2 Ways to Look at Email Discovery with GroupWise
November 7, 2007
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. And I’ve talked to a lot of people about it. I’ve come to the conclusion that there are 2 ways to go about doing email discovery and forensics work, particularly when it comes to litigation support type work. The first way is the way that I end up doing a lot of my work. I get a call from a LitSupport company who has a bunch of data they were sent and it’s all GroupWise. I help them extract the data using my GroupWise expertise and the tools that I have. We tend to extract everything to PST since that’s what most LitSupport companies want it in. This is the Post-extraction method. It tends to cost a lot of money in Consulting and LitSupport dollars. And it’s not very good for companies (well, other than companies like mine and Lit Support companies who make money doing the extraction work) who have multiple litigation requirements that they have to fulfill.
The other way to handle this is pre-emptively, or before it happens, the customer can setup (or we can help them set it up) an archiving solution such as GWAVA Reveal and/or Retain, Nexic Discovery, or Messaging Architects GWArchive. These products all support GroupWise natively and allow the customer to do searches and extract those searches to a readable and searchable format. If a judge tells you to provide all the mail from 2006 that includes the words balogna, you can easily go to any of these tools and do a search on those keywords and then export them to a CD and deliver it. You don’t have to get a Consultant involved (although sometimes the objectivity of a consultant is required) or at least it shouldn’t take the consultant as long to take care of if you’re already got an archive that you can search and prepare for them. Cost-wise, each of these products are sold on a per-user basis, but by paying up front to get these types of solutions in place and ready to go, you can avoid the costly attorney & consulting fees that come around the other side of a litigation situation.
So, you might want to take a look at what your email retention requirements are (check with the regulatory board in your industry to find out what they are) and get ready ahead of time by using an Enterprise Archiving solution to get ahead of the curve. The other huge benefit of using tools like these is you can get a bunch of that old GroupWise email off of your production GroupWise environment, and on to an online archive that your users can refer to, but it wont’ be hogging up your GroupWise System.
Let us know if we can help you install and configure any of these types of solutions. We’ve installed them in lots of companies across the nation and could easily be scheduled to come help you.
Until that time, keep sending those emails, and let us know how we can help you get your GroupWise System in the best shape possible.
Matt Ray, Owner, Prinicipal Consultant, MC Consulting – GroupWiseGuru.com
Recreate User Database - A GW Zombification Tool!
September 25, 2007
It’s almost Halloween time and there’s always talk about Zombies at Halloween time, right? Besides being a GroupWise expert, I’ve also spent a lot of time in Haiti (with Healing Hands for Haiti, my hobby, you might say) where most of the “real” zombies live, I’m told. 
But what you may not know is that we can create zombies of our own in GroupWise. To explain, I need to explain to you a little bit about GroupWise and how it works.
GroupWise uses a set of shared databases to store and represent messages to users. There are a set of user databases (ofuser directory), a set of message databases (ofmsg directory), and a directory for attachments (offiles). When I send an email to someone else in my post office with GroupWise, three things happen (I’m definitely simplifying the process here). First, I insert the actual message in my assigned message database. Then I create 2 pointers to that message. The first is in my Sent Items folder and the second is in the recipient’s Inbox folder. If there’s an attachment to the message it gets stored in offiles directory, but that’s besides the point.
So, let’s say my recipient doesn’t want the email any longer. He deletes the message and then empties it. However, until I delete the message and empty it from my Sent Items folder, that message, although dead to my recipient, is still living. From my recipient’s perspective, it’s buried, but really, “It’s A-L-I-V-E-!” (insert a wicked sounding laugh here).
So, who cares whether GroupWise naturally creates zombies of messages or not? Well, when you’re going through email for litigation purposes and you can’t find the email you’re looking for, perhaps the reason it’s not there is because the recipient deleted it from his mailbox. But, as long as the sender didn’t delete it from their Sent Items folder (something that almost nobody does, by the way, because they don’t think to delete sent items) you can run a process called, “Recreate User Database,” or something I like to call, “Bringing emails back from the dead!” The recreate user database will dump all the emails into the recipient’s Cabinet folder, even the ones that were in sub-folders before, but there’s a good chance you’ll get many more emails recreated than what you had originally. By the way, it also dumps all the Sent Items in that same folder. Once they’re in that folder you can do your keyword searches or extract the mailbox to PST and search it that way.
I hope this helps in your email searching. If you need more information about creating zombie emails, please don’t hesitate to contact us for assistance. For litigation/e-discovery purposes, or for any of your GroupWise Consulting needs, call us and we’ll help you get the job done, even if it means bringing emails back from the grave!
Matt Ray, GroupWise Guru, mray@groupwiseguru.com, 661.885.2699
GroupWise Litigation Support!
August 17, 2007
Have you been given a GroupWise project to grab all the files from backup and extract mailboxes? Has it been difficult? Let us help you by providing GroupWise expertise in this area. We’ve been doing GroupWise Litigation Support for several years now, providing law firms & litigation support companies with GroupWise expertise on their toughest GroupWise Litigation Support Projects. We’ve worked with so many companies to provide this support that we went ahead and documented what you need to get started. This doc tells you what files and directories are required to get things going right.
