Letters to the editor, SharePoint downtime and partner events in Europe!

Novell recently published a 'Letter to the Editor' in the student newspaper at SCU. I thought it would be nice to see the entire letter from Kari Woolf in print.

Several articles have appeared in The Santa Clara concerning the university's plans to migrate from Novell GroupWise to Gmail. As the Marketing Manager for GroupWise, I'd like to provide some facts that should be considered in the journalistic analysis.

First, Santa Clara University is running the GroupWise 7 client. This client was released in 2005 and obviously lacks the user interface enhancements, mobile device support and other new features of more recent versions, including GroupWise 2012. I won't question the decisions of the university's IT department, but SCU users should recognize that they are not leveraging anything close to present-day GroupWise capabilities.

More importantly, customers migrating to Gmail from any other email solution often encounter unanticipated "gotchas." The issues it presents in areas like uptime, security, and data governance remain pressing. In addition, Gmail does not deliver important end user features like message retraction and tracking, offline mode, personal email archiving, and freedom from limits on mailbox size, attachment size and more.

Many organizations have considered the Gmail path, only to find that the business disruption, loss of functionality, and even cost of this "free" solution are prohibitive. Milliken University discovered this reality before they took the leap. After determining that it would have cost at least $35,000 to switch, they upgraded to GroupWise 2012 and are reaping the benefits (detailed HERE) as a result.

There's much more to GroupWise than The Santa Clara's coverage would indicate. I invite interested readers to get the facts by contacting me at kwoolf@novell.com.

Interesting Data point and Article

 

I read the following article and found it interesting to see so many organizations using Exchange and SharePoint that are experiencing some serious data loss and lost productivity!

E-Mail Downtime Throws Businesses for a Loss

I extracted the following quote....

Nearly half of businesses (42 percent) relying on these applications (Exchange and SharePoint) experienced at least one data loss while using them last year, with 59 percent reporting it took at least half a day to recover from that loss, according to a survey of 326 IT managers, engineers and sales personal conducted by Kroll Ontrack, a provider of data recovery, e-discovery and information management.

Open Horizons - Loriol

 

I am currently visiting France and meeting with customers and partners. At this Open Hoizons event, Novell presented Windermere, which includes the new Admin console. This year's France summit was held in Loriol, France. I include a picture taken by Arnaud Delin, who sponsored the event and put everything together with Paul Van der Cruyssen. Novell was also represented by Lionel Musquin. Technical Sales Engineer based in Paris.

GWAVACon - Düsseldorf

 

Novell will next travel to Düsseldorf, Germany and showcase their solutions. Ken Muir, CEO for GWAVA, will present several new solutions from their talented engineers and Bob Flynn, President and General Manager for Novell, will give the keynote. I will also be joined in Germany by several Novell colleagues including Kari Woolf, Tracy Smith, Kai Reichert, Dirk Giles and Nadeem Nazeer.

Watch the GroupWise Facebook page for pictures and updates!

Dean

 

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.