Finally! A workspace that works the way you do

Novell GroupWise 8 gives you a wide range of collaborative tools to create a truly “plugged in” work environment. You can easily customize different Home Views or “personal productivity dashboards”, bringing together the tools and web applications you interact with most for any given aspect of your job. From e-mails from your boss, to your daily appointments, to your RSS feeds, to team workspaces, you can grab what matters most and put it front and center.

This eliminates the distraction of bouncing in and out of applications by bringing most of what you need together in one space.

With your customized dashboard, the tools for boosting productivity are no longer hidden from you. There’s no need to be a “power user” with GroupWise 8: The dashboard puts all the tools and connections you need to work smart right there in front of you.

It doesn’t even matter what platform you prefer, or what device you’re using. Steer your productivity from a laptop or a hand-held device. Use Windows, Linux or Macintosh platforms. Use the Web to work from home or on the road. With GroupWise 8, you can work wherever you want to.

Turn your contact list into a relationship builder.

You can do a lot better than just keeping track of phone numbers and addresses. Now you can keep track of people, histories, agreements, connections and more, right within Novell GroupWise. Contact management in GroupWise is more than a digital “rolodex”—it’s a powerful tool that helps you track, manage and build all-important business relationships.

GroupWise lets you display your contact information in ways that make sense to you. Add in all the details that give you a complete picture of who your contact is, and how to find them. For example, you can embed map-location capability (Google, MapQuest, etc), photos and other key information to each contact file.

Try using the different variables you can drag into your contacts list to remember those important personal details that enhance your business relationship, like birthdays, anniversaries and much more. You can even do free/busy searches on your contacts’ published calendars, so you’ll know when they’re available for a meeting.

Contacts never get lost when you manage them in GroupWise. “Find Contact” searches for contacts across all address books, and a quick filter searches for partial matches on many of the possible fields. You can make notes within each contact history (much like what you see in a Contact Management system). The notes are time-stamped and also appear on the Notes section of your calendar—allowing you to track all the notes you’ve made for any given day.

Your contacts are the lifeblood of your professional life. Keep them at your fingertips with GroupWise.

Manage tons of users with a tiny administrator staff

With Novell GroupWise you can support up to 10,000 users on a single server. And centralized, policy-based administration means one administrator can manage several thousand GroupWise user accounts; in fact, many current Novell customers manage 5,000-10,000 users with only one administrator. (Yes, you read that right.)

The most overlooked aspect of the collaborative equation is the one that makes it possible for your users to get anything done at all. Your IT staff deploys and maintains your system, and supports the knowledge workers who use it. If the system you choose is reliable, virus-resistant and efficient, it makes the most of every IT resource you have—from hardware usage to staff-hours—toward the optimum end result: enhanced and reliable personal productivity for users.

If, however, your system is vulnerable to viruses, security breaches and downtime, your IT staff has to work twice as hard to support your knowledge workers. When those systems go down, the people using it can’t get their work done—and your IT staff has to scramble to get the engine of productivity back in use.

If you’re using a collaboration system like Microsoft Exchange / Outlook, you know first-hand how quickly the IT part of that productivity equation can turn into a vicious cycle. You have probably seen first-hand just how damaging that cycle can be.

Here’s what GroupWise administrators have to say about its ease of administration:

“We have about 15,000 accounts, 14 post offices, 7 domains and 3 Web access servers. It is amazing that one person can take care of all that.” – Victor Cable, Cobb County School District, United States

“We have about 4,500 GroupWise users, and only one administrator. It is a four domain setup, running all on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, including GroupWise Mobile Server. Favorite feature, hands down, is the stability!” –Daniel Bray, Health First, Inc., United States

“The hospital has 8,000 employees. There are 9,000 e-mail boxes, and I’m the only GroupWise administrator.” – Eddie Munoz, Scott and White Hospital, United States

Harder to hack than Exchange

Microsoft Exchange is the world’s leading target for hackers, and not just because of its widespread use. Hooks in the code enable easy third-party integration, yes—but also provide entryways into your system. Reactive patching and other Microsoft security measures simply can’t keep up with the speed and innovation that hackers demonstrate when attacking a system.

The CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) is a Department of Defense-sponsored, federally funded research and development center. CERT.org found Microsoft Exchange to be far more vulnerable to viruses and worms than other collaboration solutions. Malware enters Exchange easily through ActiveX and Visual Basic acceptances in Outlook, leaving the door wide open to costly and disruptive virus attacks and potential data compromises.

According to CERT.org Vulnerability Notes Database, as of September 2008, Novell GroupWise had only 12 vulnerabilities documented.  Microsoft Exchange had 89 vulnerabilities and IBM Notes had 81 vulnerabilities documented.  This continues to demonstrate the fact that GroupWise is the industry leader when it comes to securing your email and calendaring solution.

The US-CERT Vulnerability Notes Database

Here’s what GroupWise administrators have to say about its security:

“During the past 17 years, I’ve administrated GroupWise systems that have included as few as 10 users to groups that included more than 10,000. Throughout the years, my favorite feature of GroupWise has always been its total impenetrability to viruses and Trojans. I’ve worked with many folks who run other mail systems, and they are always chasing outbreaks. With GroupWise, that just does not happen.” – Alan Russell, Leon County Board of County Commissioners, United States

“I have been working with GroupWise for about five years, and I currently support approximately 130 users at this time. My favorite GroupWise feature is its resistance to virus attacks. It’s also much less demanding, in terms of administration, than Exchange. You start it up, and it runs forever with no upkeep. It is the most trouble-free e-mail system I have used.” – Troy Chappell, Hospice and Palliative CareCenter, United States

“We have been using GroupWise since 1996, and have nothing but good things to say about it. One of the best things about GroupWise is that it you turn it on and it works! No patches, no reboots.” – Melville Pereira, Pollard Windows, Inc., Canada

Incredible Uptime

Microsoft servers go down so often that downtime is planned into IT activities. With Novell GroupWise, your system doesn’t tend to go down unless you take it down. GroupWise stays running far longer and more reliably than anything else. Viruses don’t get through nearly as often to bring down your system. Think of what it would be like to do without Patch Tuesdays. With GroupWise, that’s a reality.

Here’s what GroupWise administrators have to say about GroupWise uptime:

“Currently our agency has about 110 GroupWise users, supporting the public across eight counties with a population of about 158,000. GroupWise has always been up to the challenge of handling our e-mail and scheduling needs for this population. We receive about 12,000 e-mails a week, and our virtualized NetWare/GroupWise servers never let us down. GroupWise has saved our agency from at least four or five e-mail worms that caused great havoc for other state agencies that were running Exchange.” –Matt Merrell, Southeastern District Health Department, United States

“We now have more than 20,000 mailboxes currently running GroupWise 7.0.3. We have to say that the system runs itself. Overall, we have never lost any e-mails and our availability has been an average of 99.9 percent available monthly.” –Karen Migliarini, City of Toronto, Canada

“In our 10 years of using GroupWise, it has never once become corrupt, suffered downtime or disappointed. With its versatile deployment options (WebAccess, remote, caching or direct), I have been able to meet the needs of all our users. I have three favorite features: 1) Proxy access—try that with Exchange! 2) Find—powerful, fast and accurate! 3) No viruses—can Outlook say that?” –Roger Anderson, Aerospace Distributors, United States

“GroupWise has been the main e-mail system for RBF since e-mail was introduced to the company. Many have lobbied to replace it with more expensive solutions, only to be completely stymied by three important facts: 1) Our company has had an accumulated post office downtime of 90 minutes in 20 years! 2) Our system has never been subjected to virus attacks, nor has it ever experienced any downtime due to one. 3) We have three post offices that continue to run flawlessly with more than 500 GB stored in each post office. It is obvious that there is no other e-mail system that even compares to GroupWise’s stability.” –Steve Tucker, RBF Consulting, United States

Are you considering Novell Groupwise™ software for your organizaton? Let the Kifinti Solutions expert team help you. We can leverage our many successful implementations to help make your project a success. Ask about a free product evaluation.