???? "as opposed to GroupWise's individual productivity" ????? Tell that to any number of organizations who use shared calenders, Shared resources, Distribution Lists, etc. etc.

You know if you want to say you think Teaming is "Cooler" then Groupwise thats fine, thats your opinion, but for you to denigrate a *great* product like GroupWise with a statement like that is just beyond the pale and it is both personally insulting and infuriating.

Eric, don't waste your breath, they are not going to explain anything about messenger. They have their new toy and they are going to starting leaving GroupWise, Messenger, et. all. in the bucket.

I predict the following:

1. Bonsai will be the last release of GroupWise

2. Messenger will never see version 3

3. The file & Print server from Novell is dead after OES2

4. Novell Open WorkGroup ( NOWS ) will be left to languish on the scrap head as Netware has been.

5. Alex will delete this post.

Submitted by Sebastiaan Veld (not verified) on 17 February 2008 - 5:22am.

1) Don't think that will ever happen, that would trigger a lof of 'Exchange'.
2) True, at least not in the form we know it todat. Don't even really care, cause to most of my customers its not usable anyway; no SSO, no Web based access, no gateways (even not to other NM systems), no integration with existing products from even Novell itself. So, if Pidgin will be the future, then enhance that with a GW skin, the ability to apply policies and SSO support, ZenWorks > Remote Control etc.
3) Only if OES itself got dead. Maybe it gets partly replaced with Samba stuff, but that would be only done if there is Enterprise integration in the existing environment (iManager/eDir/Printer Profiles), but could be indeed triggered by the DSFW project. But this not al all triggerd by the Sitescape aquisition. Good Brainshare question anywy 'Future of iPrint' :>
4) Why? Methinks that T+C is a great add-on to the portfolio of products and add's what we do not have today. Hopefully Novell is smart enough to finally default all products to one portal solution and stop the web portals mess they greated in the last few years. As conferencing today uses some propierty stuff of Sitescape, it would be a great idea to start add like Asterisk support to the Conferencing part and intergrate all.
5) He, that would delete mine also.

Think at Brainshare we see a nice roadmap where we're heading. This is the time to start asking for enhancement and integration points, that could not be done without aquiring Sitescape (without rebuilding what's aready there).

Submitted by Ian (not verified) on 17 February 2008 - 8:31am.

FG,

While I won't try to tell you that your concerns aren't valid, I have to disagree with your opinion that Bonsai will be the last GroupWise. There was an informal question asked on this blog site a year ago as to what the most important product Novell produced. Almost everyone said GroupWise. I know personally, if our shop moves away from GroupWise due to stagnation or the product is out right canceled, that means only one thing: Exchange. And Exchange means that we will quickly slip to a MS only shop.

Novell has to realize that this is a common scenario. They can't afford to lose GroupWise customers. It effects so much more than just their email market. It hurts every facet of the business in turn.

Submitted by Mike (not verified) on 17 February 2008 - 12:57pm.

Flyingguy, you need to seriously bring it down a notch. I've seen other inflammatory posts by you... I really hope that the people who read these comments don't assume that all Novell customers share the same mentality which you project on these blogs.

The thing is that unlike you, Novell sees the writing on the wall. Open source is the future. If they hadn't bought SUSE, we wouldn't be having this "conversation". Novell probably would have either closed up shop or been bought out by now.

Sure, NetWare is/was a great OS, but it had its drawbacks, as every platform does. The problem is that the rest of the world wants Linux more than they want NetWare. You simply CANNOT go to a major hardware vendor's website without seeing the word "Linux" somewhere. I don't see NetWare on these sites anymore like I used to. And if the hardware vendors aren't going to support NetWare (but they will support SLES), how can you expect Novell to sit idly by and suffer a slow death? I started my professional career on NetWare 5.0 and GroupWise 5.5, and this is the first time I feel that Novell is really flourishing.

So now that Novell is a Linux vendor, an OPEN SOURCE vender, they have to start being part of the community. GW instant Messenger will go away in favor of an opensource, multi-protocol IM client (Pidgin). I'm OK with that... I can still talk to my corporate GWIM server with it. And I can also use ICQ, MSN, Jabber, Y!, etc. all on the same client, without having to maintain 5 different pieces of software. Who wants to do that? Novell understands that we don't. And if the GWIM server backend goes away, that's fine with me too because I know they will replace it with something better, not worse.

