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Novell's GroupWise Tops Microsoft, Lotus Products in Groupware Return-on-Investment Study GroupWise Provides Greater Productivity, Cost Savings, Ease of Use than Exchange and Notes PROVO, Utah -- April 21, 1997 -- Novell, Inc. today announced results from a recent study showing its GroupWise groupware and E-mail solution offers businesses a significantly greater return on investment than Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange. The study conducted by Creative Networks, an independent research firm based in Palo Alto, California, concluded that GroupWise saves $469 more per employee, per year than the Lotus and Microsoft products. Overall, study results show GroupWise provides six times more in productivity gains, significantly lower cost of ownership, and superior ease of use. "The cost savings and productivity gains associated with GroupWise are not surprising," said Stewart Nelson, vice president and general manager, Novell Applications Division. "When you consider its ease of use and rich functionality, you can see how companies can leverage GroupWise to shave minutes, hours and ultimately dollars off of the time their employees need to spend doing such crucial tasks as group scheduling, delegating tasks or checking E-mail. Intuitive, easy-to-use features mean employees readily use more of the product to get real work done, and this ultimately saves employers money." "GroupWise's collaboration suite and utilization of the underlying infocomm network gives the product significant management and cost advantages, as this study of over 100 companies demonstrates," said Nina Burns, founder of Creative Networks, Inc. Increased Productivity The Creative Networks study indicates that the rich feature set and powerful collaborative capabilities of GroupWise save users considerable time on tasks such as group scheduling, sharing information with others, and managing E-mail and documents. When asked to rate the value of 19 specific usability features -- such as scheduling, document management, E-mail and information sharing -- in the context of how much time these features save a typical user, respondents calculated that GroupWise users save six times more than users of Notes or Exchange. That is a time savings of $469 per employee more than the other products. GroupWise also has the greatest impact on organizations. GroupWise users estimate they would have to spend 237 percent more time on activities such as managing E-mail and sharing information with others if denied their groupware environment -- four times greater than the impact estimated by Notes and Exchange users for the same activities. GroupWise proved to be the easiest to use of the leading groupware products, with users citing ease of use twice as often for GroupWise when asked why they chose their particular products. Cost of Ownership The research demonstrates a substantial savings in cost of ownership for administering, maintaining and supporting GroupWise versus other messaging-based collaboration products. "From a reseller standpoint, GroupWise is a home run. It enables us to generate additional revenue from our existing client base, it runs on top of our client's existing equipment and it is centrally managed by Novell's NDS," said Bryan Vincent, president of Bryan Vincent Associates. The Creative Networks research also indicates reduced administration, management and training costs as a result of the linkages and common components between GroupWise, Novell Directory Services (NDS), Novell's IntranetWare and popular desktop software from major vendors. Only 37 percent of GroupWise organizations required separate staff to run the system and an internal network, while 52 percent of Exchange and 68 percent of Notes organizations needed to hire additional staff to run and maintain their groupware applications. The report highlighted the use of NDS as the directory for both GroupWise and the network operating system by GroupWise users as the key feature resulting in this savings. Together, NDS and GroupWise provide a single point of administration for the network administrator. "The GroupWise-NDS combination lets me leverage my administrative staff exponentially by providing a single point of administration across the entire network," said David Hasselbach, network administrator for the University of Michigan Medical Center. "GroupWise makes it easy to add users and leverage network resources dynamically, with no interruption to the user community." Scalability Besides lower cost of ownership and improved productivity, the report shows that GroupWise is the most ready-to-expand application out of the three products. When asked if they would have to increase their number of servers if their organization grew by 300 percent, Notes and Exchange users predicted they would have to buy twice as many servers as GroupWise users to accommodate the growth. Report Availability A white paper detailing the findings of the Creative Networks study will be available for download on the World Wide Web at http://www.novell.com/groupwise Monday, April 21, 1997. About Creative Networks Creative Networks, Inc. is a leading intranet and collaborative computing consulting and research firm in Palo Alto. Founded by Nina Burns, Creative Networks is the foremost research, publishing and consulting firm to help clients harness the power of infocomm technologies to enable their business strategies. About GroupWise GroupWise 5.1, Novell's premier collaboration product for corporate networks and intranets, is the industry's only expanded e-mail system to include full document management capabilities as part of a Universal Mailbox. The Universal Mailbox also gives users single-point access to personal calendaring, group scheduling, tasks, voice mail, faxes, documents, images and other message types both from the desktop and via the Internet using GroupWise WebAccess. GroupWise WebAccess allows users to access the Universal Mailbox from any HTML-compliant Internet browser. GroupWise information can be accessed via the World Wide Web at http://www.novell.com/groupwise. Founded in 1983, Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL) is the world's leading provider of network software. The company offers a wide range of network solutions for distributed network, Internet, intranet and small- business markets. Novell education and technical support programs are the most comprehensive in the network computing industry. Information about Novell's complete range of products and services can be accessed on the World Wide Web at http://www.novell.com. Novell , IntranetWare and NDS are registered trademarks, and GroupWise is a trademark of Novell, Inc. All other registered trademarks and trademarks are the property of their respective holders. Press Contacts:
Shelly Greenhalgh |
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