GroupWise 5.5 Gives Companies the Ability to Manage Corporate Information
Articles and Tips: article
01 May 1998
Novell, Inc. recently announced a beta version of GroupWise 5.5, Novell's premier collaboration product for corporate networks and intranets. An enhanced business-class, collaboration tool, GroupWise 5.5 gives network users immediate value through improved tools that gather, access and communicate corporate information. It does this through expanded information manageability and inter-company collaboration capabilities.
Users will benefit from support of industry-standard Internet security, improved open Internet standards support and Novell's continued commitment to offer the lowest cost of ownership for its networking solutions. In addition, this latest version of GroupWise will include increased functionality of E-mail, calendaring and scheduling, and enhanced performance and administrative capabilities while remaining the easiest collaboration solution to use.
"This latest, enhanced version of GroupWise is an important implementation step in Novell's strategy to deliver the most scalable, reliable and powerful collaboration solution as one of the pillars of its intelligent networking platform," said John Gailey, director, Novell Collaboration Services Group. "GroupWise 5.5 provides a high-performance, Internet-ready collaboration solution that lets businesses easily manage the daily deluge of information they must effectively deal with in order to be successful today."
GroupWise allows users to manage all information types in the enterprise, from spreadsheets, word processor files, graphics, E-mail and calendars from a single point. Users receive immediate value from the new features of GroupWise 5.5 in the form of powerful, easy-to-use tools that strengthen and support business processes.
Expanded Information Management and Inter-Company Collaboration
GroupWise 5.5 incorporates new and expanded functionalities that lets users leverage the power of traditional document management via the GroupWise Universal Mailbox.
Enhanced Calendaring--Expanded calendar printing options and appointment descriptions let users accept an appointment or see the results of a busy search with such specifics as "free," "busy," "tentative appointment" or "out of the office." Calendar views have also been expanded to include a multi-user view and a month view.
Full-Text Indexing--All incoming information, including E-mail, documents, tasks and scheduling, is full-text indexed, allowing the user to more easily view, prioritize and manage the daily flow of business information.
Dynamic References/Attachments--GroupWise systems dynamically recognize when a user sends a document reference to users outside of their GroupWise system and attaches the document for those users.
Related Fields--Document property fields have been expanded to allow users to relate property fields to one another, enhancing contextualized retrieval of documents.
Document Echoing--Documents are dynamically "echoed" from a GroupWise library to a user's local hard drive, giving users access to all of their documents and network information even if the user is remote.
Enhanced Internet Security
GroupWise 5.5 now gives users the confidence to send business critical information across the Internet securely, while still maintaining the full encryption security already provided within GroupWise systems.
GroupWise 5.5 users are now enabled to sign, encrypt, decrypt, authenticate and access non-repudiation capabilities across the Internet through Entrust 3.0 for S/MIME and/or PGP via the respective products which are enabled for GroupWise. Users may also set defaults to sign and/or encrypt all messages.
Improved Open Internet Standards Support
The upcoming version of GroupWise provides users with a combination of extensive, out-of-the-box Internet and intranet functionality that enables them to fully leverage the Internet and corporate intranets for E-mail, document management and collaboration processes.
GroupWise WebPublisher is integrated into this latest version and allows users to publish documents directly to the Internet and corporate intranets and dynamically share information while maintaining the robust security, concurrency and version control of GroupWise document management. GroupWise 5.5 further supports open Internet standards through native Internet addressing and HTML viewing.
Native DNS-based Look-up and routing have been added as a first step toward full inter-company communication, allowing for a dynamic link between unconnected GroupWise systems that retains the rich attributes of shared information such as tasks, E-mail or calendar items.
Through Intelligent Content with HTML and Embedded Scripting, GroupWise lets users enrich their GroupWise environments through the creation of individualized scripts or forms in industry-standard languages such as VisualBasic and JavaScript. These languages allow users to access and manipulate information in the GroupWise repository.
GroupWise 5.5 supports the vCard electronic business card format, which lets users exchange information and instantly create a new GroupWise address book record. Users may also send and receive vCard signatures via E-mail.
Commitment to Total Value Networking
As with other versions of GroupWise, this latest version lowers total cost of network ownership by providing customers with the immediate value of deploying one of the easiest to use collaboration solutions. All the enhanced GroupWise 5.5 features designed to expand the information management capabilities of Novell's collaboration solution can be easily accessed and immediately utilized through the familiar and powerful GroupWise interface.
GroupWise 5.5 further lowers the total cost of network ownership by leveraging Novell Directory Services (NDS), reducing administrative costs and keeping system maintenance to a minimum.
NDS helps to reduce administrative time and effort by providing enterprise-wide administration tools that automatically replicate all GroupWise object changes on the user's client/server platform of choice. GroupWise 5.5 also saves administrative time through automatic database maintenance and link scheduling.
GroupWise 5.5, Novell's premier application for NetWare and NDS, continues to expand upon the Internet standards support introduced in GroupWise 5.2, and offers sophisticated collaboration functionality through GroupWise WebPublisher and WorkFlow Professional capabilities.
GroupWise remains one of the most scalable collaboration solutions in the market, powerful enough to easily meet large scale enterprise needs, yet easy enough for small businesses to use and maintain. Further addressing network users' concerns, GroupWise 5.5 has been thoroughly tested and meets all Novell Year 2000 readiness specifications.
On the client, GroupWise 5.5 will support Win 95 and NT, Win 16, Mac and UNIX. On the server, GroupWise 5.5 will support NetWare 3.X, 4.X and 5.X, NT and UNIX. Upgrade and pricing details will be provided at the time of first customer ship.
Attendees of Novell BrainShare '98 received copies of the beta version. Availability of an open beta will be announced at a later date. Additional information about GroupWise 5.5 beta can be accessed on the World Wide Web at http://www.novell.com/products/groupwise.
* Originally published in Novell AppNotes
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