An educational client – over 75 schools, 40,000 students and more than 7,500 employees (administrative & teaching).
They run Novell GroupWise.
Have been for years. They have a domain with 9 post offices for the 7,500+ employees – these post offices handle a ton of email traffic every day. Most of the teachers access their mailboxes through the WebAccess interface.
Another domain, with 3 post offices, handles the mailboxes for the 40,000+ students. Granted, only about 5,000 of them are actively using the email addresses provided by the school board, but every student has an account.
Finally, there is a server for the Internet agent and WebAccess interface. So, basically, a total of about 13 servers for close to 50,000 users.
There is also a Blackberry Enterprise Server, as this had been the direction adopted several years ago. Like many organizations, however, smart phones and tablets have crept into the environment and there is now a large demand to connect these devices, so the school board deployed a GroupWise Datasync Mobility server.
And then, of course, there are the email security appliances to provide anti-spam and antivirus services.
Can you imagine the crew required to run, maintain and support an email environment like that?
One.
No, seriously: one guy!
And every time I visit their office, he always has time to talk – he never seems like he’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
So evidently, they’re very happy with GroupWise. It’s stable, reliable – it just runs! They’ve estimated, based on a number of reports and white papers they’ve read, that if ever they were to migrate to Exchange, they would need about 12 people to run a similar environment. The number of servers would double or triple, which we don’t doubt – we know of one college who went from one single GroupWise server for their 850 or so users, to four servers when they migrated to Exchange. Yes, for the same number of users!
Don’t be fooled – migrating is a costly, painful and time-consuming proposition! And yet…organizations keep making the decision to migrate away from GroupWise to Exchange. As evidenced by comments in this discussion, the decision is rarely technical. Some exec wants his Outlook, or someone gets promised all sorts of goodies from Microsoft, or some new CIO or IT Director comes into the organization who knows nothing about Novell (or still equates Novell with NetWare! Really??) and decides to rip everything out and replace it. We even know of some organizations where such a CIO comes in, rips and replaces everything, and then moves on – leaving behind a very bitter, embattled team of people who now have to deal with a mess.
Nice.
So many times, when I talk to GroupWise customers who are considering the move and I ask them why, they often bring up points that confirm that the biggest problem is a lack of training! Sometimes I take a couple of minutes and just show them how to address one of these points, and I get the “Oh. Cool!” reaction. Some of these customers end up booking some training for their users, and it never ceases to amaze me how, even after having worked with GroupWise for years, they learn so much in the span of about 2 hours!
To existing GroupWise customers: please know that you’ve got an enterprise-class, reliable email system. Know that Novell is entirely committed to GroupWise, is listening to their customers and partners, and that the community is strong.
To customers running anything else: sorry.
Want more proof that migrating is a costly affair? Novell has put together this white paper to explain the costs.
Effectivement Jacques, tu as raison, il y a beaucoup de coûts additionnels sous-évalués lorsqu’un client délaisse Groupwise. Que ce soit des coûts directs (licenses), indirects (plus de serveurs = +énergie + espace) ou facteur humain (heures supplémentaires, formation) ils sont souvent sous-évalués ou ignorés dès le départ. J’ai connu des compagnies ou des organismes qui ont fait le saut et ce fut beaucoup plus couteux et périlleux que prévu. Le hic c’est qu’ils ne veulent pas qu’on en parle… Qui se vanterait d’un mauvais coup ou de dépenses beaucoup plus élevées (surtout s’il s’agit d’un organisme obtenant ses fonds des contribuables…)?…
From my linkedin post:
The last few years I’ve been the guy hired to migrate GW to Exchange. Some observations:
1. No ROI. Chances are the customer is gonna do the same things with Exch as they did with GW (email and calendar), and not utilize the full features of either one. When all is said and done, lots of money is spent, lots of human hours spent ($$) and lots of chaos happened, and everyone is doing the same thing, albeit with a different interface.
The only times a migration makes sense is if you have different platforms for the same company or government, etc., or have a specific application that demands one system (and no, Sharepoint is NOT such an app).
2. Neither system runs well w/o trained admin staff. Neither system runs well w/o trained users. In school systems, no one wants to go for training, and in most places, no one wants to pay for it. This is not fixed with a migration.
3. In all cases, you’re migrating from a neglected GW system to a new shiny Exch system. Well, in 10 years, guess what the new Exch system is gonna look like if they give it the same level of care?
4. Let’s face it — email can be easily outsourced to an offsite company. My bet is that the next round of email migrations will be to outsource the email, in the same way that companies outsource voice mail.
We are a non-profit, so we have always been behind 1 or 2 versions mostly because lack of funds but also because we were able to get $75,000 worth of Novell software for only a couple of grand in a three year cycle donation through Gifts in Kind. Last time we upgraded to GW 7, GW 8 came out a few months after so we were able to obtain it because of software assurance.
This year we want to upgrade the email server and decided to research staying with GW or migrating to Exchange. We decided to stay a couple of more years with GW 8 mostly because there are other expenses we are incurring as we are merging multiple sites, but if this has not been the case we will be migrating. Why? One license of Groupwise cost $86 while one license of Exchange cost $2 through non-profit channels. I hope that in a couple of years they bring the program back and we will be able to keep GW.
However its still great to see the push forward on getting 4k into these tiny action cams.
At this moment I am going away to do my breakfast, when having my breakfast coming yet again to read more news.|