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GWAVACon Berlin and GroupWise 8 Update!

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14 October 2008 - 1:28pm
Submitted by: dlythgoe

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Lots of great things happening at GWAVACon Berlin this weekend. Several Novell representatives have been invited to join GWAVA and many many partners for this annual show in Europe. The show is October 18-20th. Check out http://www.gwavacon.com to register and attend.

I will be traveling with Alex Evans - Product Manager for GroupWise. Dirk Giles - Senior Engineer for GroupWise and Teaming + Conferencing. Daniel Shelley - Product Manager for Teaming + Conferencing. Travis Grandpre - Product Marketing for GroupWise. Karen Rowell - Senior Product Marketing Manager for Teaming + Conferencing ---- just to mention a few. There will be several Novell people that you can meet and talk with while at this show from both GroupWise, Teaming + Conferencing and ZenWorks. Not to mention our superb Partner community.

I hope that those who do attend will make sure they come talk to Alex and I. Tell us when you will be updating to GroupWise 8 and if you have downloaded and played with the Public BETA.

Update on GroupWise 8!

Since Public BETA - we have released to Authorized BETA sites - BETA 6 and we are currently testing and preparing to release BETA 7 (it actually released yesterday to our Authorized sites). BETA 7 is our 'Gold Master Candidate' release - so we are getting very close. We are completely rolled out within Novell on our servers, POA, MTA, GWIA and WebAccess. We have over 1300 employees already using one of our new GroupWise 8 clients. Several authorized beta sites have rolled out into production systems and we have several Lighthouse accounts who have also rolled out into production. All reports are that things are VERY solid and running very smoothly.

BONSAI!!


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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Anonymous's picture

Release date

Submitted by Anonymous on 14 October 2008 - 1:50pm.

I have one quite big customer with GroupWise Maitenance valid till 30. October, it looks like he don´t catch GroupWise 8 ... . Or is a chance ?

alandpearson's picture

What about public beta 7 ?

Submitted by alandpearson on 29 October 2008 - 10:39am.

Dean

When will public beta 7 (or even GOLD release) be available to public beta ?
I'd have thought Novell wanted to get this tested with a wide audience.
I can't currently get 'live remote' mode to work on the MTA, and would like to see if this is fixed in Beta 7
A change / fix log would be good too.

Thanks

Anonymous's picture

Re: Public BETA

Submitted by Anonymous on 29 October 2008 - 1:57pm.

We are not planning any more public betas. We have received valuable feedback during the Public BETA that has helped finalize the GroupWise 8 release. The next release of the product will not be BETA, but will be the actual release. We also do not have any further authorized BETAs planned. The next step is to get the product to Operations and then align the marketing activities with our partners. We have had a great response on the Public BETA and many of you have downloaded it and provided feedback. It has been tested by a very wide audience both in labs, proof of concept and actual production systems. I believe we have roughly 6000 mailboxes in Bonsai production today - outside of Novell Inc - where we now have close to 2000 employees running a Bonsai Client and every one of the 40 post offices within Novell have been running Bonsai for several weeks.

It is getting very close!!

Dean

dlythgoe's picture

Re: Live Remote

Submitted by dlythgoe on 3 November 2008 - 12:10pm.

One more comment. Live Remote support. We have not done anything intentional to disable live remote, but this is not a recommended connection model anymore. Bugs, issues and other problems will probably not be addressed as we move forward. Caching, Remote and Online are all the preferred modes and we recommend moving your customers to these models.

mgorn's picture

serious bug in Bonsai *STILL* not fixed?

Submitted by mgorn on 31 October 2008 - 10:40am.

Unfortunately, the serious stability problem that causes the client to crash almost daily and was referenced in defects 167399, 195696 and 383400 over the last two and a half years, is *STILL* not fixed. Can you shed some light on why this bug would be ignored for so long and not fixed even in Bonsai?

dlythgoe's picture

Re: Not Fixed...

Submitted by dlythgoe on 1 November 2008 - 8:20am.

Michael,

I have posted a response to your inquiry in NGWList. We have not ignored the defects and we continue to improve the quality of GroupWise with every release.

GroupWise 8 is very solid and hundreds of issues found/reported in previous releases of GroupWise have been fixed in GroupWise 8. It is far more likely that a customer reported issue has been resolved in GroupWise 8, but there are some exceptions - as you have pointed out. However, these are exceptions and not the rule.

Dean

Anonymous's picture

Fixed or Not fixed?

Submitted by Anonymous on 2 November 2008 - 10:37pm.

i suppose i need more details as I don't know what bugs are not fixed, however, I have to say that we have a number of multi-platform client users who are complaining long and loud about having to kill the 7.03 client when it freezes for them.

This is a chronic problem and its a bit of a show-stopper as far as groupwise is concerned. We've been telling them that the new version will address this problem, however I am most concerned that if we go to all the trouble of upgrading and the users end up with a client that still crashes, Novell's and my credibility will be shot.

We adopted the open workgroup suite last year and in many respects it has worked, however because we have users who swap between windows systems and linux systems, we get serious feedback about the problems with the linux client (not to mention other glitches on SLED).

And whilst as an administrator I truly believe that linux based systems are better and easier to administer, if the user experience doesn't reflect that then I am going to lose the battle and before you know it my life will be hell as I battle with exchange on windows.

alandpearson's picture

Agreed

Submitted by alandpearson on 3 November 2008 - 8:36am.

I totally agree with this comment.

Novell need to stop making excuses and fix the problems.
Dean has said he feels like he is being beaten when he replies to some threads by the haters but he needs to realise these are all users and need the system to work.

Every glitch in GW is yet another reason to go Exchange.
I'm currently fighting the same loosing war in exactly the same environment you are in.
It's do or die for Novell here, and when GW goes, so does OES, ZenWorks, SLED, to be replaced by MS and Redhat.
This isn't a joke, and Novell need to get serious about fixing a lot of problems in a timely manner, not in years.

Dean, take this as constructive criticism, please. We aren't haters and just want a system that people can't complain about.

dlythgoe's picture

Re: Criticism

Submitted by dlythgoe on 3 November 2008 - 1:25pm.

These are good comments and we take them as constructive criticism. We completely understand that many are battling, along with us, to make Novell and GroupWise as successful as possible. We never discount the comments or think that the the issues reported are without value or are very real concerns from our users, customers and partners.

I would never ask anyone to stop telling us where we can improve and what things we need to change. We welcome your input, feedback and if necessary - your criticism. We also never categorize the feedback as coming from 'haters'. Your concerns are heard, they are discussed, we make decisions and even change direction based on valuable input.

On the other hand....

- We don't make excuses - even though you may not like all of our answers
- we have fixed a lot of things with GroupWise 8 - many of them that currently exist in previous releases of GW
- we have much better Q/A processes and increased personnel working to make the product as solid as possible
- we have done and continue to do a lot to make sure that GW will work for all users and all environments

Even with this effort, focus and extra time and investment, all software will have flaws and occasional bad days. We will continue to do all that we can to minimize the impact for the majority of our users and customers.

I, too, would like a system that people can't complain about. For the vast majority of our customers and most of their users, they have that system today and they will have an even better system with GroupWise 8!

Thanks for your comments and input! We appreciate it and recognize the great strength our product has from our very dedicated partners, customers and resellers. We also recognize that you have high expectations. This is a good thing!

Dean

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