Novell has released a new version of GroupWise, its answer to Microsoft's ubiquitious Outlook/Exchange collaboration suite.
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(Credit: Novell)
GroupWise 8 has been available in beta form for several months, but overnight Novell said the final code was ready to be implemented. GroupWise comes in Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and web versions, with Novell touting the software as having a "lower total cost of ownership compared with Microsoft".
While most large Australian organisations have embraced Microsoft's Exchange/Outlook suite in preference to GroupWise or IBM's Lotus/Domino alternatives, there are holdouts, with some NSW government agencies particularly still remaining GroupWise users.
In a statement, Novell said new features included the ability to utilise wikis, blogs and RSS feeds, in a 'mash-up' style personal dashboard. Novell said the new software supported the iPhone, BlackBerry and Palm mobile platforms, an enhanced calendaring system that can make some data publicly available (for example, to assist third party contractors who work closely with internal staff at organisations) and added a number of contact management features such as the ability to associate geographical maps to contacts.
GroupWise also supports threaded email, which allows conversations to be read as discussions. The software costs US$143 per seat, although Novell has not yet released Australian prices.
Are you still using GroupWise? Will you upgrade to version 8 or switch to Microsoft Exchange? Post your thoughts below this article.
We recently migrated our mess of an IT system to Novell's Open Workgroup Suite which included GroupWise. The pricing came in at about 1/3 the cost of an Microsoft setup and the users seem very happy with what they got, including GroupWise.
I think that it could be a real killer application if they could break it's reliance on eDirectory.
We certinaly would not be looking at any sort of migration to Exchange but I doubt that we'll be rushing out for an upgrade to version 8 of Groupwise either.