Now back to your main point about Alex's comment... GroupWise is a corporate email package. Meaning that if I want to communicate with the rest of my corporation, I have to email them. From my "individual" GroupWise mailbox. Yes, I can share out all of my folders and calendars and call it collaboration, but T+C is so much more. If you would take your head out of the sand, you would see what Novell is trying to accomplish with this product.

Welcome to 2008. Technologies change. Companies change. Their technological needs change. Dead companies do not change. Dead technology does not change. They die from stagnation. Novell is changing. And you can either stand on your soapbox and complain about the fact that you won't see a new version of NetWare in a few years, or you can embrace change and run with us.

I predict the following:

1. Bonsai will be the best version of GroupWise ever. Until Monterrey comes along.

2. Jabber will replace GWIM.

3. File and print from Novell will never die until OES dies. OES will not die for a long time. (Look how long NetWare made it.)

4. NOWS is just a collection of different Novell technologies. It will evolve too.

5. Alex doesn't care what you think.

6. You won't change.

Submitted by Flyingguy (not verified) on 17 February 2008 - 6:26pm.

Mike have you ever heard the saying, "You don't know what you got 'til its gone?".

I bleed Novell red, and the powers that be are throwing away the BEST parts of Netware, in favor of the mediocrity of Linux.

NetWare is a lousy Application Server, that is as true as the sky is blue. Conversely, Linux is a lousy File & Print Server and that is as true as the sky is blue. NSS perhaps one of the best file systems ever created and still VERY relevant but Novell has put very little effort into making it World Class on Linux. It is light years ahead of Reiser, Ext, NFS and all the rest put together, yet it is treated like a Red Headed Step child. Oh and the architect of Reiser wont be doing much from prison. I live in the same neighborhood as Hans, and while his guilt or innocence has yet yo be determined, he sits in a jail cell and cannot contribute to the project, and most of the people where we live believe he is guilty.

So I have to ask myself, *why* are the best parts of NetWare not being ported to Linux? Is it because Linus wont let them into the kernel or is it because the powers that be, simply don't see value? Take the best of what Linux has to offer and the best of what NetWare has to offer and mash them up, since that seems to be the thing these days.

We can't even get a decent GW API out of Novell that is well documented and clean, and this leads me to believe that they are going to really keep humping GW up the hill?

The problem with being part of the "community" is you can never really tell which way the community is going to turn now can you. All I see in the Linux community that is remotely stable and continues to move forward is the kernel, but the kernel alone is not Linux and even there they have fights about schedulers for crying out loud.

The Linux community is mostly about the "Technology De Jour". It takes all my fingers and all my toes to count up the various assorted and sundry different application frameworks out there all competing to do the same thing, host a freeking web page with some dynamic content.

Whether Alex cares what I think makes no difference to me in any way shape or form.

Change! I have been changing and adapting all along, but at some point I have to call these people on what I see as hugely bad decisions. I think and am proven out time and time again, is that for the greatest majority Linux users are loaners. They really don't have the concept of being a worker bee, or even managing a company full of worker bees. Most Linux users have the mistaken notion that it is "Their Computer", well it is not, it never has been and it never will be. It must be subject to the policies of the company that set it on your desktop.

Do you know why every one of my clients use GW Messenger? Because they can isolate it from the rest of the world, IM has value inside a workplace because it allows the employees to communicate with *each other* not all their pals on yahoo, or MySpace, Y!, MSN or any other other malware and virus infested networks like ICQ and get work done, because that is, after all, why the company hired them.

When a discussion of T+C came up I asked some very pertinent questions like, can someone using T+C while on vacation print a document to the printer outside their bosses office from an internet cafe' when they are on vacation? No answer. I asked would they be able to see their department directories from the T+C interface from said internet cafe'? No Answer. I asked if mail and appointments would be reflected back into GW on team calender, I got a "Well maybe, were thinking about it" kinda sorta wishy washy BS answer. Does this lead me to believe that it will be fully integrated into GW, not really! What it leads me to believe is that the T+C crew are going to just going off on their own, like most Linux projects do, without regard for what is paying the bills.

