Just to remind everyone.  CoolBlogs has moved, or maybe more accurately, the CoolBloggers have moved.  We moved over to the Novell Communities site where we are still active.  We listened to your feedback and have made the new CoolBlogs easier to find - there is now a link on the left of all Novell Communities pages that will take you to the official Novell bloggers.  But here is the link to that landing page for your convenience. C’mon over

Like Dean I am moving house to the Novell Communities site. My first post is on there already so go and check it out. You should also update your RSS reader links. So, why are we moving? Well, firstly the readership over there is much larger. Secondly, Novell is trying to open it up to a lot more corporate bloggers and that’s the place they we want to do it. These pages will serve as a historical reference for me, we haven’t yet decided if we are going to port the posts over to the new site.

So, farewell old friends - and I’ll see you on the other side (of this link)

I am moving!!!

I will continue to Blog and provide updates on GroupWise, but now in a new place. I have posted my latest blog in the new ‘communities’ space. Insider: GroupWise 7.0.3 and GMS on Linux

Here is the link:

New Blog Link

All current blogs will probably continue in the ‘CoolBlogs’ section that you are in now (still debating whether we should migrate them), but from now on I will be blogging in this new place. Please update your links and RSS feeds…

See you in the Novell Communities!!

Dean

There is some very exciting news in the Workgroup Business Unit. Novell announced the acquisition of SiteScape. For those that don’t know we OEMed with SiteScape to create Novell Teaming+Conferencing, which is all about team productivity as opposed to GroupWise’s individual productivity. This is a very strong statement to the market on our intentions in the collaboration space and I could not be more excited. So what does this mean for GroupWise? Well, the fantastic work that the GroupWise team was doing meant that we initially embarked on the Teaming+Conferencing product, and that the value that GroupWise and T+C have demonstrated since that point means that Novell is ready to invest into collaboration at an even more significant level than they did before. GroupWise has demonstrated growth over the last few quarters and we expect that trend to continue. GroupWise Bonsai is one of the most anticipated releases of GroupWise that the team can remember and it is a joy to demo at events like GWAVACon, as feedback is invariably very positive.

It also means that we just entered the Unified Communications space - this is not an insignificant point. The UC market is expected to grow to almost $48 billion by 2012. To put that into perspective, the Operating System market is around $21 billion right now. It also means that our roadmap going forwards is going to have a lot of integration between GroupWise and T+C, and between those two products into a UC environment. Of late we have been talking a lot about Unified Messaging and Unified Communications within Novell and with other partners and where we plan to play in that space. It’s not something that we are ready to talk much more about at this point, but it is safe to say that the SiteScape announcement puts us on a particular track. Over the last few days we have also been briefing a number of the technology analysts, to a very positive reception. One even confirmed that this announcement makes us a technology leader in the Unified Communications space in relation to teaming applications - much of what our competitors talk about right now is vaporware.

There is going to be a lot more to come on all of this. This acquisition is the result of months of hard work by a large team and I would like to welcome the SiteScape guys (and gals) to the fold. To read more about the acquisition read John Dragoon’s Blog, and the press release.

One of our Danish partners, and Novell Sysop, Tommy Mikkelsen sent me a link to a site over the weekend.  It spoke of a Danish effort to consolidate calendars.  It is a long standing effort to allow public sector workers to quickly share calendar information.  The estimates are that it could save up to $10 million per year if every one of Denmark’s public sector workers saved just one hour over the year when scheduling meetings.  This puts a real figure on the amount of time and money we all spend when trying to schedule meetings across company boundaries.  I experienced this pain recently trying to set up meetings with three of our partners who where coming into town (actually, it was our admin who experienced all the pain).  What this project does is link calendars in Exchange, Notes and GroupWise into a single central site.  It uses iCal and SOAP to integrate the calendars.

Tommy wrote the GroupWise connector for the project (he’s a smart cookie - I have used some of his other projects in other roles).  He didn’t mention it but I am assuming that he used the GroupWise 7 SOAP interface.  Now, my Danish is a little rusty so I can’t tell you what the project sites say but the source is available out there.

