Groupwise Email: Not a Fan Favorite
There are many challenges an employee faces at the workplace. Deadlines, corporate politics, demanding bosses, meetings, and the like. To top it all off, some companies throw in Groupwise to really make things difficult.
If you aren’t familiar with Groupwise, it is an email program similar to Outlook or Eudora (the lucky few now use corporate Gmail).
Unlike the other programs listed, it makes simple things like setting up an out-of-office reminder seem impossible. Like to organize your emails with rules and folders? Forget about it.
With Groupwise, there is no such thing as a quick email search.
Ironically, there are articles that support Groupwise, explaining the unique features it has over Outlook.
Since I have experience with Groupwise, don’t like it, and don’t plan on comparing it, my comparison will be no comparison at all. Rather, I have compiled a list of quotes online that do the work for me.
Editor’s Note: To fulfill the request of the readers, here is a list of my Groupwise complaints.
Notable Groupwise Quotes found on the World Wide Web:
Pros: Better than Nothing…
Cons: Unreliable, Not Intuitive, Crashes Disrupt Whole System, Difficult to Configure
Still working on Novell GroupWise issues….
I don’t know. Groupwise is pretty sucky.
groupwise just might be the world’s very worst email system
New employer uses novell groupwise for email instead of outlook. I now know why my computer is chained to my desk.
and it’s true! groupwise makes me miss lotus notes.
All in all, I would stay away from groupwise if at all possible. I would not even recommend using it if novell gave you an unlimited license for free.
it would take so long to write an appropriate description about groupwise, that im scared my keyboard would explode. So instead…i’ll say the one good thing about Groupwise…. the “X” in the top right corner almost always works.
Groupwise was “selected” as the email package for one company I work for. It was forced on to the users and most are pretty upset with it. There are plenty of reasons that they are upset with it.
I wish we had gone with Lotus Notes.
all students at my U have Google/Gmail accounts. all faculty have Groupwise accounts. clearly, my U hates faculty.
So pleased to have conquered GroupWise appointments: now delegated to my google calendar
webmail is killing my soul. though still better than groupwise.
is anyone else forced to use GroupWise at work instead of Outlook & Exchange?
Management Ease: Terrible, I am not the Groupwise admin, but I see them standing in front of the servers pretty much all day every day.
Blanket + cookies + Dr. Pepper + GroupWise busy search function… = Mitigated frustration.
Have an opinion on Groupwise? Let’s hear it!
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What do you mean by, “Like to organize your emails with rules and folders? Forget about it”? It’s quite easy to do this. I have numerous folders and all sorts of rules organizing mail into them. Now if you want to create an out of office reply, yes it’s slightly more difficult as with the version of GroupWise you appear to be running in your screenshot (GW7) you have to use the same full rules interface. It’s quite powerful but can be overwhelming to the novice user. If your system is upgraded to GW8, there is a brand new vacation wizard that makes setting up an out of office rule extremely simple.
Here’s another falsehood: “With Groupwise, there is no such thing as a quick email search.” If the administrator has GroupWise running properly, the QuickFinder indexes should be up-to-date which means searches should literally only take seconds. Not only can you search e-mails, but you can even search the text of various attachments such as Word & Excel documents.
There are plenty of other untrue statements, such as “Unreliable, Not Intuitive, Crashes Disrupt Whole System, Difficult to Configure.” Not even sure where to begin there other than to say none of those are true. If that was a true statement I’d be hearing many complaints from my users. I don’t.
All I can say is that it sounds like this article is combining lack of end-user knowledge with GroupWise along with possible administrator mis-configuration on the server side. GroupWise is extremely powerful, robust, stable, and scalable. There’s no reason for any of these complaints to exist in a properly configured system with ample end-user training.
your an absolute IDIOT!
I am baffled by your comments about Groupwise. I have used it for years and one of the features I like best is the fast speed of the searches. The ‘disk full’ message that you have displayed is really not an error but rather a message informing you that you are out of disk space with regard to your Groupwise system. My guess is that your organization has not put much money into its infrastructure and your email system is probably running on equipment that is outdated and does not have enough capacity to store all of the messages.
It is also somewhat disingenuous to take quotes about a product and print them without any contextual reference. I believe that you could find as many disparaging comments about any email system.
Overall, it sounds to me as though you do not know how to use Groupwise, and you never bothered to check in a manual or the online documentation from Novell.
I also have experience with GroupWise, along with a number of other email products. It’s a great email/GroupWare solution, and not like you describe at all.