Show me T+C *rally* integrating tightly with EDir and GW and I will get excited about it, I will embrace it, until then, whatever....

Show me Linux being *really* being integrated with the best that Netware brings to the table and I will get really excited about it.

Show me SLED that comes ready to connect to a NetWare server, out of the box and I will get really really really excited about it. But no, a SLED install is pointed towards windows ( CIFS ) or SAMBA, no option for "Connect to Edirectory and Netware, it does not exist unless I really missed something when I installed my last SLED 10 Sp1 box.

Both Edir and NSS are glued on with elmers in NOWS with the Linux kernel, not integral and native. It is a poor effort at best. When Novell pulls their head out of the sand, and starts really driving the merge of best or Linux and the Best of Netware I will cheer like mad and fed-ex Alex a bottle of the beverage of his choice. When I see things like T+C really well integrated with GW I will send him a cake!

Until then I am the voice of those of us who see people like you and Novell throwing the baby out with the bath water instead of doing the hard work it takes to turn out something superior.

Submitted by Flyingguy (not verified) on 18 February 2008 - 10:34pm.

Ian,

GW *IS* the only thing keeping *anything* labeled Novell in lots of places. Messenger is another thing that helps keep GW anchored in place because its clean, it is not polluted by every flipping protocol on the planet and on top of that it seems to be pretty much virus and malware proof because you cannot do things like connect it to an ICQ,Y1,MSN,AOL or whatever virus & malware infested network some fool in your company decided to randomly connect to because he or she wants to share the latest drivel about Brittney Spears.

T+C is simply a mashup of messenger and GW, if they were to put some actual effort into GW libraries, there is you document sharing. Everything else pretty much hangs right along, shared and group calenders, etc. With tasks a group leader, supervisor or what not can assign tasks to people that report to them. I have looked at T+C a couple of different times now and haven't seen any evidence of that, not to mention all the status tracking, etc, etc.

So as I mentioned in another post on this topic, when I see T+C tightly coupled to the GW backend I will get excited about it. If those kinds of features cannot be accomplished because someone else does not have a backend capable of that, then we simply sell them the GW backend to drive all of this. Re-Brand it whatever you want if that will sell T+C because its not "that old GroupWise thing".

All I really see in T+C is a "cool" thing. Icons with kids with spiky hair and cartoon images.

Give me a set of API's that with C or C++ bindings and DOCUMENTATION that I can run on a Linux server (instead of pushing around SOAP/XML) and I can build the same thing, only better, based on GW's *proven* DB and engine. The rest is just CSS and design and I can buy someone to do that, cheaply, these days.

As it stands here are the server requirements:

# 2-bit/x86 processor or 64-bit/x86 processor running in 32-bit mode
# Java Virtual Machine (JVM) 1.5 or later
# Any of the following server operating systems, plus the latest support pack:

* Novell Open Enterprise Server 2.0 (Linux Kernel)
* SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server 10 sp1
* RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 or 4
* Windows 2003 Server

# Liferay Portal 4.3 (provided)
# Databases

* MySQL
* Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or 2005 (Windows platforms only)
* Oracle 8i, 9i or 10g

So basically they are duplicating *most* of the functionality of GW, but without all the finer bits. When asked if integration with GW was going to happen, then answer was a wishy washy "well maybe after the 1st release". No do you really wonder why I made the prediction I did?

Submitted by Sebastiaan Veld (not verified) on 19 February 2008 - 5:49am.

I believe we al got that 'maybe' answer when we asked for a proper integration (roadmap) of GW and T+C. If SS was not aquired then that would mean rewriting or recreating the entire solution or decide on having just loosly connected systems. So, now the aquisition is there, the teams can even work closer together and I think (hope) with T+C '2' there will be portlets specifickly written to leverage GW functionality and turn that in business advantage, cause if that's not the kind of integration level where we're heading then what's the advantage of running a GW+TC environment vs using either Exchange or Notes with T+C?