This cross boundary calendaring is a major feature of GroupWise Bonsai, which really validates the goals of the project.  Bonsai will allow users to subscribe to external iCal calendars so that they can view that calendar alongside their own in the client.  Users will also be able to publish their own personal calendars using the Calendar Publishing Host.  The Calendar Publishing Host creates an HTML version of the users’ calendar and publishes it to a website that your company hosts.  It also provides an iCal interface to the same data so that external users can subscribe to it. Finally, Bonsai will allow your users to publish their own Free/Busy information, as well as busy search any external users that publish their own Free/Busy information.

There continues to be a lot of questions around GroupWise’s support for things like NetWare, eDirectory and ConsoleOne. I would like to clarify what is happening with all of these technologies, how they will be supported in Bonsai and what to expect in future releases.

GroupWise and NetWare. Many GroupWise customers continue to run their POA, MTA, GWIA and WebAccess on NetWare. Bonsai will continue to support the NetWare server platform for these agents. However, more and more of our customers are understanding and following the overall Novell strategy to move to Linux. Open Enterprise Server 2 (OES) shipped last fall and is one of the best server platforms available in the market today. Robust, secure, scalable - all the usual buzzwords We will continue to encourage our customers to move to Linux through the OES and SLES offerings. Linux is the future and it is increasingly important that the GroupWise community and customers embrace this platform by making plans to move off of NetWare and on to OES. Future versions of GroupWise will discontinue support for NetWare versions that are in the ‘end of life’ phase of the product life cycle. Bonsai will support NetWare 6.5.x. We have as one of our reference platforms, NetWare 6.5 with the latest support pack.

GroupWise and eDirectory. GroupWise continues to have a dependency on eDirectory. Bonsai will continue to require and leverage this robust directory service. However, our road map does include allowing customers to substitute other directories in addition to eDirectory. We envision a version of GroupWise that will allow customers to have a very tight experience if they choose to run GroupWise with eDirectory. However, if the customer chooses, we plan to provide a LDAP connector that will essentially allow any LDAP-enabled directory to be the underlying directory. Better with eDirectory, but available with other directories will be our goal.

GroupWise and ConsoleOne. Bonsai will still have a dependency on ConsoleOne and ConsoleOne will be the administration tool for the Bonsai product. Looking forward - this is a real debate! One that has been discussed in the comments of the ‘What’s New in Bonsai’ blog a few months ago. Check it out if you want to see some great back and forth and some very valid insights, concerns and suggestions. The only sure thing that will happen with our administration story is that we will be moving away from ConsoleOne. ConsoleOne will be entering an ‘end of life’ phase as a product and GroupWise must move to another strategy. iManager has been a consideration, but not a final decision. However, we have been actively working on a platform for administration and there are some definite objectives. We plan to provide a SOAP enabled administration interface. It may also have Java and C++ bindings. We are leaning towards a rich web interface for administration. Current plans have this targeted for the Monterrey release - (the release after Bonsai).

I hope this discussion provides some insight into where engineering is at and what we are planning. Looking forward to your comments and suggestions on each of these topics.

7.0.3 Public BETA is now available!

Please download, install and provide feedback on Public BETA of 7.0.3. We will now be working on FCS (First Customer Ship) of 7.0.3 - currently scheduled for the first week of March!

You can download it from http://download.novell.com. Select GroupWise as the product, and look under the “Beta” tab.

Dean

We all flew back from San Diego last night after GWAVACon finished.  It was a great event, highlighted by Ron’s keynote.  GWAVA did an exceptional job and it ran very smoothly.  Richard Bliss gave a great keynote all about owning words.  The 2 NTS guys that we took along were buried with questions the whole time and we had a nice dinner with our customer, Dan, on the last night.

