Blog Entry
Today is a very special day in the history of Novell and especially in the history of GroupWise. On this day, 20 years ago (8/08/88) - WordPerfect Corporation released WordPerfect Office 2.0 for DOS LANs (based on WordPerfect Library, but with e-mail and group scheduling).
We currently have three people on the GroupWise Engineering team that were either working for Novell or actually working on GroupWise at that time. Jay Parker started with Novell in July 1987 and he has always worked on GroupWise. Tom Urquhart and Kevin Crtuchfield began working at Novell that November - 1988. There are 6 other engineers - including myself - who began working at Novell in 1989 and 1990.
Today marks 20 years of history with a company and product that has been a fascinating part of many of our careers and lives. In 1988, I was still single, listening to 'Don't Worry, Be Happy' by Bobby McFerrin, going to school and looking for my first computer job :)
When I arrived to the GroupWise product, Novell was preparing to release GroupWise 5.0. My first assignment with GroupWise was working on the Address Book with Dennis Foster - who is also still with Novell. My job was to code the 'Name Completion Control'. I worked on it during the day, dreamed about it at night and solved problems with my designs and bugs during the commute and during lunch discussions. We shipped the product and I attended my very first BrainShare in Salt Lake City. Meet the Experts - I had a line waiting to talk to me for 4 hours - I answered questions non-stop about the Address Book, Filters and, of course, the Name Completion Control. One attendee took a look at the Name Completion Control and declared - "now, that is sexy" - I was hooked!! I knew I had found a place where I could be happy!
It is 2008 and we are about to go to Public BETA with the 8th major version of this amazing product and technology. GroupWise is better than ever, it is used by more people than ever in its history and is one of the most profitable products in Novell's portfolio. How exciting!
Please share with me your memories and history about your experiences with this product and with the amazing community of experts, partners, technicians and sales people that continue to believe and rally for its continued success - may there be another 20 years!!
Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).
It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.
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User Comments
Only 10 years for me
Submitted by aevans on 8 August 2008 - 9:17am.
I have been with the GroupWise team for 10 years - started in the support center in Capelle, outside Rotterdam. When I joined Dimitri Sapanidis and Michael Baehr were my office roommates and mentors and we were just releasing support packs for both 5.2 and 5.5. Both of those guys still work with Novell in Capelle, along with my other mentor Rob van Kooten. It has always amazed me how long most of the team have been here - I am the newbie, with only 10 years under my belt. GroupWise seems to invoke passions in people that makes them want to stick around.
Long Live GroupWise and all who sail in her.
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Happy Birthday GroupWise!
Submitted by nwman2 on 8 August 2008 - 9:35am.
It was WordPerfect Office 4 at the time in the early 1990's. I was an electronics tech at a manufacturing firm. So, my first exposure to the product was that of a user. By the time I began working for the IT department, the company I was working for was transitioning from WPO4 to "GroupWise". The MCNE I eventually earned while working there was in GroupWise.
For a number of years, I ran a bulletin board (even participated in FidoNet) so I was fascinated by the communication abilities of GroupWise. Now, years later, I work in a higher education environment and I am still administering the GroupWise system here. Keep up the good work, Novell!
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It's been like family
Submitted by richardbliss on 8 August 2008 - 9:39am.
I joined the WordPerfect Office Team in 1990. My brother, Rodney Bliss, talked me into supporting the product because he told me email was going to be big.
Many of the people in those early days are still around supporting the product.
Brandon Black is with Messaging Architects, Sean Kirkby founded Concentrico, Sue Kimball married Jeff Stratford, and together they created Nexic, Greg Peterson, Morris Blackham who didn't have a desk in the beginning and would come to work each day and simply sit at anyone's desk who wasn't there that day.
Trevor Harrison was a young teenager with a big attitude who went on to fame and fortune as the NGWList sysops.
Sean Neuemann, Cleve Wright, and many others all became like family over the years as we have all supported this great product.
