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Our GroupWiseR reporter Sander van Vugt had an Exclusive Interview with Tommy Mikkelsen from Denmark, working for a company called "IT Quality", a Novell Platinum partners over there. Tommy's focus is on GroupWise, apart from that he's also working with other "traditional" Novell products, like ZEN works, NetWare and eDirectory. Tommy works with GroupWise since version 5.0, and with Novell products for 14 years now. Here are some quotes from this interview:
- "...GroupWise is a major competitor. It's still one in the top 3 of collaboration suites. I think that within the next 10 years, it will be bigger than Notes....."
- "... the GroupWise community ... is the strongest Novell community in the world. The NUI was important in the past, but now it is almost gone..."
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Q: What exactly is it that you do in your daily work?
A: I'm working as a developer, an architect, consultant and support person. It is pretty broad, and all related to GroupWise. If it's related to GroupWise, it's me.
Q: And apart from that, any hobbies?
A: I'm one of 28 Novell support forum sysops, one of 5 of the sysops for developer forums and one of two worldwide that do both of them. I've been doing that for a couple of years now because I like being active for the community as well. I'm also pretty active in other parts of the community live. Of course I'm a GroupWiseR guy and I've been speaking at several conferences. I was the president of the NUI in Denmark as well, but due to lack of spare time, I’m no longer part of the NUI DK Board
Q: Being so active, what do you think of the GroupWise Summit Initiative?
A: It's a great idea, but I was sorry to hear that it wasn't going to be in The Hague this time. I really liked it there. But, on the other hand, I haven't been to Belgium yet, so there's nothing bad that I can say about it, and I’m sure it’ll be as big a success as last year, if not bigger, due to the Hands-On labs.
Q: Do you think that there is place for two GroupWise conferences in EMEA: the Summit and Gwavacon?
A: Not in this way. Both are taking people away from each other, mainly also because they are so close. If there has to be two conferences, they should be separated by half a year. I do like Gwavacon, but it would be better if Novell should be doing it, like BrainShare we had before in Europe. That has the advantage that people can also learn about other products. I mean, if you come to BrainShare for ZENworks, you can pick up something about GroupWise as well and that's really great for both products.
Q: Do you ever see BrainShare coming back to Europe?
A: I really do hope so, but I don't believe so. They only had 800 attendees the last time, and since it costs about the same amount of money as it did in Salt Lake, that's just not enough. Novell software is under heavy pressure, people are migrating away from it. I don't believe that the traditional SUSE people were ready for the Novell embracement the last time BrainShare was in Europe. They went to they own Linux things. I think however that it has changed now. Novell should try it again, it's a different market nowadays.
Q: Let's talk a little about the product itself: how is GroupWise doing nowadays in Denmark?
A: We're definitely into a battle. We see especially that in our traditional stronghold, the government, a lot of departments are merging. During those mergers the IT people have to negotiate about the products they want to keep and the products they don't. We see often that IT departments can't do without ZENworks, and due to that, they skip GroupWise. There are however some very positive aspects as well. I do for example like that GroupWise is the only collaboration suite for Linux. That should increase the market share in the future. The SOAP interface is a major advantage as well, The API's are very good at this moment. We're no longer dependent on one platform any more. We have a Linux client and a Macintosh client and that really is something good. One of the things that didn't help however, was GroupWise 7.0. That really was a disaster, it was hardly working and that didn't help for people to continue working with GroupWise. Fortunately, SP 1 has made some really significant improvements.
Q: How do you see the future of GroupWise?
A: It's a major competitor. It's still one in the top 3 of collaboration suites. I think that within the next 10 years, it will be bigger than Notes. We have a native Linux client and that is good, that will help GroupWise grow, easpecially when the market share of Linux on the desktop grows. Maybe later on it could take up the fight with Microsoft Exchange as well.
Q: Do you see people migrating away from Exchange already?
A: We only see it during mergers if one part of the merged company was using Exchange and the other part was using GroupWise. Most of the times Microsoft is very good at marketing. They will sometimes just give away the product to prevent companies from taking something else and we can't compete with that. We do have a future however, because GroupWise integrates really well with different environments.
Q: What about Linux? Have you dived into that already yourself?
A: Not much so far, I just didn't have time to do it. Some of our customers are starting to ask for it now. If they do, I'm working together with collegues who do Linux setup, and I'm doing GroupWise on top of it.
Q: Last but not least, let's spend a few words on the GroupWise community. What do you think of the European community?
A: It's the strongest Novell community in the world. The NUI was important in the past, but now it is almost gone.
Q: Why is the community so succesful?
A: GroupWiser is the stronghold. When Erno started it up, he did more than a normal human being could have done. Everyone is standing up behind him. Combine that with the fact that it is independent, and that really makes it something that people want to be a part of.
Q: Something else that you'd like to share?
A: Yes! What I really like is the icon of the GroupWise client. It is the embracement of the whole world, and that's where GroupWise is going: it's a globe. |