Submitted by Alex Evans (not verified) on 19 February 2008 - 10:32am.

Yes, there has been talk of it. There are a couple of partners out there that integrate into Cisco CallManager - TopCall and ALI I am pretty sure about, AVST and Active Voice possibly.

Submitted by Alex Evans (not verified) on 19 February 2008 - 10:33am.

For the record we are already roadmapped out past Bonsai. As for the rest of the Troll I am not even going to dignify it with an answer

Submitted by Roger (not verified) on 19 February 2008 - 11:08am.

I think its unfair to claim that Flyingguy is a Troll, but I would say that he may have gone rather OTT (over the top) with his comments on this tread, but he is rasing a number of vaild issues regarding the status of the current release of T+C within a Novell based environment. (Some of his other comments I disagree with, but they are off topic).

Someone (maybe you) has already posted a reply to questions I raised about future T+C intergration with GW, but Messenger still seems to be left out in the cold. As Flyingguy has already noted many deployers of Messenger use it because it is an in-house full audited system that does not provide ease access to third party IM gateways. Also anyone who has a GW focussed Backberry BES server installed is also now intergrated with Messenger for their Blackberry chat tool. The result is that the more intergrated on Novell products you are the less likely that you will want to deploy T+C.

At the moment T+C is far too general in its intergration - a bit here a little there. Hopefully with the acquisition Novell can retain the general features but also speed up the intergration of Novell products. The key thing is that Novell now has the possiblity of using an open source portal for many of its GUI and intergration needs - so maybe getting back to ideas that were talked about in the days of NPS. It would be very usefull to have things like the iPrint and NetStore GUIs provided as JRS186 portlets.

Roger

Submitted by Alex Evans (not verified) on 19 February 2008 - 3:36pm.

So, the honest truth about GWIM is that yes, we have to make a decision on it's future and no, that decision has not been made. Obviously we currently have 2 IM solutions, and our current GW base are very used to having IM as part of their options. In essence it makes little difference what the eventual solution is, under the covers, as long as it does what our customers expect.

GW and T+C integrations are absolutely key going forwards and will be a big focus. These are the types of discussions we are having in house - how to flesh out out UM and UC strategy, what GW/T+C integrations look like and where we take GWIM, or Conferencing. They are all parts of the same discussion to be fair.

Finally, on the JSR168 'standard' - unfortunately it's not too much of a standard, more of a guideline. A portlet that is JSR168 compliant that is written for a particular portal that is also JSR168 compliant will not necessarily work on every other JSR168 compliant portal. That's what we are finding right now.

Submitted by Roger (not verified) on 20 February 2008 - 4:01am.

>>So, the honest truth about GWIM is that yes, we have to make a decision on it’s future and no, that decision has not been made.

The key thing is that Novell needs to make a decision and to a lot more open on these issues - Over the years lot of Novell products have ended up in limbo (which is where I would say GWIM is) as no decision were made or were not published. I can't be the only person who will not now touch a new Novell product until release 2.0 as that shows that there is at least some long term commitment. As for GWIM, Novell may get more third party support if it at least published the SDK correctly so that people could develop against it.

>>Finally, on the JSR168 ’standard’ - unfortunately it’s not too much of a standard, more of a guideline. A portlet that is JSR168 compliant that is written for a particular portal that is also JSR168 compliant will not necessarily work on every other JSR168 compliant portal. That’s what we are finding right now

I'm aware of its limitations (JSR268 is better) as it very much defines an interface but not the framework it must work within, the key thing is that at least Novell has a good foundation with the Liferay product - it just needs Novell to help out its LDAP intergration. Portlets are I think the best option you have unless you plan to 1) write your own platform (again!) or 2) code for Sharepoint.

Roger

Submitted by John Yorke (not verified) on 22 February 2008 - 2:24am.

