Q: What is the difference in unplanned downtime between GroupWise and Exchange?

Q: How much time does it take before my users can use Teaming + Conferencing effectively?

Q: Nokia has announced to step away from mobile sync solutions, should we even look at GroupWise Mobile Server? Is there a future?

Q: For some reasons we've so many (different) workstations and laptops, can we still deploy Windows with just one image?

Q: Which file system on Linux should we use for GroupWise? There are so many choices: Reiser, Ext3, XFS, NSS, which is best?

 

You can find more questions as well as the answers from the community here...

We're very happy to be able to announce two new labs for the EMEA Summit, based on the same theme, but from opposite directions. The Lab680 - Back to the Roots: GroupWise Administration has been created by Diethmar Rimser specifically for anyone who needs to know more about the administration of GroupWise in a broader and deeper sense. As we do not underestimate how many people have never really learned much about GroupWise architecture and all items related to that, this is an essential lab for both newbies as well more experienced admins. 

 

This year we also offer Lab060 - Advanced Troubleshooting with Novell Support, which will now be presented by not ONE, but TWO GroupWise Support Engineers from Novell Technical Support. We're very glad that both Jan-Arie Snijders and Rob van Kooten will join us for the EMEA Summit. They will also work together to create the big troubleshooting contest, which has always been one of the highlights of the Summit and will run on Tuesday night.

 

The EMEA Summit - both newbies and real experts can learn so much more - send your (new) colleagues, customers and friends!

Omni has always been very involved with the GroupWise community and we're glad that they will join us again at the EMEA Summit presenting Lab520 "Beyond E-mail:  CRM, ERP and Third-party Integration for GroupWise 8". As Omni mentions, with their integration technology GroupWise will certainly leapfrog over competing collaboration solutions in offering very strong back-end integration with other solutions, like CRM and Sharepoint.

We're very glad that Branden Black, Director of Technical Services, will join us to present Lab440 "Top 10 reasons your really need to know about M+Archive" together with local talent Denis de Wit. This lab will especially be interesting for anyone looking for the latest news about how the new stubbing interface in GroupWise 8 will be used for M+Archive solution.

We're very proud that RIM will work with Arnaud Delin to create the first ever Lab530 "Become a BlackBerry Poweruser - Get More Done with your BlackBerry",which will be an excellent way to learn how to make better use of the great BlackBerry devices. And for those more technically oriented Rob Clarke will deliver "Lab120 - Beyond BlackBerry Enterprise Server Quick Start Edition", which introduces the many ways you can utilize the application framework in your BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

This will be the first time ENGL will join the EMEA Summit and they will immediatelywill help you to save a lot of time an money. Jamie Glendinning and Roel van Bueren will explain in Lab660 "Automated Windows deployment w. ZENworks + ENGL Imaging Toolkit" how to use the ENGL solutions to deploy Windows workstations very fast with completely hardware independent images.

As one of our most loyal partners GWAVA will deliver two labs at the EMEA Summit.  Lab600 "No one knows GroupWise Backup like Tay does" will be presented by Tay Kratzer and Frank Korpershoek. Tay formerly worked for Novell, is an well-known author of many GroupWise books and has been speaker at many events. The second Lab610 "Archive your GroupWise data - it's more than just Archiving" will be presented by Raymond Hulha, the lead developer for GWAVA's Retain solution. This lab has become even more interesting as GroupWise 8 will support stubbing, a great new feature.

Toffa has decided to join the EMEA Summit as well, where they will launch their hosted SyncML device sync for GroupWise. And the good news is: ...it's FREE for a Calendar sync, all that's needed is a compatible device and access to your GroupWise system via SOAP. Toffa have been providing synchronization solutions to the GroupWise community for 12 years. In 1996 they were the first company to offer a dedicated solution for GroupWise. As technology progressed over the years, so did Toffa's solutions and their commitment to the GroupWise community.

Just last week GroupLink has announced that they will join us as well at the EMEA Summit. They will present Lab650 "Your Integration Story – Is Your Help Desk Really Integrated?". In this lab you will learn how the everything HelpDesk's key integration with GroupWise calendaring and email system, Zenworks and eDirectory can benefit your organization. You'll also learn how to install and configure a trial that you can take home with you to try in your organization. This lab will be a very good chance to "dig" into the HelpDesk system, and configure it exactly how you want to see it used in your organization. You can read more about GroupLink and their lab at  this page

As you might have heard already, Notify has been involved with GroupWise community for many years with their mobility solutions and at GWAVACon in Berlin they have been showing of their iPhone solution to a bigger audience. We're quite excited that they have decided to join the EMEA Summit as well, so everyone at this even will get the opportunity to investigate this solution even deeper.

Senselogic delivers a secure, reliable and scalable portal and content management system called SiteVision for web sites, intranets and extranets. SiteVision is a platform for both web publishing and portal integration. SiteVision combines advanced functionality with a user friendly and easy-to-learn interface. At Open Horizons we're very glad that Senselogic has decided to join the EMEA Summit to present their solutions to our participants, as there is a very interesting relation in the pipeline towards Novell's Teaming + Conferencing solution.