I agree with Bob and Joe, without context, this blog entry and supplied quotes mean nothing.
It sounds like someone had an embarrassing PEBKAC moment, and makes me wonder what product the author will be having troubles with next week.
My oh my, where to start? I’m not going to spend a lot of time with what is little more than trollbait but:
Rules are pretty damned simple. Spend 5 minutes with the help function and you’ll see.
Disk full? In what universe is the SOFTWARE at fault for failure to provide sufficient disk space?
Crashes? Hmm, I’ve managed both Groupwise and Exchange, each at several version levels. Groupwise is FAR more reliable than Exchange for any given level of maintenance. Reported number of admins per thousand users has been many times that of Exchange until recently; even now exchange only approaches but does not meet groupwise in ease of management.
Sounds like someone is pissy about his ignorance and publicly refuses to correct the situation. Not much we can do with rampant pigheadedness….
Well,
There are about 40 million users of GroupWise, and something tells me they are not unhappy about GroupWise
Gert
GWCheck.com
If your testing of rules, searches etc are all performed on the IMAP account in your screenshot ( Archival Mail ) you might be getting an inaccurate impression about groupwise – try testing with the native mail store.
I back up Reply All on this. As a corporate drone who went from Outlook to Groupwise, I’d do anythign to go back. Call me crazy, but antequated e-mail systems aren’t my thing.
This is just flame bait. I hate reading articles like this because I wish there really was an apples to apples comparison but without one shred of a fact in the article it’s useless. Why isn’t there an author to the article? Without the author listed it makes it looks like its “thecollarsheep” original art and I know that can’t be. Right?
You are obviously a Windows-weenie and technologically challenged. Have you never herad of reading the on-line Help for any application? Handheld through every application you use?
Get with it. If you can’t figure out a simple email client then you must be one of those hapless victims of Helicopter Parenting. Please learn to become a little more self-sufficent and truly check things about before spouting untruths.
Every email client has it’s issues, Outlook/Exchange is not the ONLY answer. There are plenty of other wonderful tools out there, including GroupWise, Notes, Google Mail (although it’s too simplistic for the majority of my particular needs), Yahoo email (ditto on the Google comment) Thunderbird, Eudora…and I could go back to even older solutions.
As for crashing and downtime, I can tell you that my Group/Wise systems pretty much run themselves…Exchange on the other hand, not so much. My typical GroupWise system (I run several) is down only when I’m upgrading or patching, and I configure them to automatically run routine checks every weekend to keep them humming happily. Exchange is getting better, but still doesn’t have the world class admistrative features. And it’s more a resource hog (especially disk space) than GroupWise. It’s been too long since I’ve touched Notes to comment on that one. And the quota features on GroupWise are much friendly than on the Exchange side (at least to end-users…I love user quotas regardless of the system).
So, go back and do your homework. Don’t depend on Mommy and Daddy to do it for you.
@Von Kaiser: Just how is GroupWise antiquated? That may be correct if you’ve gone to an environment that uses an old version of GroupWise, say 6.5 or older. But in that case if you moved to an Outlook/Exchange environment that still used say Exchange 2000 & Outlook 2000 you would have the same “antiquated” problem.
Fact is many users who go from GW to Outlook/Exchange or vice versa often complain simply because what they now have is “different” and requires that they learn something new. It has nothing to do with limitations of the new system at all.
I’m not sure why you guys even bother. I’ve used both GW and Outlook. GW has some things that could be improved, as does Outlook, and it goes without saying the Author is way out of line. If he is not even willing to do the work to point out from his own experience what he finds wrong with the software, I’m not sure why everyone else puts in a lot of work debating it.
I’m really bothered more by the complete laziness of the author than his dissing of GroupWise.
As a non-IT guy, I gotta say Groupwise has been nothing but a headache for my company. It’s been so bad that at times I wish we were still using Lotus Notes. Is that because its not set up right? Perhaps. Could Groupwise have a more intuitive interface? Definitely. As just your average collared sheep, I am not a fan.
Joe — In my haste (was leaving for work) I was brash and vague in my last comment.
First, some disclosure. I am one of the founders of this site, and use GroupWise as well. Reply All and I do not work for the same company, but both of us are on GroupWise systems.
OK, back to GroupWise. I’ve been on GroupWise for about 14 months now, after a few years in Outlook, and, like Reply All, I’ll try to not draw comparisons.
