Yesterday this website was one of the first to bring some vey interesting news about the future of GroupWise mobility, as Alex Evans was quoted about this at this page. For the very near future nothing much changes - GroupWise Mobile Server will be supported until at least October 2009 and by then a new solution based on ActiveSync should be available. So is this good or bad news? Interestingly, recently I've had discussions about this with several groups, for example the attendees of my GMS lab at the EMEA Summit as well as a GW8 upgrade training this week and these discussons had an interesting outcome. So is this announcement good or bad?

 

First of all, let's have a look at where this is coming from. A few years ago, Novell and Intellisync came to an agreement about the usage of Intellisync Mobile Server (IMS) and to use this technology as the basis for what has become known as GroupWise Mobile Server (GMS). Only a few weeks after this announcement Finnish based Nokia bought US based Intellisync for more than 400 million dollar, as they wanted to expand their offerings into this segment of the market as well. This way Novell was now teaming up with Nokia and this has brought us the GMS which is now being used at many GroupWise sitesoften with great success. Part of the agreement was that IntelliSync would create a version of GMS that would run on Linux as well and that version has become available in 2008.

 

Then in October 2008 everyone was quite surprised to hear that Nokia deciced to stop the development of all their behind-the-firewall solutions. This included IMS and by throwing their 400+ million dollar investment in Inetllisync out the window the GMS was obviously hurt as well. In that same time frame Nokia announced that their (future) phones will support ActiveSync server as well, for some a bit of a surprise as Nokia had never been a big fan of Microsoft until that moment (see also this page). Some people have suggested that signing up a deal about supporting ActiveSync and stopping with new development on IMS are linked, but it's always difficult to see if that is true indeed.

 

Even before that decision was announced, as the contract with IntelliSync was already a few years old and was up for renewal, Novell must have been looking at the continuation of the GMS project or at alternatives. The problem with the mobile market is that even for huge companies like Nokia things are changing quickly. Obviously Novell now had to speed up the project to find a replacement for GMS.

 

During the Hands-On lab about GMS during the EMEA Summit in November I had a very good discussion with the attendees about these developments. We all didn't like the fact that GMS was going to be a dead-end, although support and even new developments for GMS would not end for quite some time. To summarize a long discussion, here's what our group came up with:

 

A. Novell could buy GMS and/or Intellisync - Interesting thought, however considering the 400+ million dollar Nokia had paid for Intellisync and what Novell would really buy for a few hunderd million (technology, developers, patents) - would it be worth the money?

 

B. Novell develops a new GMS themselves - With regards to the backend, the server part, the Novell engineers would probably have been quite capable of creating a very well integrated solution. Actually, they were quite involved with GMS development anyway. However, the real problem here is the device support - even for big companies like Nokia and Microsoft the fast developments in this market space create huge problems, for example resulting in the fact that Microsoft sync server will only work with the latest Windows mobile versions, an attitude that Novell would never be able to"sell" to its customers.

 

C. Novell adopts one of the partner solutions as their own - There are several partners like NotifyLink, RIM, Toffa and several others that have a strong connection to GroupWise and deliver solutions that support GroupWise. However, taking over an existing partner or making a new OEM does not solve the problem as mentioned under B. - device support would still be a major concern.

 

During our discussion we have looked at several options and then turned things around - what if we look at it from the device and not from the server? First of all there is SyncML, an open standard which is included in many phones already and can be installed as separate client on almost all other devices. Then there is RIM, as they offer a solution to connect non-BlackBerry devices to their RIM server, some Nokia phones already supported this. And then there is ActiveSync, obviously embedded in the WindowsMobile devices but alos supported by the popular iPhone as well as by Nokia and more and more other manufacturers.

 

So that's where we end up now: Novell will adopt the ActiveSync technology and basically frees themselves  of the device support dilemma - let the market solve that themselves. And they can now concentrate on building a new GMS server which supports ActiveSync, either by doing this themselves or hiring some other company to do that for them.

 

So is that good or bad? Well, it's bad that Nokia dropped IntelliSync, it's good now that within a few months Novell already has a clear vision on the future of GroupWise mobility. Me and many others will follow this project very closely and critically test whatever comes at us - currently I'm not a big ActiveSync fan yet, so I need to adapt and start loving a piece of Microsoft technology.To be continued...

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