Thanks to Dean and his team for giving us something worth supporting.
more comments at http://gwbliss.blogspot.com
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Started with GroupWise in 1991
Submitted by ssalgy on 8 August 2008 - 10:00am.
I began my career at WordPerfect as an editor in the documentation department, working on WordPerfect Office (now known as GroupWise). I became the manager of that team the following year, and we churned out printed manuals and online help files for all the different platforms.
During a cyclical lull in our workload after a major release, I began to explore the idea of keeping my writers and editors busy and productive by creating an online magazine that would provide extra tidbits of GroupWise knowledge that didn't make it into the manuals. (As you know, documentation is written while the product is still being tested and fine-tuned, and printed manuals have to be sent to press long before the last bug is fixed. This left a gap in the manuals, and we thought it would be cool to fill it.)
As a team we began conceptualizing such a site. We called it "GroupWise Cool Solutions" -- and set it up so that we'd write a new batch of tips, Q&A and articles every week. We created a special GroupWise mailbox (gwmag@novell.com -- still in use today) in case anyone wanted to email in a question for us to research and answer in the next week. We settled on a conversational, chatty writing style, in contrast to the technical writing style we used in official documentation. We set up a group in the Address Book so we could send out emails notifying people when something was new on the site.
On December 15, 1996 we posted the first edition. To our astonishment, we started getting email from places like Perm, Russia with questions about GroupWise usage. We taped a huge world map on the wall in the hall, and would put red stickers on cities from which we received email. We even started taping questions on the wall so the team could see what was being asked. It helped us form a clear, detailed picture of our users -- which helped enormously in all of the writing we did, as well as how we organized the site. (We call this a "persona" nowadays.)
The GroupWise engineers were highly responsive -- we'd ask them for answers to things that stumped us, and they'd supply levels of detail that would give us nice meaty responses to post.
We quickly realized that the uni-directional "magazine" approach was not going to be as interesting as a more interactive approach for this site. What people wanted was a chance to submit their own tips and tricks, and learn from others who were using GroupWise in a creative and practical way.
We opened it up for submissions, and that opened the floodgates. People started sharing their nifty ways of setting up GroupWise Rules. People started sharing their horror stories about vacation rule bounces. We got cool ideas about using shared folders to coordinate on projects, using blind copying as a way to send mass mail that didn't feel like mass mail, and very amusing stories about the "retract" feature. We began sending t-shirts out as rewards for people who submitted content, and were happy to see that 100% cotton t-shirts were an international currency.
Sometimes the workarounds revealed clumsy user interface problems, and the engineers used that insight to make things better. Sometimes the questions revealed gaps in the manual that we filled in the next release. Sometimes the questions revealed the need for whole new features.
It was a grand adventure that yielded unexpected dividends, uniting the GroupWise userbase, and allowing them to help support each other.
After all these years, I still love GroupWise. She just keeps getting better and better, and I am proud to have been a part of her success, in this small way.
One more note:
I remember how they got all the WP employees to use the new "scheduler" function for setting up meetings. (Scheduling meetings only works when EVERYONE uses it.) The execs issued a memo that said that if a meeting wasn't scheduled via WP Office scheduler, we weren't required to attend it. That did the trick. Within a couple of weeks, all of our meetings were being scheduled via GroupWise.
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20 years, is that all?
Submitted by anonymous (not verified) on 8 August 2008 - 5:10pm.
I bought my first network in late 1988, netware 2.15 and with it was wordperfect office 2. I broke it so badly when installed it, took days to sort it all out. When I was done everyone in the office had supervisor rights to the sys volume. I learned, we all have.
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And may we all remember this 20 years from now!
Submitted by dzanre on 10 August 2008 - 11:39am.
Of course, by then I hope to be retired :)
I too am a long-time GroupWise user/admin/consultant, and have many fond memories of the people and places that GroupWise has taken me! I started out with WordPerfect Office 2.0 in 1989, and it's been no looking back for me.