Anyway, this blog entry is about GroupWise CRM integrations.  I will have more to say in this space over the coming months as I am co-presenting with Omni-TS on this subject at Brainshare (if my wife doesn’t give birth in the middle that is).  We have been asking around in our channel on what the biggest integration needs are for GroupWise, and the pretty overwhelming response was CRM.   Well, we reckon that has changed, and I can’t even say ‘of late’ - more of this when I get to LinkPoint 360.

Omni have a Riva CRM solution that integrates Salesforce.com, Microsoft CRM and SugarCRM.  Aldo showed it to me at GWAVACon - pretty nice I have to say.  It can either be a desktop sync, or server side, and it’s cross platform. It’s based on an underlying GW SOAP engine, so adding a new CRM is going to be pretty quick - based on a need more than anything else.  I think he plans to add more CRMs as well as more features as time goes on.  They are in beta right now but keep watching his site for news.

Next - VoiceRD has a SugarCRM integration, as well as some PBX, Asterisk things going on.  It’s pretty slick too.  I am struggling to get to the site at this point, but I know they are still around as I talk to them all the time.  It is also based on an underlying GW SOAP engine so will be pretty versatile.

The one that blew us away was LinkPoint 360 from the point of view that none of us had heard of them before.  They had a booth at GWAVACon and they were a new presenter in the GW space, though they have been providing GW/CRM integrations for YEARS!  They integrate though the client C3PO and Object API interfaces, into the 8 biggest CRMs.  When I spoke to them they reckoned that they could add almost any other CRM integration within 3-4 of coding.

So, if you are a GW customer with CRM needs then you really have a lot of choices with some deep integrations into your CRM.  Keep watching this blog as I hope to have some other news really quite soon.

GWAVACon is this coming week….Sunday January 27th through Tuesday January 29th, with a Bonus Day on Saturday - January 26th.

This show will be the ‘Collaboration‘ event of the year for GWAVA, Novell and its Partners. As many of you know - Ron Hovsepian will be presenting one of the keynotes. In addition, several other key Novell executives will be there. Kent Erickson - VP and General Manager for the WorkGroup Business Unit, John Delk, the VP of Sales for WorkGroup Americas and Andy Fox - CTO for Sitescape - just to mention a few. In addition, Ken Muir has promised to make an appearance. I will be there with several of my engineers (Scott Brown and Scott Clayton), Alex Evans, the Product Manager for GroupWise as well as Phil Karren and Daniel Shelley for Novell Teaming + Conferencing. Of course, the marketing guru - Gregory Webb - will be there as well!! Novell IS&T, NTS and Technical Specialist will be on-hand to answer questions, give advice and present sessions.

Please register and come support one of our great partners - GWAVA! They, along with several other collaboration partners will be demonstrating some of the latest solutions and innovations from their engineering experts.

However, maybe one of the best reasons to come to GWAVACon is that you get to meet hundreds of fellow GroupWise administrators, users and trainers. GroupWise networking at its best!! The true experts, feet on the ground kind of advice you will only find by participating in events like GWAVACon - where so many like-minded folks come together and talk shop!! You will never meet a nicer group of people that are so willing to help you solve your problems, provide valuable advice and make lasting friendships!!

PLUS - its in San Diego!! What could be better?! Hope to see you there and talk some Bonsai and T+C!

GWAVACon - San Diego

Here we go again. This year some of the Australia territories decided to change the end of their DST periods by one week.  We are currently planning on how we tackle this.  We have 2 basic choices and some variations on the theme - do the same as we did for the US or the same as we did for New Zealand.  To summarize the options that we are looking at:

Option 1

For the recent New Zealand DST changes we worked with OMNI to get a blanket license for their Riva product and a custom build DST module.  This module attached to each mailbox and inserted a search folder with a fixed set of criteria.  Basically it searched for all SENT appointments in the mailbox that fell inside of those extra weeks of DST.  The user could then go to this folder and selectively resend those appointments that needed resending.

There are a couple of modifications that we can make to the query:

Option 2

Same as #1 except it will show both SENT and RECEIVED appointments and users are given instructions to only move the ones they SENT and notify the other senders to resend theirs

Option 3

Same as #1 except if you know that all workstations were patched on the same day that you can give this date as an extra parameter and the search folder will only display appointments SENT or RECEIVED before that date.  This has an additional benefit - as other senders resend their appointments they ‘disappear’ from the search results.

