GroupWise Admin Group Meeting Info



With updates for the Toronto and Ottawa area GroupWise Groups
	GroupWise Administrator Group Meetings!

This is the twice-annual meeting of the GroupWise Admin Group for those in the Toronto Area.
GroupWise is such a low maintenance groupware application (according to it's Admins), it's no wonder that there are so few GroupWise administrators out there ("the stuff just runs itself!"). Well, we're here to help you lonely administrators get in touch with each other so that you can share the knowledge and skills of tuning, tweaking, and enhancing this powerful and flexible product, and further reduce your time and effort! Meet others who have "Been there, done that, got the T-shirt!". Come and learn how to save time, effort and money administrating and using ALL versions of GroupWise. (You veterans out there will recognize the box shots at right!)
It's that time again - to get together, learn some great stuff about our favourite product and share some of our experiences. Date: Wednesday November 22, 2006 Time: Sign in beginning at 3:30 PM; Meeting runs from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM sharp! Place: SPECIAL LOCATION! Toronto Public Library - Northern District Branch Rm 224BC 40 Orchard View Blvd. (directions below) 416-393-7610 if you're lost! Agenda: News from the GroupWise Advisor Summit in Phoenix The latest GroupWise news and updates. Tips and Tricks; Experiences from GroupWise 7 and SP1 Questions and Answers, Roundtable discussion Directions: Map to Northern District Library: Closest major intersection: Yonge St. and Eglinton Ave. Located 1 block north of Eglinton Ave. just west of Yonge St. Driving - From QEW take Yonge St. exit and go North towards Eglington. From 401 take Yonge St. exit and go South towards Eglington. It is one block north of Eglington. Perhaps park somewhere along the Yonge Line and take the subway? Paid - Limited parking in metered spaces under library building, side street parking, several paid parking lots nearby. There is a reasonable Green P parking lot across Yonge St. (ie East Side on Roehampton) $1.75 per 1/2 hr Public Transit/Walking/Cycling - Take subway to Yonge and Eglington Walk 1 block North (up hill direction) from the intersection and turn left at the first street. (The Library is big building just off of Yonge on the Left side)
Recent Meeting News
Prior Meeting: Tuesday May 9, 2006 Brainshare update and GroupWise news! GroupWise mobile device solutions and Notify Technologies guest speaker Questions and Answers, Tips and Tricks October 15, 2005 GroupWise 7 in action GroupWise Add-ons from Messaging Architects Questions and Answers Prior Meeting: Wednesday November 17, 2004 GroupWise info from Brainshare 2005 What's new with GroupWise?! (shhhh... Sequoia beta) The Blackberry Gateway in action Questions and Answers Prior Meeting: Wednesday November 17, 2004 Research in Motion presents: Blackberry Enterprise Edition for GroupWise RIM is about to release the much-awaited native gateway. Instant bidirectional message synchronization between GroupWise and the Blackberry. Native GroupWise API's and Native RIM communication and security. RIM's Slideshow is here, or download pdf (6.7 MB). Prior Meeting:Thursday February 19, 2004 GroupLink presents: ContactWise - GroupWise advanced contact management and Helpdesk software GroupWise 6.5.1 - Why it's the one to run. Questions and Answers Brainshare 2004 countdown Prior Meeting: May 22, 2003 For the GroupWise Brainshare update (with what's new including Linux support!), Andreas had a fresh GroupWise Futures slideshow that you can download and show your boss and co-workers. Charles Taite from Beginfinite/GWAVA spoke about GroupWise and SPAM and his product's approach in the battle. He also offered several tips and tricks to help keep up with the Spammer's latest tricks. There was a brief discussion about GroupWise 6.5 and what's it like in operation. Those who had it in production, really liked it. From a show of hands, much of the audience was planning on upgrading to it in the next 12 months. GroupWise Messenger (Instant Messaging ready for corporate use) was discussed, but there wasn't enough time to present this slideshow (also from Brainshare). Download it to see what we had in mind for attendees! Again, this is good information on GroupWise Messenger to educate your Boss and co-workers!