I've posted more comments at http://www.caledonia.net/blog
Danita
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I *heart* GroupWise
Submitted by tvissoc on 10 August 2008 - 6:17pm.
I started working with GroupWise 4.1 back in (I think) '96. I inherited the system from a co-worker that was moving on to other exciting things.
Our system consisted of 4.1 running on Solaris. cc-mail and Async gateways running on an OS2 box. One of the two I think was a DOS version running on OS2. It was an interesting setup.
Once we decided to move to a Windows NT network, we timed it with an upgrade to GroupWise 5.0... or was it 5.1... heck, I can't remember...
After a pilot test of converting our 4.1 mailboxes to the 5.x format on Windows and Netware, it was a no-brainer that we would roll out on Netware. I seem to recall that it took ten times as long on Windows NT as it did on Netware. This also got me excited because I could finally use the knowledge I gained from my Netware training.
That migration to 5.x was my real-world training/introduction to GroupWise. I learned alot and began to love the product, even though many of our "customers" liked to call the product GroupStupid, or GroupDumb.
I maintained the system through version upgrades, hardware upgrades, additions of Anti-Spam, Anti-virus products. Blackberry support, etc...
The sad part of my story is that our company was purchased by a much larger company. That company runs Lotus Notes, so I had to retire the GroupWise system about a year ago.
You know those "customers" that called the product "GroupStupid"? They now realize how WISE the product really was.
I miss working with GroupWise and Netware. I stay subscribed to the email lists and other Novell updates. I hope to one day return to working with the product if the right opportunity comes my way.
GroupWise #1 fan,
Tony
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Wow time screams by, huh?
Submitted by anonymous (not verified) on 11 August 2008 - 7:15am.
Twenty years. Wow.
My first exposure (no pun) was WP Office at a nuclear power plant, when we switched from Wang Word Processing to Word Perfect, from terminals to PCs. We also launched Word Perfect Office, with that neat menuing system that allowed you to switch from one open app to another, while in DOS. While in WP Office, beware of selecting a busy search, as that would lock up your PC for a long while.
Then came the Windows version, where you had the message in a nice Windows format, but had to scroll down in the tiny message Window.
Representatives from Word Perfect Corp. would come on site and give end user training classes to the users, heaving out packets of plain or peanut M&M's to the folks there, for answering a question correctly.
The strong user feedback loop made both products very strong and users felt they had the opportunity to design the next version of the product, merely by asking for new features.
Happy Birthday and don't be afraid of that big bully called Exchange. Deep down, he's a very shallow individual. He needs to spend money to make himself feel better.
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GroupWise Support Semds Best Wishes
Submitted by dmpalmer on 11 August 2008 - 10:15am.
I have the good fortune to work with a large number of GroupWise backline support engineers and support engineers that work with our large accounts. When I saw Dean's happy birthday wish, I began polling our engineers on their years supporting WordPerfect Office/GroupWise and the earliest product they supported.
Here is a quick list of those that responded. There are many others who have similar years, but did not respond.
Tom Smith - 19 years - Office/Library 2.0
Bert Workman - 19 years - Office/Library 2.0
Andy Peck - 17 years - Office 3.0
Rita Parker - 18 years - Office/Library 2.0
Dana Palmer - 11 years - GroupWise 4.1
Jeff Lay - 10 years - GroupWise 4.1
Obviously, we have a love for GroupWise that has kept us around for so many years.
Tom Smith even reminded me that GroupWise almost wasn't GroupWise. The proposed name when Office was renamed was "Symetry" instead of GroupWise.
Happy Birthday GroupWise.
Dana Palmer
Novell GroupWise Support Product Lead
dmpalmer@novell.com
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10 years of GroupWise fun
Submitted by anonymous (not verified) on 11 August 2008 - 12:37pm.
in '88 I wasn't working with Novell software. that started just in '89 (first with Banyan Vines, soon later with Novell NetWare; in fact I was a Vines fan over NetWare).
it took till '98 (10 years ago in october) that I started touching on GroupWise, when a switch of jobs (for which I thank my gf back then) led into migrating GroupWise 4.1 to 5.2. after that I became known as 'the GW admin' of a company with 1000's of IT consultants / professionals. that's where I got hooked up.
ever since it's on my plate, I eat it, I blog it, I run a website on all of its facettes (GWCheck.com, since 2002) and I'm a VP for the GUG-NL.