My main qualms with GW (I’m on GW7 now) is that some of the functions just have steps that could be easier. Also, I consider myself pretty computer savvy, and like the male cliche that exists, I’m not much of an instructions guy. I never needed them on any other e-mail program, whether it be setting out of office notices or linking multiple e-mail addresses to one inbox.
When they installed GW7 on my machine, I was given a “Quick Start Card” — 6 pages of instructions for basic functions for any electronic organizer/e-mail client. I quickly dismissed this, but thankfully did not throw it out. (Note: It is kind of the GroupWise people to have such a card, though, because most of my coworkers are computer illiterate and rely heavily on such instructions)
The frustration came in when I actually had to look up how to create rules and troubleshoot why I could not easily set up recurring appointments on my calendar for every Friday for a whole year. You might be thinking “That’s because you’re an idiot” but I’ll beg to differ. This sort of what plays in to what Joe Marton said, but this is not the first system I’ve had to learn, yet it is the most frustrating.
To me, my dislike for GW comes down to ease. Some things are just too annoying to accomplish in the program. From some of the comments, it sounds like GW8 may have remedied some of these things, and that’s great.
Either way, we appreciate everyone chiming in on GW. Twelve of the 13 reader comments were useful, and that’s to be commended.
@Von Kaiser: I’ve read stories from people whose organizations have migrated from GroupWise to Outlook/Exchange and with those environments there’s a learning curve as some tasks again are reportedly not very intuitive. Heck, even being rather tech savvy myself, I struggled trying to find where to configure a simple signature within Outlook 2003 when I was testing it against our GW system. Granted there are some things in GW which aren’t the most intuitive, and rules are probably the worst offender since they are designed to be so powerful & flexible. But honestly any system is difficult to use without some form of training, especially if users are used to something else.
In your case, an upgrade to GW8 may surprise you in how Novell has improved the Windows client.
@Joe — I’m intrigued by GW8…My company, like most, isn’t really thriving right now, but I’ve always been very friendly with our IT folks, so maybe I can sweet talk them into sweet talking corporate :]
And Reply All was telling me on Friday how tight he is with his IT dept. (a very important thing for any employee, IMO), so maybe he can get the ball rolling at his firm, too.
We all dream of a day with flawless e-mail clients!!
Time for the Author to chime in…
First off, let me give you all a warm welcome to The Collared Sheep! I recommend reading the other articles posted on this site to help reduce the increase in blood pressure that this article seems to have caused.
No, I did not insult your mothers. It sure does feel like it over my supposed slander about email software. That being said, any of the above quotes on Groupwise are actual users’ opinions taken from reviews, twitter and forum postings, etc.). Consider it hard evidence that the software isn’t perfect. They aren’t meant to upset you or your apparent love for Groupwise. Please do not take them personally. I do applaud the number of responses and promise to allocate some spare time into researching more about Groupwise features.
I work 8-5 and do not consider myself computer savvy. Although I can Google, and do find tricks and tips for Groupwise, I still see no reason to defend it.
Please remember, this article is simply a rant on Groupwise. If I was using Outlook, the title would have been Outlook.
I agree, there aren’t many facts supporting my case (didn’t plan on providing any). And yes I am lazy. However, I do feel inclined to provide some sort of half-assed response to the annoying things I find with Groupwise 7.0:
1. Why in the world would Groupwise start filtering emails before you finish the complete phrase and hit enter? You literally have to race to type in search words.
2. Why does Groupwise allow someone to send an email with the Subject in BOLD font? It looks like it has never been read!
3. Why does the Groupwise world think the silent email retraction is such a good feature? The typical office email is sent to others outside of the email server. By the time you retract, their email server has already delivered your email.
4. Managing “Frequent Contacts” requires too much work. Groupwise tries to make it easier on the user by bringing up emails as you type. Sounds good, but when you can’t remember if Groupwise remembers the actual email address, last name, or first name to bring up the email address … it makes things a bit tricky.
5. Accidentally single clicking on a large file size will lock up your computer. Double-click to open, single-click to preview. Accidently preview a large file size and your cooked.
6. Archiving… don’t know much about it, other than the fact that the “move to archive” is right above the “Categories” function when you right click on an email. I usually make the mistake of accidently clicking on this and then have to go through the whole accessing the archive process.
7. I have 90 emails in my trash folder. When I try and empty the folder, the emails disappear. When I click on the trash folder again, VOILA! 90 emails in my trash folder.