Prior Meeting: November 4, 2002, the room was packed as usual. Nick Colletti from Computhink talked about ViewWise, but couldn't show anything since it's so close to the next version shipping that he said it wouldn't do it justice. His presentation is here, and this is a good article from the recent press that better describes ViewWise and its benefits. Next up was a special speaker, Jesse Boudreau from Stashmail. He presented on a great GroupWise to Blackberry solution that is encrypted, uses the more common and less expensive Internet Edition Blackberry you may already have, and is reasonable priced. (yes mail comes from you@yourcompany.com too!). Here is a link to his flyer. Check it out! Rick Tomaschuck talked about the NUI discount to Brainshare 2003 available to the GAG members (more details will come via email), and the unfortunate demise of the Novell Connections magazine. Last up, everyone got a tour of the new GroupWise v6.5, codenamed Hawthorn. The anti-spam and instant messaging features were a big hit. (Too bad you can't run it against a GW6 back-end, or everyone would be on the new client right now). Here's a link to a recent report on Hawthorn. All this being said, GroupWise Hawthorn is now in public beta! Get yours now. That's all we could fit into two hours. Hope to see you next time! =====>Andreas
Prior Meeting: April 11th, 2002 GroupWise Utilities! This session will be jammed with utilities to enhance and work with GroupWise. The folks from Kenetic Associates and Messaging Architects will be presenting solutions such as: - GroupWise Archive Manager - GroupWise Shared Folder Manager - GroupWise Client Enhancement (including a skin that looks like Outlook) - GroupWise AntiVirus Protection - GroupWise Fax Server - GroupWise Applets for automation - GroupWise Instant Messaging - GroupWise Address Book Agent and if time allows an update from Brainshare. Prior meeting: Thursday March 29, 2001 - What's up with GroupWise 6? - Wireless developments - New utilities and add-ons Previous May 31st, 2000 Minutes: March 23rd, 2000 What was covered: The Future of GroupWise Since the Announcement of "BulletProof" had just come out, Andreas had a short presentation covering the interesting details and developments. But to get a better idea of what's coming down the GroupWise track see this feature article on the Cool Solutions site! GroupWise Access Methods Apparently, Andreas once told a customer in passing that there were over 9 ways to get at your GroupWise information when out of the office. Well, of course the customer then wrote back and asked for a detailed description of all nine ways! But for this meeting, instead of going through all the gory details, a simple (8-slide) presentation was able to convey the same information. Because it was broken down in a modular fashion according to connection type, it wasn't too hard to understand. And besides, there ended up being 10 ways! The Rest of the Meeting The rest of the meeting was spent discussing GroupWise and firewalls. This was quite lively with many questions, opinions and discussions that can't be easily captured in print.
Minutes: Dec 16th, 1999 The Meeting held at TriOS training centres went very well. In addition to the regulars, there were also many attendees who trickled in after their Novell Certified Directory Engineer (CDE) training. It made for a full room, but as always, an entertaining crowd. So here's what was covered: The GroupWise Enhancement pack in detail Actually, for full descriptions of all the new features of the GroupWise Enhancement Pack, please check out the comprehensive GW5.5 EP brochure. First covered was the new 32-bit Client. This began with a demonstration of the POP3/IMAP functionality. POP3 mail comes into a GroupWise folder (Mailbox, or an individual folder), while IMAP has its own little "mailbox" icon. The reason for this is that IMAP supports foldering, so you need something at the top to represent the IMAP mailbox. It was tested against the free Novell WEB/POP3/IMAP messaging system: www.myrealbox.com (sign up yourself it you want free e-mail with lots of options, and NO advertising!). The great thing is that you can now use one client (at home perhaps?), with one interface, to connect to company GroupWise mail, as well as personal ISP mail! Also shown was the native HTML editing. Web pages come into the mail view and are displayed just like in a browser! When composing a message one can use icons and buttons to insert HTML codes and features. The secret to this functionality is that GroupWise calls some Internet Explorer .DLL's, so IE 4+ has to be on the hard drive, but this does not have to be your default browser! Next was shown the new WebAccess. This was the most popular feature of the Enhancement pack. The new look is great, but the higher usability is the real bonus. The whole process is now a Java Servlet (instead of CGI), and most functions spawn a new browser window, eliminating the need to keep repainting the screen with the inbox contents. You can see it for yourself at democity.novell.com. Next shown was the Agent enhancements. They run as NT services on that platform (not shown), and every agent has its own Http port. This means you can surf over to the agent and see how its doing! Also, the GWIA now supports paging support. Since most Pagers have a SMTP gateway at their end, this is the easy way to do things! Last covered was the GroupWise Monitor. This browser-based tool is a java servlet that periodically polls the agents (via Http, and SNMP) and displays the status, configuration and health. At a glance one can see how your whole GroupWise system is doing! Configuring Encrypted Internet message passthrough in GroupWise 5.5 Did you know that you can very easily set up encrypted communications between you and any other similarly-configured GroupWise 5.5 system? Well you can! To see how, it's probably just best to read Andreas' article over there on the GroupWise Cool Solutions Site. Instant Document creation that uses the GroupWise Address Book. Finally, we wrapped up with a quick demo of ProWrite. This handy GroupWise add-on, allows one to quickly build documents from re-usable "boilerplate" text, and custom mail-merge them together using information from the GroupWise Address book. Very handy to better leverage the contact information you already have! It works with both Word and WordPerfect. And that's all we could cram into 2 hrs!