GroupWise is part of my heartbeat.
I've got to meet great people, guru's and admins, all part of the GroupWise community. I met the guru's first time in 2004 at the 1st EMEA Summit by Erno & Advisor / GroupWiseR.
Buon Anno, GroupWise ! GroupWise IT !.
Gert
GWCheck.com - the best GW site (Tay Kratzer)
GroupWise is fun !
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Groupwise on Linux?
Submitted by anonymous (not verified) on 12 August 2008 - 6:20am.
GroupWise seems like a cool and noteworthy piece of software. I presently use Open SuSE and Kontact. I will try out Groupwise soon.
Master Rod
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Groupwise on Linux
Submitted by anonymous (not verified) on 13 August 2008 - 1:20pm.
Please do, if you are looking for rock solid software. I came into situation where the formere supplier mingled versions on Netware, the hard disk crashed, the MTA was gone, only the Post Office (POA) was restored from the crashed SYS Netware harddisk (with God on our site).
The customer's income was based on every send e-mail, so imagine !!!!
It took blood, sweat and tears, and luckily it was Christmas time (meaning no business mails) but everything got restored and updated from that mixed Grouwwise 5.1 to the Groupwise 6.5.
Never seen a customer that happy.
Try this with any database oriented solution and you will see a different customer face !
Danny, Belgium
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My first version
Submitted by anonymous (not verified) on 12 August 2008 - 6:30am.
For the long time employees I started in the time that
OFFGEN.EXE was the tool to use :)
Rob
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17 years...
Submitted by anonymous (not verified) on 12 August 2008 - 6:46am.
I started with OFFGEN.EXE then used AD.EXE moved on to NWadmin and for now working with C1 :)
btw what happend with the TAS gateway???
Rob
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Office 2.0
Submitted by dzanre on 12 August 2008 - 8:03am.
In about 1997 I received a call from a customer wanting to add a user to their WordPerfect Office 2.0 installation. I remember just sitting at a DOS prompt trying to remember the commands (there was no "gui" menu for 2.0), and it finally came to me .
I found this today - ooooooooh:
http://www.retrosoftware.com/11512.html
Danita
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GroupWise "My Curriculum Vitae"
Submitted by anonymous (not verified) on 13 August 2008 - 4:32am.
After finishing my studies in Germany and France in computer science I started in 1995 a job at a Novell partner in Switzerland. That was when GroupWise came to Novell through the acquisition of WordPerfect.
Since than I have done many installations and consultations of GroupWise Systems in Switzerland and installed GroupWise Domains, Post Offices, Gateways all over the world. I visited Brainshares in Salt Lake City or Barcelona, GroupWise Advisor Summit or GWAVACon. I had many contacts to people working for Novell, Novell partners or customers.
Because in 1996 there was no one in Switzerland available to teach GroupWise Administration I became CNI and was the first GroupWise CNI in Switzerland.
At the beginning of my career the GroupWise Administration was done with AD.exe, GroupWise Domains were connected to each other via Modem and the Async Gateways, other Gateways (Fax, X.400, Lotus Notes) were installed on DOS or OS/2.
Than GroupWise was integrated to NDS (now we speak about eDirectory) and Administration was done with NWAdmin. The first companies started moving away from NetWare to Windows Servers but still keeping GroupWise running on Windows.
Now companies are migrating from GroupWise to MS Exchange or visa versa moving their backbone to Linux Servers and syncing their mobile devices over the GroupWise Mobile Server.
We are living in a fast moving world and I hope that GroupWise will still turn long in our networks and I am curious about the next coming version GroupWise 8.
