Novell Support
October 13, 2008

We’ve spoken to a few customers over the past year about Novell Support and the changes it’s going through.   The outsourcing of many of the support groups to India has impacted things a bit.   Also, more recently, Novell has stopped offering support to companies unless they purchase maintenance when they upgrade or purchase new products.    This, unfortunately, has left some customers who previously had support without support and not knowing where to find good domestic support options.

Well, we’re here to tell you that we’d love to offer you support contracts or support incidents or whatever you need to provide you with strong Novell Support.  We have supported customers all over the country and would love to provide you with the same kind of support.  Whether you need help with your NetWare server, your LINUX server, your Windows server, or your applications on those servers, we can help.   We have consultants and support reps who can help you with GroupWise on NetWare, LINUX, or Windows, as well as Zenworks, IDM, eDirectory, etc.   Let us help you with your Novell environment and get you working quickly.  Call us today for support and ask us about our proactive GroupWise Monitoring, too!

Posted by Matt Ray @ 5:25 pm

GroupWise Gurus listed as a Recommended Consultants with AVST
October 13, 2007

In a recent addition to their website, AVST, listed GroupWiseGuru as their recommended GroupWise Consultants. See this link for the addition:

http://www.avst.com/company/recommendedconsultants.asp

More about AVST:

Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST) is a leading developer of communications solutions for businesses of all sizes. Through its world-class unified communications platform, CallXpress®, and its innovative speech application module, Seneca®, AVST offers the industry’s most powerful suite of second generation communications solutions including voice messaging, unified messaging, speech-enabled applications (including automated attendant and hands-free mobile worker access), and call processing (including embedded IVR). More can be found about AVST by going to their website, http://www.avst.com

Remember that MC Consulting – GroupWiseGuru.com is here for all of your GroupWise needs. Whether that includes health checks, upgrades, migrations, expert witness, litigation support, or forensics & discovery. We do GroupWise!

Posted by Matt Ray @ 12:05 pm

GroupWise Litigation Support with version 4.X - Part Deux
September 25, 2007

Last week I wrote about us working on a 4.x system and having all the passwords set.   Luckily for us, someone had the old password and we were able to get into all the domains and create userlists to the customer could then pick out which custodians they needed us to extract from each dataset.   However, along the road, we also discovered that the Primary Domains could be reset using GroupWise 5.2.   This is partly what I had remembered from my 5.2 days.   The inital release of 5.2 had a bug in it where it would allow you to access the 4.x domain without putting in a password.   Shortly after this release, another release came out that did require you to put in the password, however, using this release of 5.2, we were able to get past the password issue we were facing.    For more information see the previous post.

Hope this is helpful to you.  As always, if you need help with your GroupWise Litigation Support project, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Matt Ray, mray@gwguru.com

Posted by Matt Ray @ 5:45 pm

GroupWise Litigation Support with version 4.X
September 10, 2007

We ran across a project this week where the customer had a bunch of old data from 1997, 1998, and 1999.   It was all GroupWise 4.X data.   Back in the good old 4.X days (yes, we were working on GroupWise back then (actually back to Office 3.x!)) you didn’t have edirectory providing security and authentication as it was WordPerfect security, not Novell security.   However, WordPerfect allowed your domains to be secure by having a password to protect them.    This was fine and dandy back then, but it poses a difficult issue when doing Litigation Support or eDiscovery on that version of GroupWise.   That’s why when you want to do GroupWise Litigation Support on 4.x, you really need to ask if they have the domain password.    If they have multiple domains, you’ll need to get them all if you want to access mail from all of them.  The only other way to get around this issue is to send the domain.db into Novell and have the password reset.   Unfortunately, this would be quite cost prohibitive, particularly when we were talking about 80+ domains!

If you run across any other interesting GroupWise Litigation Support issues, please don’t hesitate to contact us.   We’d love to help you with all of your GroupWise needs.

Matt

Posted by Matt Ray @ 6:41 pm

GroupWise Archiving… you can’t ignore it forever!
August 17, 2007

GroupWise Archiving

Sarbanes-Oxley got you down? HIPAA causing a pain in your side? Are you being required to maintain all of your documents, including your email, and you’re not sure how to go about it or don’t have time to do it? Or maybe you’re one of the ones who thinks that this isn’t going to apply to you. Trust us, eventually, you’ll need to provide something to the court system and instead of having easy access to it, you’ll be digging through old backup tapes, hoping you have the right tape drive and backup software to get everything restored correctly, and then you’ll be reverse engineering GroupWise just to get into it. We’ve done this with hundreds of companies and most of them end up turning it over to us to do because they don’t want to mess around with it.

