Novell Ships GroupWise 5.1
Articles and Tips: article
01 Jun 1997
Novell announced on April 8 that GroupWise 5.1, its premier collaboration product for corporate networks and intranets, is now shipping. GroupWise expands E-mail with powerful collaboration tools, making it easy for users to find and share information, manage documents, and collaborate inside and outside the company. Version 5.1 offers significant enhancements in performance, speed and scalability, as well as key Internet capabilities.
"The speed and performance enhancements in GroupWise 5.1 make it the ideal choice for mission-critical collaboration," said Aaron Fessler, president of The Allegro Group, a worldwide Internet hub provider. "With these key improvements to performance and back-end administration, GroupWise 5.1 will continue to play an integral role in our business collaboration needs."
"GroupWise 5.1 is the next step in our effort to provide customers with the most advanced set of collaboration tools and the greatest amount of flexibility in how they implement and use them," said Stewart Nelson, vice president and general manager, Novell Applications Division. "This commitment to our customers has made GroupWise the groupware product of choice for more than eight million users."
GroupWise 5.1 performance improvements fall into two categories: enhancements that improve the overall capacity and throughput of the GroupWise system and enhancements that improve the GroupWise client's responsiveness to the end user. For example, client/server connections and other operations have been optimized, resulting in reduced overhead, faster start-up, reduced memory requirements at the server, and increased message throughput.
The innovative document management functions of GroupWise have also been enhanced, resulting in improved import/migration of documents, as well as improved document creation operations. In addition, significant performance enhancements were made to the GroupWise full-text query capabilities, which allow users to search GroupWise libraries for information (messages, documents, appointments, notes, tasks, etc.).
The feature enhancements for GroupWise 5.1 include support for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) on the client, support for embedded URLs (Uniform Resource Locators), and multi-user calendar printouts. LDAP is an industry standard protocol for directory access. With the provided LDAP support, GroupWise users can look up user information via any LDAP-compliant directory service as easily as from their personal address books and from the GroupWise system address book, which is based on Novell Directory Services (NDS).
With the release of GroupWise 5, users were able to send World Wide Web URLs to other GroupWise users. Now, with GroupWise 5.1, any URL included in the subject or message body of any GroupWise message is automatically detected and hyperlinked to the user's default browser. This allows the recipient of a message that references information on the World Wide Web via URL to immediately follow the reference to that information.
Like GroupWise 5, GroupWise 5.1 offers cross-platform, expanded E-mail solutions, including full document management capabilities, as part of its Universal Mailbox. The Universal Mailbox gives users single-point access to personal calendaring, group scheduling, tasks, voice mail, faxes and other message types both from the desktop and via the Internet using GroupWise WebAccess. GroupWise WebAccess allows users to access the Universal Mailbox from any HTML-compliant Internet browser.
GroupWise 5.1 natively supports open Internet standards such as TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, SMTP/MIME and LDAP (client), with support for IMAP4, POP3, NNTP, S-MIME and LDAP (server) available in upcoming versions. This combination of Internet support and rich functionality makes GroupWise the first of a new breed of expanded E-mail systems to offer intranet-ready collaboration and full functionality out of the box. And, with its open Object API, customers now have the option of customizing their GroupWise solution.
Partner CD The open development environment of GroupWise 5.1 enables ISVs to enhance GroupWise and provide additional business solutions. On the GroupWise Partners CD, which is included with the shipment of GroupWise 5.1, are solutions from Callware Technologies Inc. (voice and call processing), Cheyenne (fax), Information Builders Inc. (report writing), Time Line Solutions Corporation (project management) and Quarterdeck Corporation (real-time document sharing).
GroupWise 5.1 Upgrade Window Under the terms of the GroupWise upgrade program, users who purchase(d) new GroupWise 4.1 licenses, upgrade licenses to GroupWise 4.1 or new GroupWise 5 licenses between August 1, 1996, and May 31, 1997, are eligible to receive an equal number of GroupWise 5.1 licenses at no additional cost by submitting a claim no later than June 30, 1997. Requests for fulfillment must be received by June 30, 1997. International customers are eligible for the free upgrade on purchases made up to 30 days after international versions of GroupWise 5.1 ship, and may submit claims no later than 60 days after international versions of GroupWise 5.1 ship.
Licensed users of SoftSolutions 4.x are also eligible for a free upgrade to GroupWise 5.1. SoftSolutions 3.1a customers have two upgrade paths available to them: they may either purchase SoftSolutions 4.1 upgrade licenses or they may purchase GroupWise 5.1 licenses at the upgrade price. SoftSolutions, Novell's document management software, works independently of GroupWise 4.1. With GroupWise 5.1, however, Novell has strategically integrated document management features and functions into GroupWise.
Fulfillment order forms, promotion details and additional information about GroupWise can be accessed on the World Wide Web at http://www.novell.com/products/groupwise. Customers can also call (801) 228-4272 for promotion and product information. Customers in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East should fax completed order forms and a copy of a dated GroupWise 4.1 or GroupWise 5 receipt or purchase order to +353 1 703 8955. All other customers should fax completed order forms and a copy of a dated GroupWise 4.1 or GroupWise 5 receipt or purchase order to (801) 229-1566.
GroupWise 5.1 Availability GroupWise 5.1 is now available in English and German versions. Additional language versions, including Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish and Swedish are expected to be available at the end of April. Other language versions will follow shortly.
* Originally published in Novell AppNotes
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