Novell releases GroupWise 8

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.

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Keep using? Yes. Upgrade? No. Anonymous -- 18/11/08

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.

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Groupwise Anonymous -- 20/11/08

We have dozens of clients running groupwise 7 and I anticipate that it will continue to maintain it's marketshare. When bought in the Worgroup suite for the SMB market it is a great solution for the price- especially in mixed environments.

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Groupwise 8 YAY Dave Nichols -- 20/11/08

I am a SYS Admin at a highschool, and Groupwise is a huge part of our network. I will upgrade Groupwise as soon as I can to 8. I think you are stupid to go to Microsoft these days. With Groupwise being cheaper and now with 8 able to run on Linux, Windows and Netware. Where is the bad part of it?

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Groupwise >>> Exchange Fred -- 20/11/08

We have clients running both groupwise and exchange. There are many problems with exchange that just don't exist with groupwise.

I could go on forever, but exchange is not "open", meaning that you just don't know how the darn thing routes messages because it's not documented.

With groupwise, you know exactly how the system works so it's easy to troubleshoot. Exchange is a mistery, so unless MS has seen the problem before, you're out of luck.

Groupwise also has more features.

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GroupWise 8 Anonymous -- 19/09/09

We have upgraded to GroupWise 8 and found it to have so much more than version 7. Paired with Novell Teaming it is the perfect solution.

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Better than exchange, but not ALWAYS Anonymous -- 20/09/09

We (a German company) bought 800 licenses for Open Workgroup Suite (which includes Groupwise licenses) for 65 Euros (about 95$) per seat. Now we'd like to buy more licenses. But they cost 183 Euros per seat! (about 269$) So we procrastinated buying those licenses. For how long? I don't know... Well done, Novell, best way to stop the cashflow.
That scheme works for drug dealers, but it will not work for Novell.

I'm glad my employer chosed Groupwise, not Exchange, but there still a lot to improve about Groupwise. These are some examples of what Groupwise-admins and -users have to endure:
* the Console1-application (needed to administrate Groupwise) is a pain in the ...
* In Console1, you can enter a phone- and fax-number for every eDirectory user object, which will appear in Groupwise's address book. But to enter a cellphone number, you need to do this: http://www.novell.com/support/viewContent.do?externalId=3741418
I find that pretty ridiculous. That problem exists since Groupwise 6.5. We had to wait until Groupwise 8 until it's fixed. (I'm not really sure if it's fixed in version 8, we haven't upgraded, yet)
* When you managed to have cellphone-numers appear in Groupwise-7 address books and upgrade to Groupwise-8, this is what you have to do to keep your users from beiing confused in a mixed environment (clients running Groupwise7 + 8): http://blog.wilmsenit.nl/?p=356
The best part: "Wait for the automatic address book rebuild to start at night. The next day you’ll see the field contents ..."
* In the Groupwise7 address book, you can't just click a column header to sort by that column, you have to right click the column header, then choose "Sort by ...".
* When you added custom columns to the Groupwise system address book, your users cannot sort by these fields.
* When entering a contact in a personal address book and filling out the company name, Groupwise automatically creates an "organization" (some like that, some hate it). But when you enter the company address to a contact, the address is not copied to that "organization" and vice versa. (this is fixed in Groupwise 8)
* and so on, and so on. There are a lot of annoyances in Groupwise.

There also a huge security problem in Groupwise 7 + 8: It uses the Internet Explorer engine to display html. When I received an html-mail with embedded java, a message popped up telling me the java could not be launched because I disabled unsafe ActiveX-controls. In Groupwise-8, users can *finally* integrate websites into the mailclient. In Outlook, that's old hat since Outlook 2000.

Try this: In Groupwise-8, create a web-panel and let it display the website http://www.whatsmybrowser.com/ It will show "Internet Explorer 7", even if IE8 is installed. Good luck browsing the web with this (unpatched?) Internet Explorer.

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