Ok done. There’s a quick list of some issues I have with the program. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not an expert with the software. The Groupwise knowledge on this comment chain is impressive. Please keep in mind though, that I am just an office drone that expects simple things like email to be intuitive.
And remember… this is an office humor website!
As an IT professional and an administrator of both Exchange an GroupWise email systems I appreciate NOT having to work the weekend, bring down the mail server and apply patches at least once a month with GroupWise. Our old GW and eDir server is being retired today, been up for 901 days. Exchange gladly went away…
Also, Never had a virus on the GroupWise server!
@Reply All: I’ll respond to a few of the points.
1) Why does Google search try to fill in your search term after you’ve only typed a few characters? All software in an effort to be more “efficient” tries to predict what you are doing. Is it a good thing? Dunno, but it seems to be the trend. Is the software always right? Nope. But at least in the case of GW it starts filtering immediately which at least starts narrowing down the contents of the current folder, which typically isn’t a bad thing.
2) It may be dumb, but some people just want to do it. If it didn’t allow a bold subject, people would complain saying why doesn’t it let you do it.
3) The silent retraction serves its purpose for internal e-mails.
4) The “auto-fill” feature is based on the display name. So take a look at your contacts… if it only has an e-mail address and nothing else, then the display name is the e-mail. This would happen if you just compose a new message to someone you’ve never e-mailed. If you are replying, it will grab the sender’s name (assuming it’s in the headers of what you received) and add that into the contact’s info, setting the name as the display name. One option if you don’t like it… disable FC altogether.
7) The administrator has turned on either the smart purge feature or retention feature. The first one doesn’t allow you to empty the trash until the message has been backed up. The second doesn’t allow you to empty the trash until the time has been archived by a third-party message retention application. In either case, some third-party app isn’t working properly which means it’s not updating the timestamps within GW that allows the system to know the messages have been backed up or archived. Or, worse yet, the third-party app isn’t working at all which means the messages haven’t been backed up at all or haven’t been archived at all. In either case, it’s up to your admin to fix this. Definitely not a GW bug.
Joe
Thanks for the help Joe.
In response to Item #1, I believe the major issue with the software is that it was designed to assume there is no “lag” in the workplace. I’ve never worked at a company where the email connection is instantaneous. There is usually a substantial loading time when you try and do anything on the email software (whatever it may be).
That being said, when Groupwise begins to filter, and you make one typing mistake, you sit there for 20 seconds before your second chance to search. This might not seem like a lot of time, but in the workplace the little things cause the biggest annoyances. I personally feel that if a Groupwise tester was to try the software in a “live” environment, they would obviously see that this is a lackluster feature.
I agree with #2 however, the ability for a user to send an email as a “Follow-up” item (making the font orange) when I actually use the follow-up feature for organization is extremely aggravating. This is another issue I believe looks good on paper, but when it is actually put to use, does not work well for the common office employee.
Item #3, understandable but how often do you send interoffice email? That’s why we have phones and with the number of Blackberry’s these days, the percent chance of that silent retraction is very slim.
Item #4, good to know. Painful that a user would have to constantly manage their contact list but good points all around.
Item #7, I’ll put in the call.
I’ve learned a valuable lesson here this week… don’t joke about Groupwise, it’s fans come out of the wood works to defend it.
-Reply All
Regarding points #1 and #3, I must say, I’ve never considered your point of view for either, so reading your comments was very enlightening. #1 – I can’t imagine working in an environment where the network is so slow that that would be a problem. I tried to duplicate the situation you experienced, but couldn’t. It’s something to consider, though. Hey, go to support.novell.com, hover over Contribute and click “Submit Enhancement Request” – who knows, they may make that a selectable option in a future release.
#3, I work in the IT dept at a medium sized medical center, and from what I’ve seen, probably 70-80% of the organization’s email communication is internal. Maybe different environments have a different mix (Sales, maybe?), but I’m sure there are still a lot of organizations that would consider features like the silent retract to be very useful.
As a GroupWise administrator for the last 12 years or so, I must say that from an administrative point of view, I can’t imagine an email system being much easier. We have 3,500 users in 15 post offices on about a dozen servers, and I share admin duties with one other FTE. I probably spend about 5% of my time on GW admin tasks, and he probably spends 20-30%. Even when I was the only admin, I doubt I spent more than 30-40% of my time on GW, if that much. We researched migrating to Exchange a while back, and the initial hardware/sofware/conversion costs alone would have been roughly $1million, and it would have required us adding at least one, and probably 2 FTEs to administer it – so from a business standpoint, GroupWise has a lot going for it.