The downsides of all 3 of these options are the same.

1.  Users need to check ALL the appointments to see if they are accurate

2.  As a sender resends their appointments the search folder will either double up on the sent items, or will not show the newly sent item (for #3)

If we chose one of these options then we will likely do it in GWCheck instead of licensing Omni’s RIVA again.  We have enough lead time and a release vehicle in SP3.

Option 4

We do another version of GWCheck, like we did for the US change.  This GWCheck can look at the Timezone definition on any appointment, sent or received.  If the Timezone definition is incorrect then the GWCheck will intelligently move the appointment to the correct time and place a hidden flag on the item.  If the timezone information is missing or correct then the appointment is not moved.  The details escape me on this last point, but those that were not moved had a different hidden flag applied - the part I can’t remember was if it was just those that had missing timezone information, or all.

It then created 2 search folders that searched on the hidden flags - one you show users what was moved, and one to show them what was not, so that they could selectively resend them.

The Timezone information is placed on any appointment created with the latest Windows client (6.5.6 and newer I seem to remember), the latest Linux/Mac clients (7.0.2?), WebAccess (possibly also 7.0.2, but it may be 7.0.3) and SOAP clients (7.0.3?).  The prior exceptions, though we should be doing it globally now, was on posted appointments.  So, if your users are using the latest windows client then we can probably intelligently move 80-90% of appointments, if they are working like the rest of us do - so they only need to review 10-20% of their total.

So after having explained all of that I have spoken to a number of customers in Australia and the overwhelming feedback was  to go with one of the first 3 options and not attempt to move any appointments.  The reasons given were that it was less confusing for the users to not have appointments moved for them so that they could be sure that they had checked them all themselves.  It was also felt that most users won’t yet have appointments in the problem period and Microsoft released the workstation updates in a patch in December - we are defendant on this patch for the DST calculations.  As this was done quite early if that patch was applied there will be very few problematic appointments.

So my question to the rest of you is if this seems like some reasonable assumptions and if this is the way to go?

I saw this tip on the NGWList from Bob Jonkman. In the past, when I have wanted to decode a Base64 encoded part of a Mime message I have used websites like OpinionatedGeek but I saw a tip from Bob that makes life much easier, and it’s able to do a lot more than just decode the text portion of a Mime.  If you save out the Mime.822 with an extension of .b64 you can open it in Winzip to see the content.

So, for example, I had a mail in my mailbox that had a Base64 coded attachment - the attachment was actually a .png.  I saved the Mime and cut out everything from it except the Base64 encoded part, and the begin and end Mime boundaries.  I saved it as mime.b64 and opened it in WinZip - it displays the file in the WinZip interface and I can open it from there.  Pretty cool - I certainly used to have to decode base64 message parts quite often when I was in support.

Earlier this week I blogged on GWAVACon San Diego.  For those of you that didn’t already know it’s in San Diego at the end of this month (27th to 29th Jan, with a bonus day on the 26th).  What’s very exciting is that Ron Hovsepian is delivering the closing keynote, following on from John Dragoon’s keynote last year.  Actually, I have no idea how we top this next year, but in the meantime we’ll just ride the high.  Ron will be talking about our continued commitment to GroupWise, OES and Teaming+Conferencing.  For the full brief look here.  Latest numbers from Richard Bliss put attendance at a little below 500, so this event is going to be HUGE.  Why don’t you be a part of it and see what’s going on in the Workgroup Business Unit world.

Current status. As many of you know,  the GroupWise Engineering team has been engaged in two major GroupWise deliverables. 7.0.3 (Public BETA and Release) and Bonsai (Authorized BETA). These two projects are significant engagements that the engineering team has been working on over the last several weeks - since my last blog :).    The engineers have made significant progress in both of these areas and I wanted to give everyone an update on when and what to expect.

