Posting from Ken Muir CTSO Collaboration at Novell on NGW-List:

 

Four years ago, we entered into an OEM agreement with Intellisync which was the leader in mobile email/PIM sync. We created the GroupWise Mobile Server and gave it to our customers for free. This combined with our partnership with RIM brought to GroupWise customers the largest support of mobile devices on the market. When new devices came to market, Intellisync was first to support it.

 

When the iPhone was about to release, Intellisync was actively working to support the iPhone upon ship. Novell actively worked with Intellisync to ensure they would be ready. We saw this as a very critical platform.

Then… Intellisync was bought by Nokia. We were assured over and over that we would have support for iPhone. Time went on, promises were broke by Nokia and then they exited the business and killed the product and the team.

The Novell team instantly scrambled for a replacement strategy. We could have, or some would argue, should have, partnered with another third party for a solution. The decision was made by the team to take this into our own hands and develop the technology in-house and avoid the potential for something like this to happen again.

The ActiveSync integration has taken us much, much longer than we expected. The delay in ActiveSync has hurt our customers and their ability to met their internal customer’s needs. For this I apologize. We have every possible resource dedicated to resolving this issue as quickly as possible and with quality.

The design is to not only implement ActiveSync for mobility but to also bring to our customers a Data-sync solution to bring integrations into our entire collaboration strategy. We are on the verge of some very exciting developments in the collaboration space in and around GroupWise. The integration of GroupWise, Teaming and our upcoming Conferencing release, glued together by real-time, social and document collaboration in Novell Pulse will bring a rich feature set to GroupWise customers and deliver an entirely new age of communication and collaboration. Additionally, our synchronization services bring integrations to third-party applications and the ActiveSync connector brings the mobile experience across this entire suite of collaborative tools.

I fully acknowledge and I am sorry for the delays in iPhone support. I also thank you and appreciate your tireless support on this issue. That said, right now is a very exciting time to be a Novell Collaboration customer and the products and features that will be delivered between now and June are fantastic. I hope that either myself or my team can spend time with each NGWList customer and partners at BrainShare and show you exactly why we firmly believe you will be blown away by our strategy, direction, and most importantly, our releases that will happen in the immediate future.