Richard
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Groupwise for since 97
Submitted by Anonymous on 13 August 2008 - 12:02pm.
Converted from MS Mail to GroupWise 5.0 in 1997, was much better but the NLM's leaked memory like crazy, I remember rebooting the servers every morning for the first couple months until patches came out (whew)
Stuck with it, and it has been a stable product all in all. The worst bug we came across was in a fairly early version where when you made a global client option change from NWAdmin, it blew away every persons password (3500 accounts) that sucked :) -Will
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GroupWise since 1994ish
Submitted by Anonymous on 13 August 2008 - 12:11pm.
I started working at my job back in 1994. It was somewhere around a year or two after that when we first started using GroupWise. I was a PC tech then. The first and only Email platform our department has installed and supported for our users began with GroupWise 4.1, after Novell acquired it from WordPerfect Corp. Somewhere around 1996/1997 I became the GroupWise Administrator and have served in that capacity ever since.
We're currently running GroupWise 7 and it's still a rock solid product, even running on Windows 2003 Servers! (We just had to install a little more hardware. ;-) ) I hope to still be running versions 8, 9, 10, and wherever else Novell decides to take it in the future.
Thanks Novell!
Ron
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Since Word Perfect Office 2.0
Submitted by Anonymous on 13 August 2008 - 2:19pm.
Running the Async Gateway between offices with a dial-up connection. I think that was the late 80's.
Bill
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The lucky star at Novell
Submitted by anonymous (not verified) on 13 August 2008 - 3:31pm.
It was a smart move from Ray Noorda to buy WordPerfect Inc. Many commented otherwise, but eDirectory and Groupwise where part of the deal. Later it was a smart move to make it available on Netware, Windows and today Linux.
Too the CEO and the Board : this means something !!!!
A very long time ago (about 25 years) I bought myself a second hand computer in order to sort out the many pictures I took. That computer was an Olivetti M20 with a far better CPU than the PC. However I realised within hours that a computer was one thing. Making it work another. So after long hours at looking at a prompt, I was able to return the second hand powerfull non PC and bough a brandnew Ollivetti M 24(also branded as ATT&T). It still had a far better CPU than IBM (Intel 8086) and better graphic (close to VGA). Learned from my first experience I also bought WordPerfect and a database and demanded half day of training. Since then I'm sticking with WordPerfect. A bit later I bough WP Library 1.0 wich later became what is today celebrated as Groupwise.
IT became my profession and I had the luck to meet the people behind Groupwise, and people like Danita and Richard Bliss (hello there).
I could tell stories, but others may do far better.
There is only one sadness I have about Groupwise. My sadness is the ever missing standalone Groupwise-client. I believe this would have made and still will make a big difference. Everybody knows Outlook because you can use it on a standalone PC and in conjunction with Exchange. Many know Thunderbird, in companion with Firefox. Brand recognition is important. Technically it is feasable (doable for the Americans) to make Groupwise look as a standalone client. I did it many times in order to obstruct users to use Outlook. So brand it as a standalone client. and Novell might become Talk of the Town. Make it cheap or for free, but put it on as much computers as possible (and add a very easy GWCHECK).
Danny Sunt, Belgium
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Happy Birthday GroupWise!
Submitted by timking on 13 August 2008 - 5:51pm.
When I joined the support team at WordPerfect Pacific in August, 1992 my WP Office 3.0 mailbox was up and running before I even had a desk. That's the first time I saw GroupWise, as an Office 3.0 DOS end user. 18 months later I was supporting major Customers throughout Australia as they upgraded to WP Office 4.1.
I'm now a Premium Service Engineer in Novell's Sydney office. My 16th anniversary at WordPerfect/Novell is only days away, and this anniversary will see my mailbox upgraded for the 5th time, to Bonsai. I still specialize in GroupWise, I still support many of the GroupWise Customers I've been working with since 1994, and I still eagerly await every new version of GroupWise with the same enthusiasm as I did with Office 4.1 all those years ago.
