Novell GroupWise 2012 was recently released, and heated exchanges have been flying across the web about whether that should even be news.
It all started with this blog by David Strom. Mr. Strom is described as an IT journalist, so I’m not sure what real-world experience he has with actually supporting and managing enterprise email systems; however, he apparently knows enough to claim that no one cares that Novell has a new version of GroupWise. This, of course, has set off a string of responses & comments.
First, there was Michael Osterman of “Osterman Research”, who rebutted Mr. Strom’s article with his own blog entry and argues that actually, many care about a new version.
As a Novell Platinum Partner who works with many GroupWise customers, I couldn’t agree more – customers are indeed happy to hear about the new version! For sure, many customers have dropped GroupWise in the last several years to move to Exchange, and quite a few of these have secretly admitted to us that it’s been a step backwards in terms of support, maintenance & reliability. Of course, no one will ever admit that publicly – just as in the past “nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM”, today it’s the same with Microsoft. Those customers who have remained with GroupWise, however, cling to it with almost religious fervor.
Why?
Well, for one – it just runs! One of our local customers is a school district with over 7,500 employees and teachers on a 5-post office GroupWise system, all running on virtual servers in a XenServer infrastructure. Last summer we added three post offices in order to provide email services to the more than 40,000 students; although the students don’t use the email services all that much, the employees are very heavy users. In the past year, hundreds of these users have also started synchronizing mobile devices – Blackberries, iOS & Android devices – with GroupWise.
What’s so spectacular about all this? There is only one, single, lonely administrator for this entire email infrastructure! GroupWise, the BES server and the Datasync Mobility server – all alone…
Based on the last research we’ve seen (download Michael Osterman’s paper, Comparing the Real Cost of Email), it takes one Exchange administrator per 1600 users, so the system described above would require about 4 or 5 administrators (and I’m not even counting the 40K students in this calculation)!
Finally, Kari Woolf, Product Marketing Manager for Novell GroupWise, published last week a wonderful rebuttal to all the naysayers – get over the past and move forward! Like Kari, I too am tired of the negative press and the pessimism about GroupWise and Novell in general. Adaris is entirely focused on providing professional services to Novell customers, and not only are we doing well (which always surprises many people!), but we’re also growing and hiring!!
We love the new Novell and are confident that things will get even better!
