Blog Entry

Original post date: 3 September 08

Introducing GroupWise 8!!

Public beta of Bonsai is here! Also the code name is gone – the next version of GroupWise is officially GroupWise 8! Please download it at: www.novell.com/beta

Along with our authorized beta sites, our internal Novell IS&T team and several customers and partners, we are pleased to bring you a very solid, well tested and superbly engineered update to the Novell Collaboration family. As preparation for public beta, GroupWise has gone through an extensive round of testing, validation and automated review. Here are a few highlights:

Automation: The Quality Control team has continued an effort to automate several of our test cases and testing processes. The automated tests are run every day as soon as a new build of the code with the latest changes is complete. The automated test cases continue to expand in number and coverage. They are our first indication that we have a solid build on a daily basis. The automation test cases have not failed once in the last 45 days.

Test Cases: The testing organization has written and executed over 9000 test cases, many of them multiple times in order to catch regressions and ensure quality. The P1 test cases represent about 8300 of the overall test case database and were recently executed again as part of our public beta preparedness. Those test cases passed at 93%. Engineering has already fixed several of the issues that were uncovered by those test cases and we will target the rest of them to be resolved before FCS.

Authorized BETA sites: We have had excellent participation from the 50+ authorized beta sites. They recommended and approved that we move on to public beta. Several of the beta sites have already deployed GroupWise 8 into their production systems and environments. Their participation, input and testing has been invaluable and they have helped shape the product as well as find issues and validate scenarios.

Internal Rollout: Our own IS&T department has been very aggressive in making sure that GroupWise 8 is rolled out and being used by Novell as a corporation. We have almost every Post Office inside of Novell running GroupWise 8 on Linux and NetWare. (Over 20 in all) Those post offices are located in Provo, Waltham, Europe and Asia. We also have MTAs, two of our main GWIAs and WebAccess all running GroupWise 8. Over 4000 employees are on a Bonsai post office while just over 400 are currently using a Bonsai client (Windows, Linux, Mac and WebAccess). We expect to expand this rapidly over the next few weeks.

Quality Metrics: As mentioned in a few of my blog posts, Novell is pushing every product line to increase their quality and to be able to measure it. One of those metrics is based on the severity of bugs/defects found and fixed in the product. Here are some of the metrics that represent the state of the GroupWise 8 public beta code, including the public beta goals.

• Critial bugs: 91% resolved - 90% is the goal for public beta
• Major bugs: 93% resolved - 85% is the goal for public beta
• Normal bugs: 75% resolved – 75% is the goal for public beta
• Minor bugs: 75% resolved – 50% is the goal for public beta

Lighthouse Project: Novell is also sponsoring an early adopter program. We have 12 customers that have agreed to rollout GroupWise 8 into production with the public beta code. This will provide real world experience and help us gauge our readiness for final shipment. In all, including Novell, its beta sites and the Lighthouse program, there should be almost 10,000 people using GroupWise 8, in production, by the time we ship the final version.

We are confident that you will find GroupWise 8 to be very solid, well-tested and with more new features than any previous release of GroupWise. I know that we will not satisfy everyone, but I am confident that there is something in this release of GroupWise that will make it a ‘must’ upgrade for you and your organization.

Check out the ‘What’s New’ section of the documentation to find your favorite feature.

During the final push before final shipment, we will continue to polish and make it shine. Please help us by participating in the public beta and by providing feedback.

Enjoy!!