I think the biggest issue is that T+C isn't a portal, it is a portal application. This means Novell doesn't actually have a portal solution (although it used Liferay for the current install of T+C). As delivered the T+C components not only require better integration with Groupwise and OES but also require better integration with Liferay. Is Liferay going to be acquired, is T+C going to be installable on a wide array of java portals, or possibly both? Personally I would hope Liferay is acquired and Novell makes Liferay compatible not only Java portlets but with PHP portlets and Mono/.net portlets as well. It would be nice to see all the Novell web applications or config screens become portlets so users can access Groupwise in the portal, admins can use iManager in the portal, etc. At the same time I wouldn't want Novell to anchor T+C to Liferay in the process since some companies will want to use the same portal one of their enterprise applications is using.

Features I would like to see for T+C:
1. A demo install with folders for fictional company including Bug/Issue tracking, tasks, milestones, etc. This is something I would like to see for every product Novell sells (i.e. the same fictional company in every product demo and all the pieces linked together).
2. Liferay integration (or hiding Liferay from the users better) so users don't see similar info in two places (i.e. user profile data, granting access, etc). The current setup makes things less intuitive. I've had a user wonder why their picture isn't showing up in Teaming after uploading it and they uploaded it to Liferay and not their personal Teaming page.
3. A way to see all tasks assigned to a user without needing to select all the folders in the Task Summary portlet. As more and more task folders are created the user would need to add more and more task folders to their Task Summary portlet which is something a user can forget to do. I'm not exactly sure why non-task folders can be added to the Task Summary portlet.
4. Allow individual tasks assigned to milestones on the task form and the milestone form. I would think that would be more usable for most installations where there is a core project team for a particular project rather than a whole bunch of teams per milestone. For the current milestone setup to be useful you need multiple task folders for each milestone. I'm confused by how that scenario would make sense... hence a demo install would be nice.
5. Allow tasks to have a start date with no end date. Some tasks are assigned at a certain date but will be done in spare time and really have no end date (i.e. low priority tasks). Such tasks aren't actually due and shouldn't show in the task view with a due date.
6. I've had users ask why tasks they are currently working on aren't showing up in the Today view. There is confusion over whether "Today" means "Tasks to work on Today" (i.e. active tasks with a start date before today and not complete) or "Due Today". Making it clearer would be nice.

"So, the honest truth about GWIM is that yes, we have to make a decision on it’s future and no, that decision has not been made." - Alex Evans

The problem is that is sometimes seems like there are too many outstanding decisions to be made at Novell. Customers are confused. We want to understand the big picture of how everything ties together or will tie together, which products are not part of the vision but are being maintained purely for legacy, which products are part of the vision, and which products will be coming soon to complete the current vision but there doesn't seem to be a big picture. A customer which is introduced or re-introduced to Novell at this point can't make heads or tails of what is going to be coming or going. Is it iManager, ConsoleOne, or something else, is it iFolder, web folder, Teaming folder, Samba folder, NCP folder, or every type of folder, is it GWIM, Pidgin or something else, is OES here to stay as an add-on to SLES or is the plan that OES is an intermediate step which will be dissolved with some components going to Groupwise, some to Teaming, and some to SLES, is BorderManager coming or going, are Mac clients an important platform to Novell or not, what is happening to the ZENworks Suite components now that Desktop Management is ZCM 10... it can be very confusing. At least the vision is clearer than it was two to three years ago.

Submitted by John Yorke (not verified) on 22 February 2008 - 2:36am.

Oops... I forgot to mention that the tests of Teaming are going well enough that we will certainly be buying despite the hopes for improvements.

Submitted by Roger (not verified) on 22 February 2008 - 6:09am.

>> At the same time I wouldn’t want Novell to anchor T+C to Liferay.

As Alex Evans has already noted in a comment to me, portlets currently do not travel well between portal servers. This is because the JSR 168 standard only covers some basic aspects of the environment that the portal must operate in, everything else is dependent on the underlying API of the portal server. Ther next version of the standard (JSR 268) defines a lot more of the environment that the portal will operate in.

To give you an idea of how limited JSR 168 is - there is no standard way to handle Inter-portlet communications so portlet developers (or portal providers) must each create their own solution.

Roger

Submitted by Alex Evans (not verified) on 22 February 2008 - 11:35am.

