Blog Entry

Submitted by tmstone835 on 2 August 2010 - 7:50pm.

This sounds like great news for us GroupWise die hards. You have needed this boost for a long time and I am glad to see it happening. When you look at your accomplishments over the past year it does show a lot that has been done. It is important to keep up the momentum but you don't want to burn them out either.

I wish I had some decent programming skills so I could apply for one of the jobs.

Tom S.

Submitted by de on 20 September 2010 - 5:23pm.

Groupwise has become such a hard sell for me, even though I still believe it is a superior product. The three biggest impediments that I now deal with are:

1) Broken MS Office & Acrobat integration. For some reason, even though Novell developers know that they chose to make a change in the integration, they can't seem to understand the importance of the issue. Users are -very- put out that they can't open any Acrobat or Word files if they are in the process of attaching one to a Groupwise email that hasn't yet been sent, and 8.0.2 not only doesn't fix the issue, it gives a new error whether or not the message is sent.

It's hard for me to understand, no less explain, why your engineers made this choice to change the behavior and force something so contrary to how people use the program. NOBODY expects to be creating an email with an attachment, and have the attachment "parent" program unusable until the email is sent.

And it means I have to craft my Acrobat deployment to completely remove the ability to email out of the program, which makes the issue even more apparent.

I'd have to ask why such a major issue wasn't fixed in SP2 along with the hundreds of other fixes, not to mention why developers chose to make such a radical app-breaking change in the first place.

2) Cost: The per-user cost of upgrading from Groupwise 7 to Groupwise 8 is frankly ludicrous. I can't possibly convince anyone to spend $129 per user to do this relatively minor upgrade, rather than spend those $$ on migrating to Exchange. Once-upon-a-time, Groupwise upgrades were $39 per seat; I believe that's what the upgrade to version 7 cost. Novell has now priced itself out of the market.

3) None of my clients trust Novell anymore, because not only did you choose to drop development of Netware, but you completely dropped the product, REMOVED critical support articles, and forced a migration that users didn't want. My remaining Novell clients have loved the stability of Netware, it is a full-featured product and does more than even Windows Server 2008, but you're forcing them to migrate to another platform rather than stay with what they want and has proven to work for them.

It's beyond comprehension that Novell made a decision to cut Netware users off at the knees. It would've been simple enough to keep the existing articles and patches available, but instead even that baseline was abruptly taken away, and even Novell's own current products don't even come with the ability to install on it's long-time server OS Netware!

Mark my word: when you FORCE users to migrate to another server OS from one they love and which is stable and mature and full-featured, they're going to mostly migrate to Windows. They won't migrate to Linux not only because of the scarcity of support staff, but also because some of their apps won't run on a Linux server, and they simply don't trust Novell anymore to live up to its word.

Please give me one answer I can provide to clients that addresses the way Novell not only dropped Netware, but removed the existing support pages and patches so that literally hundreds-of-thousands of web cites are broken ... Tell me how I am supposed to get them to stay with Novell, when they've had a product they love which has been stable and provides so much functionality ... but over which you so thoroughly shafted them?

This was the wrong thing to do, period. In consideration of all the existing links on the web and given the stability and maturity of the product, Novell could have simply stopped developing Netware but left the resources intact.

Just how do I tell these clients that they should migrate to Novell's Linux, instead of to Windows Server, when the Linux migration will cost them just as much and they feel they can't rely on Novell to play it straight?

My bottom line is that Novell has continued to kill its own devoted market. The company seems to continue to be managed by people who actually hate the products and want everything Microsoft-like, and who feel no regret about destroying customer loyalty. We know that the company took WordPerfect when it had an 85% marketshare, and managed to destroy it so completely (including making it so hard to buy) that under Novell's management the marketshare dropped below 10% and never recovered. Now you take those same customer-offensive actions with Groupwise and Netware, and yet you still expect people to stay around even after needlessly shafting them time & again, after making it clear yet again that Novell management doesn't want to support products that just plain WORK.

You owe us better.

http://iwantnetware.com/ (no affiliation)

It's been a few years - how has your NetWare plans changed?
Still using NetWare.
54.65% 229 of 419
Replaced NetWare with Windows.
22.20% 93 of 419
Replaced NetWare with Linux.
10.50% 44 of 419
Added more Windows servers.
4.53% 19 of 419
Added more Linux servers.
3.34% 14 of 419
Added both Linux and Windows to replace NetWare.
4.77% 20 of 419

-- DE