[ngw] next release of GW

[Jeffrey Sessler]

Novell should be investing in the Mac/Linux clients not ignoring them. At my campus, Mac continues to gain steam, and my student base is nearing 75%. In some sense, these people carry their experiences forward, and right now, I don't see any of the Mac users recommending GroupWise given the current state of the client. Even a UI upgrade would go a long way. Right now, the UI including icons and such, while nice six years ago, look very dated now. 


If Novell wants to kill the Mac client, at least write a plug-in for Apple Mail, Calendar, Contacts that talks directly to GroupWise. If that was there, I wouldn't need a Novell provided Mac client. 


A "full featured" web client will only succeed if it tightly integrates with the OS. If mailto: isn't there, it's not on parity. If archiving isn't there, it's not on parity. I could go on and on.


Web clients crash and are prone to issues with browser makes/versions. Every time GW has moved forward, we've had to invest a lot of time/resources to get our users to update their home/laptop browsers. Additionally, unless Novell can eliminate the crashes in webaccess, then unlike a client crash, any fault causes a major outage for multiple users.


It's also likely that the elimination of gwinter for a direct SOAP interface will result is lots of initial POA reliability issues as they sort out all the bugs. gwinter crashes, but it's interface to the POA is built on years of the legacy protocol, and as such, the POA seems to be at little risk. In a sense, gwinter is the sacrificial lamb. This architecture change away from gwinter will likely cause me to delay any roll out of the new product until other early adopters (suckers) sort out the problems. There is just no way I would trade a crashing gwinter for a crashing POA.


Jeff


>>> Gert  04/13/10 7:01 AM >>>
I am not against webclients, but Novell created the Linux client to gather
more Linux users, ditto for Mac, not to lose them. Now these people are a
bit confused, I guess.

Gert

Novell Knowledge Partner

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On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 3:55 PM, Joseph Marton  wrote:

> I don't understand why people are so against web clients.  Just
> because you use a browser as your client doesn't mean anything.  The
> main thing is that the web client has feature parity with the flagship
> thick client, the win32 client.  Today it doesn't and as such there's
> no way I'd recommend WebAccess in GW8 as a replacement for all other
> clients.  But if WA is truly enhanced to have near feature parity with
> the win32 client, perhaps even more than the xplat client has with
> win32, then what's the problem?  If customers will feel better about
> it, change the IE or FF icon to be the GW client icon and then hide
> the various navigation bars so that the window doesn't look much like
> a browser.  Sheesh.  Web != bad.
>
> Joe
>
> On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 8:38 AM, James Taylor
>  wrote:
> > It's nice that they want to enhance the web client to function as
> equivalent as the windows client as possible, but it will still be a web
> client, which doesn't work for a very large number of people, so we're stuck
> with a really great mail system with an orphan client.
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