Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

GroupWise 8 Released: Time, Task, and Contact Management

Blogger: Bill Pray

Novell released GroupWise 8 today. While IBM and Microsoft dominate the e-mail market, Novell GroupWise has held a loyal customer base for many years. This release has some new features that the Novell loyalists should enjoy.

While Novell touts this release as being a "benchmark for Web 2.0-Enabled Collaboration", the most intriguing enhancements in this release are the ones for time, task, and contact management. E-mail clients tend to be where information workers "live" when it comes to desktop applications. Even with the explosive growth of social networking, team workspaces, feed readers, and new work models driven by the incoming Gen Y workforce, most information workers still spend a significant amount of time in e-mail.

In time management, the iCal standard continues to make headway as the major vendors embrace and implement it. GroupWise 8 includes subscribe and publish capabilities. Also implemented is the Internet Free/Busy part of the iCal standard, providing the ability for users to publish their free/busy information to a URL. In the past, it has been virtually impossible to share calendar and free/busy information across organizations without significant IT intervention to implement connectors between systems. Most information workers still resort to the telephone in order to schedule meetings that include attendees from different organizations.

One other very useful feature added to the GroupWise calendar is the ability to display two time zones on the calendar. This makes it easier for users traveling and working across time zones to manage meetings. 

GroupWise 8 also provides "light" project management capabilities. E-mail clients replaced the paper planners of the 1980s with combined calendar and task functions. But the task management features have lagged in development in the e-mail client - mostly consisting of lists tied to the calendar. By adding "light" project management capabilities - subtasks, percentage complete tracking, the ability to create project "home" views in the client - GroupWise 8 provides users a functional tool for personal project management.

Phil Karren, a Novell product manager, summarizes his research findings on contact management and executives by saying "contacts are their currency." For executives, contacts inside and outside organization, as well as personal and business, are important to their success. E-mail clients absorbed the independent software contact management capabilities delivered in the 1990s and became a key technology for users to track and maintain their relationships. The enhancements in contact management in GroupWise 8 provide the ability to add numerous e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, photo, and physical addresses. The contact's free busy URL can be added for easy free/busy search. Physical addresses can be displayed in maps from popular mapping sites. Perhaps the most useful feature is the contact history, which provides a log of all interactions with that particular contact as captured in the e-mail client. 

Novell's claim regarding "Web 2.0-Enabled Collaboration" is based on enhancements for Web 2.0 connections in GroupWise 8 that include an embedded web browser, RSS feed support, and integration with Novell's Teaming + Conferencing.

Some other points to note in this release:

The upcoming end of life for Netware is forcing many GroupWise customers to move their implementations to Linux or Windows servers - or consider replacing GroupWise with another solution. Any upgrade plan to GroupWise 8 needs to include plans to move to Linux or Windows for the servers.

Novell is still working on the future of GroupWise Mobile Server. Novell OEM's the solution from Nokia. Nokia has announced that it is discontinuing the product. Nokia has committed to maintaining the software for another couple of years, but Novell will need to find a replacement.  

Integration with third party solutions continues to be a challenge for GroupWise. Several partners have stepped in and provide integration solutions spanning CRM, social networking (notably Facebook), team workspaces (notably SharePoint), and mobile devices (notably iPhone). 

Outlook, the most flexible enterprise SaaS e-mail client

Blogger: Larry Cannell

Cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS) has been getting some bad press lately. In an interview last month Richard Stallman said “If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software." This should be a concern for any enterprise considering SaaS. A SaaS provider can be just as proprietary as any software vendor.

In our recent enterprise SaaS e-mail report we addressed this concern and concluded Microsoft Outlook is the most flexible enterprise SaaS e-mail client available. The reason: Outlook can be used with three of the major SaaS e-mail services we expect to see in the very near future (Microsoft, Cisco/PostPath, and Zimbra/Yahoo). By supporting Outlook these vendors can provide a near seamless transition from on-premises to SaaS e-mail. Since there is no need to sell a new e-mail user interface the business case for making the switch is simpler.

With Cisco/PostPath and Zimbra/Yahoo we are seeing the emergence of viable Exchange-compatible competitors. This level of compatibility is made possible through both the MAPI (Messaging Application Programming Interface) interface and Microsoft’s publication of Exchange protocols. Today, Zimbra has good support for Outlook using its MAPI client software. PostPath (recently acquired by Cisco) does not even require the MAPI client code. In addition, both of these products support Exchange ActiveSync for synchronizing with mobile devices.

Take a situation where a company has employees using an on-premises Exchange Server with Outlook for their e-mail, calendar, tasks, and contacts. This company could switch to the Microsoft SaaS offering (Exchange Online) and could also use Cisco’s or Yahoo’s offerings when they become available. At this time the only issues appear to be with Outlook’s mail rules (mail filtering is available but manageable only through their web interfaces).

