Delivering Novell GroupWise and Exchange Co-Existence

To further strengthen our third-party integration and interoperability efforts, as part of the Novell GroupWise 2012 SP2 release in the first quarter of next year we will provide a GroupWise and Exchange co-existence solution. As the GroupWise product team and Novell top management recently visited with customers around the world, many of your peers expressed the need to allow GroupWise and Exchange environments to seamlessly co-exist. This need can arise as a result of a merger or acquisition, or simply because one department or agency uses GroupWise and another uses Exchange.

The co-existence solution will deliver the following three main capabilities:

• Seamless interchange of email and appointments between systems (currently available with GroupWise)
• Seamless free/busy search across both systems
• Address book synchronization and seamless access to the address books of either system

This solution will not alter your current GroupWise system architecture since it will simply be built into the existing GroupWise MTA. That means you can use this solution without having to add to your network topology or deploy any additional servers or virtual machines. If desired, you'll be able to load balance the system address book synchronization across a variety of MTAs to reduce initial impact. However, other than the initial synchronization, no additional load or performance degradation is expected for ongoing synchronization or free/busy activity. (See Figure 2.)

 

 

The co-existence solution will require GroupWise 2012 SP2 or higher, and Microsoft Exchange/Outlook 2010 with the latest support packs. If you don't need or want to take advantage of the co-existence solution you should still deploy GroupWise 2012 SP2 to take advantage of its bug fixes and quality improvements. In that instance, you would simply not enable and configure the co-existence capability.