Minutes: Sept 23rd 1999 courtesy of Dan McHugh Thanks must go out to Andreas Bach, Legato, Netpro and the various attendee's who either volunteered to time or resources to make this meeting another great success. The Meeting started right on time and as always we had a great line up of demonstrations. Sneak Peak at GroupWise Enhancements We had a quick glance at the new GroupWise 5.5 Enhancement Pack Public Beta (See the www.GroupWise.org home page for links to some of the stuff we saw at the meeting). What does the enhancement pack mean to us administrators? Based on the feedback from users like you, Novell has enhanced a lot of the reporting functions. GroupWise Monitor has been completely redesigned as a Java application without any dependency on ManageWise. Functionality includes client/server polling of status information, configurable thresholds for monitoring and alerts, and use of NDS as the directory for agent discovery. GroupWise WebAccess includes a redesigned user interface and the implementation of Java servlets to replace the GGI extensions. The servlets also open up new windows when reading messages making Webaccess much faster! A lot of new toys. Mainly demonstrated was the Monitor and new Webaccess look and feel (It's definitely a new look). This Beta Enhancement pack can be retrieved from the web at: http://support.novell.com/beta/public/. E-mail monitoring and management Resourceful as people must sometimes be, Andreas Bach (Alias BungyBoy) couldn't bring Netpro Mail Central to us in person so he did the next best thing, WebEx , Internet Conferencing system brought their screens to us all the way from Netpro central in Scottsdale AZ, United States (They tried some ms netmeeting conferencing software but it just couldn't make it through the firewalls). Netpro's Mike Novac showed us the latest greatest version of Mail Central Version 2.0 Via a web conference. NetPro's MailCentral is an innovative third-party solution that monitors GroupWise on a 24x7 basis and sends proactive alerts on all key GroupWise components, including domains, gateways and post offices. The Configuration Wizard in version 2.0 enables administrators to configure the database without having to manually create and enter information for each domain, post office and gateway. MailCentral's Configuration Wizard discovers and displays the entire GroupWise system and allows the user to walk through the configuration of MailCentral's database in a few simple steps. MailCentral 2.0 also features an upgraded 32-bit client. Besides new support for GroupWise 5.5 these are several major features that users of this software have been waiting for. Also demonstrated was GroupWise Reporter from Emailxtras . A dandy tool for checking out what is going on with those GroupWise Gateways: Total summaries all message traffic. Date summaries totals for each date. External Address summaries totals for each foreign address. Gateway summaries totals for each gateway. Internet Domain summaries totals for all addresses inbound and outbound. Message lists details about each message, including subject. Time-of-day summaries totaled for various time periods during day. See when system is really busiest! Users summaries totals and activity for each user. To make the gateway analysis more meaningful, Andreas arranged for the live capture of information from one of the GroupWise Admin group attendees; Andrew Werbowy of Private Investors. This real-life analysis revealed interesting information about what is publicly available through SMTP mail. A great demo indeed. E-mail being such a mission critical service now a days, we also heard from Edgar Oblitey from Legato (Formerly Vinca) on the Vinca High Availability Products (Vinca Standby Server, SnapShot Server and Offsite Archive). Available for demonstration was a fully functional Vinca Standby Server as deployed at the City of Toronto's new 10,000 seat GroupWise system. Again more valuable information for us GroupWise Administrators on keeping things humming. Sorry to say it but there wasn't enough time to fit in the whole agenda as the meeting came to an end at about 6:30 PM. Nevertheless, people milled about after the meeting to pick the ears of the many admins and Novell's own Andreas Bach. Andreas you will never be able to run quick enough! Thanks Andreas for another great meeting!!