At GWAVACon EMEA last week I heard a very nice and true story from a very interesting person. I did ask him, if I could publish this story and he gave me the OK for that, but he did not really want his name to be published. However many people at least in Europe know this person, he is the one, who is always registering first! Of course he has been the first to register for the Open Horizons EMEA Summit in November as well..... So looking forward to see you there again, Mr........ But now lets focus on this true story.

Berlin, 19 October 2008 - Yesterday I announced the Swedish translation of  "The GroupWise Powerguide - Second Edition", today I can announce that a French speaking team has accepted the challenge to work on the French version as well. And what a great team do they bring to the table, from all over the world: Lionel Musquin from France, Stany Wyrzykowski from Belgium, Aldo Zanoni from Canada and of course Arnaud Delin from France. It will be great to have the Second Edition of the Powerguide in some many languages, scheduled to be available in Spring 2009.

Berlin, 18 Oktober 2008 - It's with great pleasure that we can announce there will be a Swedish version of "The GroupWise Powerguide - Second Edition" as well. The Second Edition of ther Powerguide will include all exciting new features of GroupWise 8 and is scheduled to be delivered in Spring 2009. This Second Edition will be available in English, German, Polish, Dutch and now in Swedish as well. As this is a community project, we're very glad that Mats Eriksson and Hans Prim have accepted the task to work on this great project, together with Christof Overkamp and Diethmar for the German version and SaNder Visser and Ancel Schouwink for the Dutch version.

Many of you will recognize this scenario - you're in the process of making final preparations for (another) trip and then things start falling apart. In this case I was finalizing the last items for GWAVACon in Berlin on Thursday, meanwhile also taking care of my mail and then things started going sour - performance of GroupWise was suddenly very sluggish, rebooting the server didn't help much. Ooh geeh, not those server harddisks, please - realizing that ordering (spare) disks was one of these tasks that has not been completed yet. As this server is virtualized, copying the image to another server seems like a good plan - however the performance of the RAID-5 disk system is now so slow that even copying 1 GB takes 45 minutes. And not having access to e-mail for a whole weekend is not an option, so the whole trip to Berlin and thus our booth at GWAVACon is now at stake. However, once again GroupWise shows its enormous flexibility and strength in solving this problem, just ass a teaspoon a little bit of ingenuity to the mix...

I´m travelling to and through the Netherlands on a regular basis, e.g. to have Open Horizons meetings with Erno and Paul or to visit customers and partners or to attend the local meetings of the very successful GroupWise User Group in the Netherlands. What I hate most about the Netherlands are the incredible traffic jams. Therefore my favorite dutch word is "filevrij" (in english this means no traffic jams). On my last trip in the Netherlands, where I had to spend some time in one bigger traffic jam, I was thinking about different things and then one logical association went into my mind. Filevrij = GroupWise.

The numbers 0815 are very well known in the german speaking area, maybe only in Germany. The term is based on a very popular german novel about a german soldier during the second world war. The title 0815 is originally a name for a german maschine gun, which was used in the second world war. Right now 0815 in Germany means something like "low standard" or "nothing special". 

I'm still fascinated by the recent announcement of Nokia - how can you decide to buy Intellisync  a few years ago for something like $ 470 million and then throw away that investement so easily? Just decide you don't need these "behind the firewall solutions" and get rid of it all? Whe they decided on this, did they imagine to sell this division to some other company or did they want a competitor to be taken out of the market? When buying Intellisync, were they serious about trying to buy and create an even bigger market share, meanwhile competing with others offerings like Microsoft? Has their recent announcement to support ActiveSync and thus the Microsoft backend on their devices got anything to do with this? I've recently thought of something else as well...

Today (Sept. 29, 2008) Nokia has announced that they will realign several of there offerings, which might have an impact on their Intellisync division as well. As Intellisync is the basis of the GroupWise Mobile Server, this might have an impact on the GroupWise market as well, although probably only on the (very) long run.With the recent release of GMS2.0.4 on Windows, GMS for Linux and the beta version of GMS3, the Intellisync division of Nokia in the USA has shown its strength and belief in the GroupWise market space. However, the recent announcements of Nokia HQ in Finland could be in the way of other developments in the coming years.