A: My name is Bill Pray.  I have been with Novell for 5 and a half years. I previously worked in the government sector, where I worked as a network manager for a small police department. I joined Novell to work for the Volera product line; this product line is now integrated in iChain. Since then, I've worked for various teams within Novell and I'm one of the two product managers for GroupWise since November last year.

 

A: Both my colleague Phil and I share the same responsibilities: some of them are promotion of the product and capturing requirements for future products. Some specific areas that I'm currently working on: I'm in Provo and work a lot with the Engineering team on sales support. Currently I also have a strong focus on real time collaboration; this is about Instant Messaging and much more than that. And I'm always focused on future products.

 

A: Instant Messaging will be one of the key solutions. Recently, we've done an evaluation where GroupWise needs to be enhanced. The first issue we found was mobility. We've found a solution for that with the GroupWise Mobile Server. The second important part was teaming, this is the option to create virtual teams, share documents and so on. And third there is the requirement of real time collaboration. You can think of web conferencing, Instant Messaging, Voice over IP, whiteboarding and more. Currently we are looking for a partner that can help us make this technology available for GroupWise customers.

 

A: I can't say too much about that right now. We're looking for some partners and I'm expecting some anouncements pretty soon. Anyway, it will be much more than the functionality that is offered by Virtual Office.

 

A: I wish we  had 10 product managers, there's so much to do! Phil and I a working very well together. GroupWise is doing so well in the market, people do like the Linux story, we are the number one collaboration suite for Linux and that involves a lot of work. We work closely together and coordinate well together. I've been doing this for six months now and it has been very enjoyable.

 

A: We have a main development team in Provo.  There is a quality insurance team in Bulgaria, another development team in the Ukraine, and an internationalization team in Ireland.

 

A: Absolutely not! GroupWise is a very strategic product for Novell. It was in the major anouncements in Brainshare. Novell's workgroup suite was announced at BrainShare as a complete solution for the enterprise and GroupWise is a major key part of it. Novell has a very strong commitment to GroupWise.

 

A: We try to be specific about that and explain to the market what product is fit for what goal. There are  two ways to look at the differences: market and role. On the market, GroupWise is an enterprise class collaboration solution. Hula is for loosely affiliated collaborative environments like universities. If you are looking at roles: an information worker needs GroupWise. GroupWise offers all the applications an information worker needs to collaborate with his colleagues.

 

GroupWise offers a calender, email, some document management, instant messaging and more. Students at a University just need email. This can also be true for citizens in a city. In that kind of environment, a lightweight solution is needed and Hula fits very well there. It is also a strong concept to have those two products if you are looking at the future: Hula recieves input from the community, that input is used in GroupWise releases as well. And there's the opposite: GroupWise develops new options that can be integrated in Hula. With both products Novell keeps its feet strongly in the collaboration market and it allows both products to enrichen each other.

 

A: It doesn't as much as we like, but we do have some succes with Exchange to GroupWise conversion. We are gaining slowly. We are especially popular in government and health care and in environments where compliance is very important. We are still gaining and not losing market share.    Everybody has email, so where's the room for growth?  We are taking from other systems now, like on the Linux platform. Collaboration on Linux is growing: IDC expects 30% raise in the next 5 years. GroupWise is the only collaboration solution  that is completely on Linux. Lotus Notus is pretty far as well, but they are not completely on Linux. We are.

 

A: People want the same features on Linux as they have on Windows. Linux clients didn't have the time to mature so far, don't forget that the Windows client has been around for several years now. Instead of developing a full-scale GroupWise client for Linux, we are looking at other options as well. One of them is to integrate native Linux clients with GroupWise, like Evolution - hooking in to the SOAP interface. One of the things that we expect a lot of, is the web client. We see exciting things happening there, like offline access. Technologies like Ajax and web 2.0 allow us to get there very soon with the web client. We are continuing to work on the Linux client, but the way to go is the web client.

 

A: Wooow, that's a tough question. Personally, I've been struggling with the address book/ contact manager. This really needs to be enhanced, we're going to do that in the next couple of releases. Currently, the contact manager is just a plain address book. In future releases we want it to be more than that, like a mini CRM.

 

A: At an administrative level: it's so secure and reliable. I have customers that have 340 days of uptime, customers just know that their mail system is going to be there. There are also some interface features that I like a lot: I really enjoy the option in the Windows client to customize my interface, make it what I think is most productive for me. This makes it very easy to customize my personal working space.

 

A: It has been a lot of fun, interacting with all of the people involved in Groupwise.

 

A: There have been some enhancement requests, and people have been asking for continuing support for international languages: people really like GroupWise to be in their own language. The other things I've learned was that some of the core values work for all types on customers; they do like the same features. Besides that, there were many requests for small enhancements, things like contact management for example.

 

A: In Europe the end users are driving it. In the US GroupWise is used differently. There are some very large companies, that can get in contact with Novell directly though their sales representatives. Smaller companies don’t always have a direct sales contact. For those companies, a community is so much more easy to work together. To be honest: the US needs a  GroupWiseR as well, and they need it right away. Folks in EMEA are ahead of the US and they are doing it right. I like GroupWiseR, the health of software can often be assessed by its user groups. This healthy user group proves that GroupWise is doing well. US user groups will be good for the product as well.

 

A: Basically there are three main collaboration solutions: Microsoft Exchange, IBM's Lotus Notes and Novell's GroupWise. GroupWise is a viable number 3 alternative. Novell is a smart company, we can be very responsive to the customers and that is our strong point as compared to the Microsoft and IBM offerings. With the right partnerships we can provide the same level of solutions as well. In some ways we are better and we can do more.