GroupWise 7 SP2 ships!
April 24, 2007
GroupWise 7 SP2 ships!
GroupWise 7 SP2 has recently shipped and it has a lot of fixes in it! You can download the NLM/NT version by going to this link:
http://download.novell.com/Download?buildid=8RF83go0nZg~
Download the LINUX version by going here:
http://download.novell.com/Download?buildid=O9ucpbS1bK0~
You should read through the list of fixes if you’ve got some time on your hands. But one of the most important fixes is a Web Access vulnerability issue. Read more about it here:
http://secunia.com/advisories/24944/
I’ve installed SP2 for a few customers and overall it has gone really well. No major issues have occurred. And, the client is a lot snappier, based on my experience. If you need help with applying the Support Pack, don’t hesitate to call us. We have accellerated upgrades that can help you apply the support pack within a few hours (backend only) and very little downtime. In fact, most people are surprised by how little down time we have when we upgrade them from 6.5 to 7 or even 6.0. We just did an upgrade from 6.03 to 7.01 IR1 2 weeks ago for a large school system and we had 5 minutes of downtime. Of course, this is an in place upgrade. If you need to upgrade your servers and do an across the wire migration it will take longer, but we’ve done one of those with as little as 30 minutes of downtime. The nice thing about that is you could do it during lunch, which we did.
Make sure you call us for all your upgrade and migration needs. We’d also be glad to help you with an enterprise level archiving solution. See our next post.
GWAVACon Report
January 29, 2007
GWAVACon Report
For those of you who missed GWAVACon this year, you really missed a great event!
There were over 500 attendees and lots of great information being shared. One event that I always like to take good notes on are the previews of future products coming out from Novell. Phil Muir spent about an hour demonstrating the new features of Bonsai, the next release of GroupWise, due out in the fall of 2007. He actually brought up the GroupWise client, as it stands currently, and he was unable to get it to crash. There were a few memory errors, but the client wouldn’t crash. The reason he wanted it to crash was to demonstrate the new feature of Save Draft or whatever they’re going to call it. In essence, if you’re working on an email and GroupWise crashes, when you re-open the client, it asks you if you want to continue working on the email you were composing. That, in itself, is almost enough to upgrade to the cliient when it comes out. But there’s more. Here are my notes from his presentation. They are a little cryptic, so please take them for what they are, Notes. If you have questions about my notes, please email me and I’ll be glad to answer them. mray@gwguru.com
Power to the People
Ken Muir, Phil Karen – Bonsai
Past successes:
May – 2006
Novell Open Workgroup Suite
June, 2006
GMS, powered by INtellisync
GW7 SP1
Dec, 2006
Interim Release 1
Future of Groupwise – Bonsai
Halfway done coding with bonsai, code complete in May, ship in November ’07.
- Contact management
- People have to get answers fast
“The first two-by-four that hit me in the head, when I looked down at it, it said Contact Management.”
- Schedule Coordination
- Publish calendars
- Subscribe to calendars
- Check availability across organizations
- Windows Client
- Collect
- Process
- Organize
- Do
- Review
- Save work in progress
- Compose messages
- Office
- Manage tasks
- Linux and Mac Clients
- Linux is an alternative to Vista
- Mac dominates creative groups
- “Rome wasn’t built in a day. We’re trying to get both clients together as far as features go.”
- Our goal: Make both clients identical.
- Functionality on Par with GroupWise 7
- -ui=gtk – a startup switch that makes groupwise look different on linux client
- Ken’s Group uses a coding method called Agile Code Development that makes the code shippable at any time.
- It looks a lot like the gw7 client and he jumped around the client and got a few memory errors, but it still did everything he asked it to do.
- Full color calendars
- He actually pulled a copy of his live groupwise system and ran the gw linux client against it.
- Drag and drop calendar modifications
- New Checklist
- New automatic saving of compose mode
- Getting things done
- You can now hide completed checklist items
- You can mark items a percentage of completion (30% complete for example) – project management
- Every folder has the ability to have a sticky folder list or quickview – remember folder list state
- Remember quickviewer visibility
- Customized Panels
- GWAVAHome Page – web page panels
- Message Preview – you can see the first 200 characters of all of your emails
- It remembers your login information and the page you were on
- Editors/Viewers
- You change the setting and when you go into new mail, it opens word as the composer
- You can insert spreadsheets and other applications into the email, just like you could in Word or Excel (or Open Office)
- Publish Calendars
- Someone sends you an email
- Webcal: it populates all the schedules into your calendar
- GWMailto hangs
- Interacts with Icalshare.com
- Alternate Time Zone
- During the Demo, Ken wanted to make the groupwise client to crash so he could show the way that newly composed messages are auto-saved so that when you go back into GroupWise after a crash, it asks you what you want to do with the messages that were saved. He eventually just killed GroupWise with the Task Manager and then restarted it so he could show this feature. It’s ironic. There are still 4 months left of coding to do on it, but he couldn’t get it to crash.
