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David Strom wrote an interesting piece about the just-released GroupWise 2012 entitled No Once Cares That Novell Has A New Version of GroupWise. His assertion is that GroupWise is yesterday’s news, has been supplanted by other platforms, and is simply a dying animal.
Although Mr. Strom is a very sharp guy, I respectfully disagree:
- I’m certain that the vast majority of the 10,000 organizations cited in Mr. Strom’s article care about the new release.
- Same goes for the 47 state governments he cited that use GroupWise.
- Ditto for the many third-party developers of encryption, archiving, security and other products that are designed for use in GroupWise environments.
- Even competitors will care, since some have made public – and not so public – their strong desire to move GroupWise-enabled organizations to their respective platforms.
Mr. Strom is right in that GroupWise has lost a significant portion of its customer base and the development of the platform has not kept pace with that of some competing solutions. However, the new GroupWise has some noteworthy and interesting features as he pointed out, such as integration with Skype for presence detection and an iPad client among them, that will help to keep interest in GroupWise alive. Moreover, given that migrating to a new messaging system is typically arduous and expensive, a new version with interesting new features might be enough to convince some decision makers that they can at least postpone the migration, if not put it off completely.
Does this mean that the new version of GroupWise will cause the platform suddenly to reverse its slide and start picking up new customers in droves? Doubtful, but if this is the first in several steps focused on updating and improving GroupWise, predictions about the death of GroupWise may have been premature.
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Reblogged this on SilverDane's Blog and commented:
Comment by SusannaSharpe January 24, 2012 @ 10:03 pmCommentary on the relevance of GroupWise 2012, which was released this week.
What Group Wise has other email system does not have? or what other competitors/other systems offer that GW does not have?
Comment by Adel Gorgis January 25, 2012 @ 1:50 pmWe have to ask ourselves, why suddenly some organization have decided to move away from any Novell product starting with GW?
Is it price, stability, flexibility, or scalability? Is it new feature, third party support, or market share?
[...] Michael Osterman of “Osterman Research”, who rebutted Mr. Strom’s article with his own blog entry and argues that actually, many care about a new [...]
Pingback by GroupWise 2012 - WE Care! February 3, 2012 @ 7:23 pm