January 5,  2009 - For most people, today will just be the start of a new year at their workplace. However, due to the economic crises for some people this new year will bring a few unexpected opportunities - their job might be at stake, their IT environment might need adjustments and so on.

 

The Open Horizons community recognizes these new opportunities and adapts to them as quickly as possible - for example for some the recent cancellation of BrainShare is seen as a failure of Novell. On the other hand, as John Dragoon (Novell) mentions at http://www.brainshare.com, this will free up a lot of resources "... to continue  to focus building the high-quality training and enablement offers you have come to expect from us."

It's finally there - On November 17 Novell has announced the release of GroupWise 8, a version with a load of small and many big enhancements. At Open Horizons we've been using this version for quite some time now and it we're still finding new improvements every day. It's really interesting to see how a mature solution like GroupWise can be even further improved with so many new things. And the good news is: many of these improvements have been based on user feedback, so if you take your wish-list and compare that to the new version, don't be surprised if almost all of them are realised with this new version.

 

Next week at the EMEA Summit we will be able to show much more of this new version, so join us for this great event or at least for the 10-8-5 Party to celebrate the Launch of GroupWise 8 and much more

Today I'm still in Krakow (PL) with Paul, Diethmar, Marcel, Adam and Wojciech delivering the CEE Summit, I just received some excellent feedback on our next project, the EMEA Summit. Have a look at this Call-for-Action from Peter Wachs (DE):

 

I have visited the Groupwise EMEA Summit 2005 for the first time. Before that event, I thought Groupwise was used only by a few companies and that Novell wasn't really doing well in publicating the product. However, I was really impressed how many participants joined this event in 2005. This experience gave me a totally new view for Groupwise and everything which has to do with it."

 

Peter then discusses the 3 main reasons why these events have been so important for him...

Teaming + Conferencing is a great help for many of the Open Horizons projects, like the Open Horizons Magazine, the GroupWise Powerguide and so on. A big part of that success is because of the advanced workflow module, which helps us to streamline processes, for example the flow of articles between authors, editors and production. However, as we noticed during the creation of a new workflow for the Powerguide project,a certian feature might not be available, in this case this was the COPY feature. The good news is: as T+C is an open source project, the solution to this problem arrived very quickly, in this case thanks to the commworld experts.

Today (Sunday November 2) at noon Paul Van der Cruyssen (BE), Marcel Ramaker (NL) and I started our 1250 kilometer long pilgrimage trip from Rotterdam to Krakow in Poland. And we do expect this to become a yearly tradition, as the first results of the CEE Summit are already quite impressive: several people from Denmark, Lithuania, Poland and the rest of the region will join us at the Sympozjum Hotel for the first ever CEE Summit. And as our car is fully packed with laptops, projectors, screens routers and so on, we've just arrived in Cottbus near the Polish border for a stop-over. Tomorrow we will set up our labs and we will soon work with all these people to discover why we all appreciate Novell solutions like ZENworks, Teaming + Conferencing, OES and GroupWise so much.

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 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...