7.0.3 (Public BETA and Release)

We are currently meeting everyday to determine our ability to ship Public BETA of 7.0.3. We have about 6 outstanding BETA stoppers and once we have those resolved we will be announcing and shipping 7.0.3 to public BETA. Our exit criteria consists of making sure that testing has run a number of test cases and scenarios at a passing rate. In addition, we roll out 7.0.3 to several internal, corporate, post offices and the engineering team’s own post offices.   Currently, we have Linux and NetWare corporate post offices updated and running. We also have updated MTAs, WebAccess and GWIA. Once our quality control team has had enough time and has run enough validation on the code, we will release it publicly. We expect that to be this week or next. After we ship Public BETA, we will be soliciting feedback. In addition to general availability, we will be talking to all customers who reported a defect that was addressed in 7.0.3 to validate that we did indeed fix their issue. In addition, we will continue our corporate roll out and respond to any serious regressions before we SHIP 7.0.3. We are expecting to release 7.0.3 in February.

Bonsai (Authorized BETA)

Upon shipping Authorized BETA on November 28th, we have been focusing a lot of effort on a refresh. We have several input sources for this effort. Of course, the first feedback comes from the BETA sites, the BETA Newsgroups and weekly BETA calls. Their input on UI, functionality, and stability is invaluable in measuring our readiness for Public BETA.   We also solicit feedback on how well we have implemented the new features of Bonsai. The weekly conference calls have been fantastic and very helpful! We have already discussed Installation, Contact Management, Favorites Folder, Calendar Publish and Subscribe. The feedback on these features has been very positive. We have also learned a great deal and are working to make adjustments and improvements in our implementations.

Another input source is our own IS&T department. They always work very closely with us as we roll out new products and they have already updated one of our corporate post offices with Bonsai. It is running on Linux, it has about 200 users and we have not had any reported problems or down time with that Post Office since deployment in early December. Of course, it is still early, but this is a very positive sign.

Engineering has been executing the test runs and they have been working towards stated quality objectives. We hope to refresh the Authorized BETA in February as well. Each subsequent release builds upon the quality metrics and test case executions that were made on previous releases. We expect each release to be substantially better and be deployed deeper into our own organization as we work with our beta sites and make continued improvements.

This is the part of the software development cycle that seems to crawl along. The user does not see many significant changes at this point, but they do see quality improve and usability enhanced. Our marketing manager, Gregory Webb, was recently upgraded to Bonsai. He is so excited about all of the new functionality that he wants to announce its availability to the world! That is very exciting for engineering, but we continue to put on the brakes until we have adequately deployed, scaled and performed in all of the expected customer environments and configurations. Bonsai is the most anticipated end-user focused release of GroupWise that I can remember. We want that anticipation met with high quality.

GMS on Linux

There is one more project that is nearing completion. We do expect to release this month, January, GMS on Linux. We have been in public BETA with this release and we are close to shipping. Watch for announcements soon!

Well that is it for now! I will continue to update you on our progress and look forward to your comments and feedback!

So, it looks like we are all headed to San Diego at the end of the month to attend GWAVACon.  I think we have quite an entourage planning to attend.  I am certainly going, as is Dean but also Phil and Daniel who are the 2 T+C product managers as well as a lot of other Novell management and techies.  We will, of course, be showing what’s coming in GroupWise Bonsai as well as doing many Teaming+Conferencing sessions.  This will be my first GWAVACon so I am intruiged to see how it all works, and it is certainly good practice for Brainshare, which is only 10 weeks away.

Talking of Bonsai the beta is doing great.  We are having a lot of participation and we have a queue forming in case any of the other sites drop off.  Our beta manager, who is new to the GroupWise beta program but a seasoned veteran with other products was amazed at just how much interest and how many requests there are from customers desperate to be on the program. I spend a good portion of my days at the moment saying ‘no’ to customers wanting to join, which is a nice problem to have really.  I wish we could accommodate everyone but it simply becomes too hard and time consuming to manage effectively.