Well, beat the rush by putting an Enterprise Level Archiving System in place and then you’ll kill 2 birds with 1 stone. 1st off, you’ll be ready if you ever have to provide old emails for litigation purposes and 2ndly, by providing an enterprise level archiving solution, you can now enforce that cleannup policy you’ve been wanting to put in place for years, but nobody would let you.

Let us help you to put an Enterprise Archiving Solution in place today. Your users will love you. Your CEOs will love you. Your legal team will love you! And your GroupWise System will love you as you unclog its arteries from all of the email in the system since 1995! Contact us today to find out more!

Posted by Matt Ray @ 3:05 pm

Migrate your GroupWise System to LINUX!

Have you been putting off migrating your GroupWise System to LINUX until you can take the time to “learn LINUX?”   Why wait?   We can come help you migrate and provide you training while we do it.    Still not comfortable?   We’ll provide a post-migration support contract to help you work through the transition.   Call us today and we’ll be glad to work with you on your GroupWise LINUX Migration!

Posted by Matt Ray @ 2:31 pm

GroupWise Administrator Backup, a new offering!

MC Consulting – GroupWiseGuru.com is now offering a GroupWise Administrator Backup where we back your GroupWise Administrator up when he or she goes on vacation or goes to training.   We’ll get to know your environment, work with your Administrator, document your system, so that when they leave for a week or two, you aren’t left in the dark!   We’ll know your GroupWise System well enough that we can resolve issues or work on projects, whatever you need.  We can also do yearly health checks and status reports if you’d like.   It’s totally customizable and will work how you need it to work.    Contact us today to get more information!

Posted by Matt Ray @ 2:28 pm

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.

Posted by Matt Ray @ 9:38 am

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
  1. Windows Client
  • Make Home View a personal productivity dashboard
    • Collect
    • Process
    • Organize
    • Do
    • Review
    1. Save work in progress
    1. Compose messages
  • Word
    • Office
    1. Manage tasks
    1. Linux and Mac Clients
  • It’s going to look like GroupWise 7
    • 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
    1. -ui=gtk – a startup switch that makes groupwise look different on linux client
    1. Ken’s Group uses a coding method called Agile Code Development that makes the code shippable at any time.
  • He just grabbed the latest build and brought it with him
    • 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
    1. Getting things done
  • You have to be able to process stuff quickly and orderly
    • 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
    1. Customized Panels
  • You can have as many columns in your panels as you want
    • 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
    1. Editors/Viewers
  • Compose messages with Word or Office applications
    • 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)
    1. Publish Calendars
  • Generates location and send the link via an email
    • Someone sends you an email
    • Webcal: it populates all the schedules into your calendar
    • GWMailto hangs
    • Interacts with Icalshare.com
    1. Alternate Time Zone
  • Allows you to see your time zone lined up against a different time zone, ie., Katmandu against PST.
    1. 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.
    1. Address now allows you to put in photos and things and looks like outlook
  • History tab shows you all the conversations you have with the person you have selected in the address book
    • 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
    1. Summary
  • An affordable, powerful, flexible, and secure alternative
    • 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
    1. Very few people were angry that he waited until June to ship because when it shipped, it was solid
    1. Windows Vista, end of February it will be supported
    1. The feedback from customers was that SP1 was the most solid release in a long time
    1. Support Call volume for SP1 was down 67% and defects & logs were down 68%
    1. 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.
    1. This is the right release (Bonsai) at the right time for our customers
    1. 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.
    1. Questions
  • How many of the new features will be available in the APIs?
    • We like to eat our own Caviar and we’re trying to make sure that the APIs are all there.
    1. What version will you ship? 7.5? 8?
  • Undecided at this point. He asked the audience what they would like to see.
    1. 64 bit support?
  • We run on 64 bit architecture now, we’re independent.
    • 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%)
    1. Are you going to change the shared folder’s ability to change ownership?
  • Expire the user’s account
    1. What’s going on with the outlook client?
  • Continuing development
    • Rewrote a bunch of tables
    1. Is MS helping with that?
  • It’s on his agenda of things to do with MS after the new agreement with them in November.
    • Mailtune
    • Out of office
    • Archiving to PSTs??
    1. Multiuser calendaring can not be shown for more than 1 day. Is this going to be addressed?
  • It’s not in bonsai
    • Not sure about web access
    1. Management of GroupWise through imanager?
  • Something they’re taking on, expanding his team to do that
    • 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.
    1. External integration with wordperfect?
  • No, not on the roadmap

    • Posted by Matt Ray @ 10:57 am

    GroupWise 7 SP1 Ships!
    June 22, 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!

    Posted by Matt Ray @ 2:57 pm