So thanks Dean. You and your team continue to deliver an excellent product with every version, and every new version renews my enthusiasm for GroupWise.
Tim
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GroupWise Since 97
Submitted by anonymous (not verified) on 13 August 2008 - 7:00pm.
Supporting GroupWise 4.2 running on OS2 is my first step in my career, then we start using various products produced by Novell, e.g. Netware, Zen, Border Manager, etc. I had a great fun with them.
As time goes, I sadly recognise that my life is getting more difficult as the market is full of MS products and my company started his steps to moving out from Novell.
Why? "Support and Compatibility" reason, and also Marketing .....
Currently we are using GroupWise 7 and personally looking forward to the up-coming version.
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Been using it most of that time...
Submitted by anonymous (not verified) on 14 August 2008 - 3:29pm.
We started experimenting with GroupWise 4.1 in 1989 or 1990 when a colleague got the software and a 5-user license at a Novell Users Group meeting.
WordPerfect was our Word Processing package at the time, and Novell Perfect Office Professional included a GroupWise 4.1 license, so as we needed WordPerfect, we ordered it that way.
My colleague left to work somewhere else and I became the Network and E-Mail Administrator in late 1990.
In about 2000 or so, we migrated to GW 5.5, and are currently moving to GW 7 ~ and only have one PostOffice left to migrate.
It's been a painfully slow process because the GW 7 client isn't backward compatible to GW 5.5. We're now using ZENworks to roll out the GW 7 client.
And it leaves me wondering why Novell doesn't have "canned" ZENworks packages for Novell products, like GroupWise Clients and Client32?
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Boy do I feel old...
Submitted by anonymous (not verified) on 14 August 2008 - 6:35pm.
First contact with WordPerfect Office was v2.0 while working with a small non-profit legal advocacy group in Western Massachusetts way back when... they used it to link 3 offices together in the region, and other than an occasional quirk with the 2400baud modems, it was rock solid.
Since then, I've had my fingers on each successive version of WPO and GroupWise, installing SMB's with NetWare and GroupWise. Looking forward to getting my fingers into GW8, too! Having managed both GroupWise and Exchange systems (as well as Banyan Vines Mail, cc:mail, and others), in my experience, GW has them beat. While no platform is perfect, GW gets pretty darned close.
So... Happy Birthday, GroupWise... from one old salt to another... Keep the messages flowing!
Just one question though... what were you guys drinking when you determined that convoluted message flow? Yikes! One could get vertigo trying to trace that too fast!
Mike G
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Are there any newbies?
Submitted by skapanen on 17 August 2008 - 10:37pm.
Everybody seems to have used GW for ages...
Are there any newbies?
We started with GW 6.0 in 2001, now GW7 and still running on Netware.
-sk
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Since WPoffice 3.x
Submitted by 9597711 on 19 August 2008 - 4:10am.
I remember SYSGEN from WPoffice and the fast, stable DOS screens of those days. SYSGEN-ning the wrong way one day, disabled all my users. Fortunately, the right SYSGEN 2 secs after everybody grabbed their phone complaining why thet could not enter their mail, enabled everybody again. I was the first BIG MISTAKE i ever made.
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From the beginning
Submitted by rascal on 21 August 2008 - 11:32am.
We've started using Groupwise when it was Wordperfect office in the 80's We upgraded from an intranet collaboration suite called "Higgins" The Netware 2.0a server ran on hardware built by Novell and had an enormous 60 MB drive. When the DOS SMTP gateway came out, we almost went with a dial-up internet connection, but decided to go with the 56k dedicated fat pipe instead.
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From the days of F7
Submitted by jmchugh on 6 February 2009 - 5:40pm.
I started with the IT department at a community college in '89 and immediately inherited a half-installed Netware 2.15 network. We migrated the admin staff from from WordStar on Televideo terminals to Wordperfect and WP Office v2 on some very powerful 286 systems. We've stayed with WPOffice/Groupwise ever since though Wordperfect didn't survive the MS marketing onslaught.
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