Roger,
This blog is all about openness. We are discussing our Messenger strategy and there are a number of different tracks we can take. I don't post them all here because that would not be appropriate. What has become clear is that GW customers want Messenger - what is also clear is that we also need to make this decision based on where we want to play in the Unified Communications market. GroupWise Bonsai will ship with GWIM and Teaming+Conferencing will continue to ship with it's Messenger. It is clear that we plan to integrate these roadmaps - how we do that is not decided but we need to do it in a way that is not painful to our customer base. And lets face it, the underlying technology doesn't matter to the vast majority of the users as long as they can get things done.

Submitted by Flyingguy (not verified) on 27 February 2008 - 1:10am.

Alex,

I submit that you could not be more wrong, "And lets face it, the underlying technology doesn’t matter to the vast majority of the users as long as they can get things done." - Alex Evans

If you base the technologies on the "I want this to be able to connect with *everything* or &anything* or any combination therein, then you must construct the code to deal with all the problems that "*everything* or &anything* or any combination therein" bring to the table.

If you decide to build in hooks to YIM then you will expose all your users to the security vulnerabilities that YIM brings to the table, or AOL, MSN, ICQ to name but a few.

What *sells* Novell prodcuts, and lets face it, that is the point of all this, is that fact that Novell represents *security*, it represents *stability* it represents the corporate investment that businesses make in technology.

Right now we have the ability to lock down GWIM, we can freeze its port, we can control it. That is not the model that other IM clients use, since they will probe for any open port ( these days its mostly port 80 ) until they can connect to their server, to serve advertising, to count eyeballs.

Can you not see the dangers involved here? Can you not see the huge amount of Risk that Novell will be exposed to? All its going to take is for some IM plug-in to slam down a system and the word will spread like wildfire, you will get slammed on /. Digg and just about every place else.

You call me a troll ( or my posts trolls ), and you are entitled to your opinion, but it does not change the fact that you are playing on a slippery slope with *a perceived* ( at least on my part ) lack of appreciation of just how slippery that slope can and will get get.

To amplify Rogers comment, Novell has an *apparent* lack of both decisiveness and focus. I deal with customers and have to answer rather pointed questions that I can't answer, and frankly there is no answer because Novell appears to be going in 37.3 directions simultaneously.

Submitted by Alex Evans (not verified) on 27 February 2008 - 9:28am.

And yet again you miss the point. The USER does not care what the technology under the covers is as long as they can get their work done. They really don't care about any of the points you bring up about technology, they don't even consider any of those things as being important. The admin does care, but more often than not in modern organizations, they are not the ones with the final say. At the end of the day as far as 99% of the organization is concerned, if it looks like a messenger and they are able to communicate with their peers in the manner to which they have become accustomed then they really don't care what it looks like beyond the fingers/keyboard interface and eye/screen interface.

Submitted by Roger (not verified) on 27 February 2008 - 2:37pm.

>> The admin does care, but more often than not in modern organizations, they are not the ones with the final say.

Very true, but in many companies its not the users in charge, its the security group or the legal team. Your post is very much about the frontend client that the user sees, while mine and Flyingguy's are far more about the backend data store and its managablity. There is a world of difference between a general public IM platform and an enterprise IM platform but it can be summed up as "control" and "acountablity". The thing is that Novell's product got these bit right with the 2.0 release as its directory based, has a central audit log of all communications and is a closed system.

I can also see Novell's point of view that it will be costly to update the client with new features let alone the adding of gateways, but if Novell was to post what is meant to be a released SDK others could provide such features as plugins.

As a side note if Novell must look around at third party solutions, you should take a look at JiveSoft's offerings as they do both commercial and GPL based solutions that you could OEM or fork.

Roger

Submitted by Flyingguy (not verified) on 28 February 2008 - 9:20pm.

And if they do add hooks for gateways then unless they want to see Corporate America shed anything remotely resembling GWIM or T+C then that darn sure better make sure that the option to add a gateway is under the *complete* control of the system administrator.

its like allowing, or NOT the end users ability to let GW link in external e-mail accounts and News Servers in GW. If the system administrator wants to allow that sort of thing, then fine, but it is completely appropriate to be able to deny that sort of thing as well.