1.1 What GroupWise Provides

GroupWise provides communication and collaboration services that are secure, highly available, and easily accessible:

1.1.1 Essential Communication and Collaboration Services

GroupWise provides a variety of tools to enable users to work together and work smarter.

  • Messaging: Send and receive mail messages, phone messages, and reminder notes. A mail message is for general correspondence. A phone message is designed for those who take phone messages for others. A reminder note includes a start date and, when accepted by the recipient, is posted to the recipient’s Calendar.

  • Scheduling: Schedule both appointments and tasks. When you schedule an appointment, you can search other users’ Calendars to find free times for the appointment. When you schedule a task, you can assign a priority and due date to the task. If the recipient accepts an appointment or task, it is automatically added to his or her Calendar.

  • Calendaring: View and manage your appointments, tasks, and reminder notes in a Calendar view. You can create multiple calendars. You can also publish personal calendars and free/busy status so that non-GroupWise users can conveniently schedule meetings with you.

  • Task Management: Accept or decline the tasks you are sent, and track accepted tasks through to completion. You can turn any message into a task. You can also organize, schedule, and monitor tasks in your Tasklist folder.

  • Contact Management: Manage information for your contacts, groups, resources, and organizations, including being able to view, update, delete, and add information to the contacts in your address books and Contacts folders. In addition, you can view a history of messages sent to and received from individual contacts and compile notes on interactions with contacts.

  • Document Management: Store documents in GroupWise libraries. In a library, documents are compressed to save disk space and encrypted to maintain security. With document management, you can check in, check out, share, and version documents.

  • Instant Messaging: Using Novell Messenger, communicate in real time with other GroupWise users. Novell Messenger lets you know when other users are online, busy, or away from their desks. It also allows you to save conversations.

  • Teaming: Using Novell Vibe, collaborate on a teaming Web site where personal, team, and global workspaces can include discussion folders, shared calendars, shared documents, blogs, wikis, surveys, and more. Powerful search capabilities make finding information quick and easy.

  • Conferencing: Using Novell Conferencing, conduct telephone conferences with the convenience of communities, contacts, and buddies for conference calls; phone presence and participation indicators; meeting setup; instant chat; whiteboarding; desktop sharing; and more.

1.1.2 Available Anytime

GroupWise ensures that your essential communication tools are always available:

  • Caching: The GroupWise Windows, Mac, and Linux clients include a Caching mode that allows you to cache GroupWise information to your local drive and continue to work even when you aren’t logged into your network mailbox.

  • LDAP Pooling: If you are using LDAP authentication for GroupWise mailbox authentication, LDAP pooling ensures that there is always an LDAP server through which authentication can be performed.

  • Clustering: To ensure that GroupWise data is always available and GroupWise components are always running, you can install GroupWise in a cluster on NetWare, Linux, or Windows.

1.1.3 Accessible Anywhere

GroupWise lets you communicate and collaborate with other people by using the device that is most convenient:

  • Personal Computers: To access your mailbox, you can run the GroupWise Windows client on any workstation that uses Windows XP or higher. On Macintosh workstations, you can run the GroupWise Mac client. On Linux workstations, you can run the GroupWise Linux client.

  • Web Browsers: With GroupWise WebAccess installed, you can also access your mailbox through a Web browser, a cellular phone, or a PDA (personal digital assistant) such as Pocket PC. The GroupWise WebAccess client formats information to best accommodate the type of device on which it is being displayed.

  • Mobile Devices: You can use Novell Data Synchronizer to synchronize personal information management (PIM) data such as e-mail, appointments, and contacts to synchronize between GroupWise and mobile devices.

    NOTE:The Data Synchronizer Mobility Pack replaces GroupWise Mobile Server in providing synchronization between GroupWise and mobile devices.

    You can synchronize GroupWise with your BlackBerry device by using BlackBerry Enterprise Server for GroupWise.

  • Other E-Mail Clients: GroupWise enables you to access your mailbox with any POP3, IMAP4, or SOAP e-mail client.

1.1.4 Always Secure

GroupWise provides extensive security measures to protect your information.

  • Encryption: To protect your information as it is stored in the various GroupWise databases and moved across the network, GroupWise encrypts the information. Each piece of information is encrypted differently through the use of randomly-generated encryption keys.

  • Open Security Standards: To further ensure that your information is secure while moving across your internal network or across the Internet, GroupWise supports open security standards such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (S/MIME), Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), and Transport Layer Security (TLS).

  • Spam Protection: To protect you from seeing unwanted messages, the GroupWise Windows client includes a Junk Mail Handling feature that lets you control unwanted Internet e-mail messages. In addition, you can configure the Internet Agent (the GroupWise component responsible for sending and receiving Internet e-mail messages) to reject messages from known open relay hosts and spam hosts. GroupWise also works with partner products that provide additional anti-spam solutions.

  • Virus Protection: GroupWise works with partner products to provide solutions that detect and eliminate viruses.

For information about additional security solutions available for GroupWise through GroupWise partners, see the Novell Partner Product Guide.