Waltham, 15 October 2008 - Novell is pleased to announce the release of GroupWise 8 to all customers worldwide. With this release, Novell raises the bar on user productivity with a highly connected collaborative workspace that leverages Web resources to enhance users' interactions. With GroupWise 8, people don't have to be power users to make the most of their tools or time, because a rich and intuitive "dashboard", the Home View, puts everything needed front-and-center. Nothing else plugs people into the Web 2.0 world as thoroughly as GroupWise or makes it look so good - and so easy - once there.  From a simple interface to the most powerful and flexible tools - GroupWise 8 is the solution for every user in your customers' organizations. First Customer Ship Date will be 17 November 2008

Apart from our speakers the biggest benefit of the EMEA Summit are our more than 25+ Hands-On labs, almost all of them specially developed for this event. We've categorized them, listing them all here would take too much space, here's an overview with some comments:

SKyCOM has announced that they will deliver an unique Hands-On lab for the EMEA Summit, in which you will be one of the first to install and deploy the latest SKyCOM beta version and your personal Asterisk SIP server. In this lab you will learn how to setup and install SKyCOM and the open source SIP server Asterisk in order to have a complete VoIP solution. At the end you will have a system which can make outgoing phone calls directly from within your GroupWise mailbox. PLEASE NOTE: the number of seats on this lab is very limited!!! 

Jamie Glendinning (ENGL, picture on the right) and Roel van Bueren (ROVABU Networks) will present the ENGL lab during the EMEA Summit, they will work with our attendees on how to create and deploy an automated Windows build process using ZENworks 10 Configuration Management and ENGL Imaging Toolkit. Exercises in this lab will include creation of a Windows XP SP3 universal base image including Mass Storage Drivers, drivers and hotfixes add-on images, Windows multilanguage pack (MUI) images, and customisation of the entire build process using templates and custom scripts. A unique and very exciting new lab, check it out at www.emeasummit.net/labs

Visiting our EMEA Tour events is always rewarding for the content, however you can also Win Big. During these events we've given away books, magazine subscriptions, discounts for events, in some locations sometimes even Blackberries, but there was of course one Big Prize for the whole EMEA Tour - a Free Pass for the EMEA Summit. And the winner is: Mr. Klaus Wiesmayr from Wuppermann, a worldwide company manufacturing a lot of different steel products. Klaus works at the Austrian office of Wuppermann, several colleagues of him around the world are members of our user groups as well. Congratulations Klaus, we're looking forward to welcome you soon at the EMEA Summit!

Tay is Lead Developer of Reload, Director of Linux Professional Services, and Author of the Novell Press GroupWise 7 Administrator's Solution Guide and 7 other books. Tay worked formerly with Novell Premium Service and has been Primary Support Engineer for some of Novell's larger customer sites, supporting GroupWise since 1993. We're very glad that during the EMEA Summit Tay will present a specially created new 3,5 hours hands-On lab about GroupWise backup, always a hot issue in every collaboration environment. Check it out at www.emeasummit.net/labs, this ab will certainly be an eye opener.

During the years we've received a lot of support from our loyal partners Blackberry, GWAVA, Messaging Architects, Omni and others, all of them part of the strong Groupwise community. Some time ago we have added Teaming + Conferencing and ZENworks to our portfolio and we are very happy that ENGL as a leading specialist in Windows XP and Vista deployment has decided to join our event as the first Gold Partner from the ZENworks community. ENGL’s Imaging Toolkit offers a proven methodology and modular deployment process that extends Novell ZENworks, enabling a greater degree of control and automation which dramatically reduces the ongoing costs of PC maintenance. ENGL is a Microsoft and Novell development partner headquartered in Oxfordshire, UK. You can read more about ENGL and their lab at this page

Here is some good and some bad news about the EMEA Summit. Lets start with  the bad news - this will almost certainly be the last EMEA Summit which will be held in the Benelux, after 2 years in the Kurhaus in the Hague and 2 years in Bruges the 5th EMEA Summit will be held in beautiful Hotel de Buunderkamp in the Netherlands, for 2009 we have serious plans to move this event to another country like Denmark. So hurry up if you want to enjoy a visit to the Benelux! The good news is about a number of interesting new speakers we've added to our team, one being Rob Luhrs, formerly Sitescape, nowadays Novell.

WALTHAM, Mass. – Aug. 26, 2008 – Novell today announced it has been positioned in the leaders quadrant of Gartner, Inc.'s, “Magic Quadrant for User Provisioning,” by Earl Perkins and Perry Carpenter, August 15, 2008. The Novell® portfolio of identity and security management solutions – which includes Novell Identity Manager, Novell Sentinel®, Novell Access ManagerTM and Novell SecureLogin – helps customers reduce deployment and administration costs, simplify complex provisioning, manage user roles more securely and enforce compliance with industry regulations.