Rubbish., plain and simple…….Rubbish.
For a start GroupWise is NOT an email ‘Program’. It is an entire System. Like Exchange + Outlook. Except it is less resource hungry, consumes less disk space per message. The messages are kept more securely (IE Encrypted AND compressed) PLUS all the things Ben says in his Article. The best thing about GroupWise is that every time there is a new mail worm or virus out, the administrators don’t start sweating bullets like the M$ guys do. I’d rather “put the effort into making the transition to another client” so I knew my data was safe and secure!! You can run Outlook against the Groupwise backend if you really wanted to but that is unfortunately where MOST odf the vulnerabilities are in M$ mail systems. That hopelessly insecure piece of code they call Outlook.
It should tell you something when one of the responses that defend Groupwise is “upgrade to GW8 and you’ll get a brand new vacation feature that makes it easy” — since when should this be something to cling to? Seriously…it’s 2010. Vacation responders should be a base feature…not something that you have to upgrade to the latest and greatest version to enjoy. If nothing else, it tells you something about their product development map that it took until GW8 to have an “easy to use” vacation feature.
Silent retraction? Makes non-tech admins feel all warm and fuzzy, but in all reality, it’s not trustable. If someone has already read the email, and you retract it…you’ll think everything is fine, but it’s really not. The message is still out there.
And another defense of GW is that ‘your organization needs to invest in more hardware’ — or something to that effect. Umm…why? What is the overwhelming benefit of keeping an email system in house that continues to grow, continues to suck more resources and more funding each year…..why wouldn’t you go with a cost-effective model like outsourcing, where you pay the same flat rate every single year, and get all the features you need without having to worry about all the extra things GW requires.
A little case study off the top of my head (not exhaustive):
GW == Server hardware, backup hardware, proprietary non-standards based messaging (IMAP for example), requires extra hardware and software to provide archiving/retention, requires in-house expertise to maintain the system
Google == no required hardware, no required backup hardware, standards based messaging, requires no extra hardware to add archiving or retention ability, requires no in-house expertise to maintain the system. All you need is people feeding google the data (LDAP), and then…well…that’s about it…if you want to compare apples to apples.
I can’t see any reason why any place still runs an in house system, let alone Groupwise. It just doesnt make sense in the long term from a cost-benefit analysis.
GW definitely has some issues, but some of your complaints are weak.
“7. I have 90 emails in my trash folder. When I try and empty the folder, the emails disappear. When I click on the trash folder again, VOILA! 90 emails in my trash folder.”
talk to your IT staff. They likely have smart purge enabled
Making a vacation rule isn’t hard even in GW7.
As for the Find function, I’ve never had a speed issue with it, but it does have frequent issues not finding email that definitely fits the search criteria
I’ve used both, and both have their annoyances. It took some digging to set my GW signature up the way I want it (why is it so obtuse to place an image in there?), but most of the functions are tolerable.
The only thing I see missing from GW (and maybe it’s in 8; I don’t know) is the conversation function. Outlook can return all of the replies/forwards in logical order.
philhege – GroupWise 7 actually has this function (hard for me to admit).
Try the following:
View -> Display Settings -> Discussion Threads
Latest rant about GroupWise – The ability to send recurring meeting invites. What a great way to flood an inbox, thanks GroupWise.
Having used (and administered) Groupwise, Exchange, and Lotus Notes. I would gladly put Groupwise up against the others.
Exchange / Outlook slicker look, but Exchange Server can’t begin to compete with Groupwise for uptime or reliability. Exchange Server has had numerous problems including ‘losing’ e-mail when it is greylisted.
Lotus Notes – All I can say is YUK, too costly doesn’t display HTML well, especially is CSS is used.
Groupwise, I have NEVER had a Groupwise Client infect a workstation with a virus. I can’t say that about Outlook. Groupwise is not quite as intuitive as Outlook, but over all the Server Side is much more stable and secure, and the Client side is more stable and a much ‘cleaner’ interface even if it is less intuitive.
No one system is perfect, but overall for stability and security I have to go with Novell and Groupwise.
Running approximately 300 clients with Groupwise, many problems do happen. The wonderful D107 error is a weekly happening on random clients, appointments not showing up right away, and now Version 8 likes to set your view back to some default each time you open. It’s not a horrible system but I would not mind trying another.