- Address now allows you to put in photos and things and looks like outlook
- View Map allows you to click on a user in address book and it jumps to google and maps their address out, all from within the client
- Birthdays put into the address book show up on your calendar automatically
- Summary
- Next Release, Bonsai, late 2007
- Contact Management
- Calendars and schedule coordination
- He committed to shipping no later than November 30th
- Clients
- Windows & Windows Vista
- Web Access
- SLED 10
- Mac
- Outlook
- Very few people were angry that he waited until June to ship because when it shipped, it was solid
- Windows Vista, end of February it will be supported
- The feedback from customers was that SP1 was the most solid release in a long time
- Support Call volume for SP1 was down 67% and defects & logs were down 68%
- Nothing is as old as yesterday’s sports page – Nothing is as old as our last release. We’re on the road to better things.
- This is the right release (Bonsai) at the right time for our customers
- Web Access has the most developers on his team and it’s going to be awesome. He didn’t show us Web Access, but will show it at Brainshare and he’s saying that it’s amazing.
- Questions
- We like to eat our own Caviar and we’re trying to make sure that the APIs are all there.
- What version will you ship? 7.5? 8?
- 64 bit support?
- The client and backend code?
- We are working on 64 bit, but, Bonsai won’t take advantage of 64 bit pointers
- We’re laying foundation and it’s all based on Unicode (95%)
- Are you going to change the shared folder’s ability to change ownership?
- What’s going on with the outlook client?
- Rewrote a bunch of tables
- Is MS helping with that?
- Mailtune
- Out of office
- Archiving to PSTs??
- Multiuser calendaring can not be shown for more than 1 day. Is this going to be addressed?
- Not sure about web access
- Management of GroupWise through imanager?
- Doubled qa team in the last month
- Adding resources to start working on aspen
- They’re working on imanager lite so that it’s not eDir specific. He doesn’t want to tie GroupWise to eDir any longer so that non-eDir customers can install it.
- External integration with wordperfect?
GW7 SP1 Ships!
June 23, 2006
After months of waiting patiently, Novell customers can now download GroupWise 7 SP1. Although the initial GroupWise 7 release was amazing, there were many things that needed to be addressed. Novell reports that they fixed over 1000 issues with the client alone. So if you’ve been waiting to roll out GroupWise 7, now is the time! In addition to all of the issue fixing, Novell has also shipped an amazing new product called the GroupWise Mobile Server, allowing you to connect to all of your wireless PDA devices. And you can do it for free!
If you’d like help upgrading your GroupWise System to GW7, or want to apply SP1, don’t hesitate to contact us. Also, let us help you implement the new Mobile Server! Call or email us today!
Welcome to GWGuru.com
December 22, 2005
Have you ever worked with a company who is so good at one thing that when you talk to them, you instantly know that they know what they’re talking about and you feel like you’ve come to the right place? Well, if that one thing you’re looking for help on is GroupWise, welcome to the right place.
GWGuru.com, a website run by MC Consulting, was founded by Matt Ray, a consultant who has been doing Enterprise-level GroupWise Consulting and Support for the past 14 years. While at Novell Matt worked with many different customers including LAPD, Port of Los Angeles, City of Redondo Beach, Synovus, Nationwide, Baptist Health Services of South Florida, Mound Cotton Wollan & Greengrass, and others. Matt has worked in the Legal, Government, Schools, Health Systems, and Corporate industries. He has offered many solutions around GroupWise and works with partners to provide additional solutions to you, providing business solutions, not just boxes of software.
Now offering GroupWise 7 Upgrades!
Are you looking for help upgrading your GroupWise System? What about professional consulting advice about how GroupWise can help you solve your business needs? Contact us and we can help you perform an accellerated upgrade of your GroupWise Backend, allowing you to roll your front end out at your own leisure. Or, we can do the whole thing. How about making sure your agents and gateways are running in a fault tolerant and redundant configuration, providing uptime beyond your wildest dreams.
GroupWise Monitoring
We now offering GroupWise Monitoring as a service. We can monitor your GroupWise System, making sure it’s designed and performing correctly. We’ll provide you regular reports on usage, trends, and issues. Let us help you and your staff to make your GroupWise System a more efficient and stable application. Our consultants have the GroupWise expertise to help you and your GroupWise System rock solid!
Partner With Us
If you are an integrator/reseller and would like to partner with us on GroupWise projects, we’d be glad to work with you. Bring us in as your GroupWise expert, providing high-level GroupWise expertise to your customers and helping them to see value in the service you provide them. We can also provide GroupWise Monitoring for them, sending you the reports, allowing you to reformat them and deliver them to your customer. Look like GroupWise Pros!
It’s a win/win solution for you and your customers!
Contact us to learn more about our services and how we can make your GroupWise System a dream come true.
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