Having a separate client (like Outlook) that can speak to multiple SaaS e-mail providers offers the enterprise needed flexibility. Web-only SaaS e-mail vendors do not presently offer this. Zimbra comes closest with their Zimbra Desktop client, but only supports e-mail (via IMAP or POP) and no support for calendars, tasks, or contacts.

By the way, Bill Pray and I will be hosting a Burton Group telebriefing this week discussing our enterprise SaaS e-mail report. Burton Group customers have a choice of two dates:

Tuesday, October 28, 2008
2:00 p.m. EDT/11:00 a.m. PDT/18:00 UTC GMT/19:00 CET

Wednesday, October 29, 2008
9:00 a.m. EDT/6:00 a.m. PDT/13:00 UTC GMT/14:00 CET

You can register for one of these telebriefings HERE. I hope to see you online at a telebriefing this week.

iPhone and Enterprise E-mail... A Few Months Later

Blogger: Bill Pray

When Apple released its iPhone 3G earlier this summer, Apple touted it as “The best phone for business. Ever.” For most users, that means enterprise e-mail, calendar, and contacts on the device.

The iPhone 3G launched with a native support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync – a logical, but interesting choice for Apple. Logical because Microsoft Exchange is, by most measures, the leading e-mail solution in the market. Interesting in that, given the desktop marketing wars between “Mac and PC”, one wonders why Apple did not provide native support for IBM’s Lotus Notes also.

So where do things stand with other enterprise e-mail solutions a few months later? Below is a quick summary for IT shops that do not have Microsoft Exchange:

Google GAPE: For the iPhone, Google provides a tailored web interface. Another option is Gmail for mobile, a Java-based e-mail application. Gmail also supports IMAP synchronization of e-mail to iPhone’s native e-mail client.

IBM Lotus Notes: IBM announced at the end of September the release of iNotes Ultralite software that supports Lotus Notes on the iPhone. The software is free for anyone with a Lotus Notes license. iNotes Ultralite is web application that leverages the Safari browser on the iPhone to access the Lotus Notes functions. The advantage is that since it is a browser, no data is stored on the iPhone (except in the browser cache), should the iPhone turn up missing. However, it is not a client, so no data on the device also means no synchronization with the iPhone’s native e-mail, calendar, and contacts functionality.

Novell GroupWise: GroupWise 7 ships with GroupWise Mobile Server – an OEMed product from Nokia for mobile e-mail, calendar, and contacts for GroupWise. GroupWise Mobile Server does not support iPhone and, with the latest end of life announcement from Nokia for the product, will not in the future. Novell customers can utilize a partner solution recently released from Notify Technology that provides full support for the iPhone and GroupWise through the native iPhone functionality using ActiveSync.

Oracle Beehive: Using IMAP, Oracle Beehive e-mail is supported on the iPhone. Another option is to install Oracle Beehive Integration for Outlook, through which iPhone users can also synchronize calendar entries, tasks, and contacts through iTunes. Like Novell GroupWise, Notify Technology provides a technically better solution for Oracle Beehive also, with full support for the iPhone and Beehive through the native iPhone functionality.

Yahoo! Zimbra: Zimbra supports the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol, which permits the iPhone to synchronize with Zimbra exactly as it would with Exchange.

In sum, a few months later, there are ways for all of the enterprise solutions to get e-mail to the iPhone – mostly through IMAP or an optimized iPhone browser access.However, because Apple chose to support ActiveSync, the rich client experience of synchronization of e-mail, calendar, and contacts with the native iPhone clients is only available to those solutions that support ActiveSync. For IBM, Novell, and Oracle this means a web client, or a third party solution like Notify Technologies that connects their product with the iPhone through ActiveSync.

If Apple wants the iPhone to be "The best phone for business. Ever.", Apple needs to add support for other e-mail vendors, notably IBM, to deliver synchronized enterprise e-mail, calendar, and contacts.

IBM Announces Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging

Blogger: Bill Pray

“And so it begins…”

That is the lead that Larry Cannell will use next week when he kicks off our telebriefing entitled “Software as a Service Enterprise E-mail: Get Ready to Go Beyond the Grind.” Today, IBM officially announced Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging. The three heavy weights are now in the SaaS e-mail ring: Microsoft, IBM, and Google. Cisco and Yahoo! have said they will be joining soon.

For many organizations, this means that SaaS e-mail services are now a viable option, especially now that the two primary vendors of on-premise e-mail (IBM and Microsoft) have a SaaS alternative. IT departments can realistically consider transferring the responsibility and headaches for this essential utility to a vendor and reallocate their stretched time and resources to other projects.

Legalcompliance and discovery will remain a concern for many organizations. Who owns, possesses, and accesses the data in e-mail is important. A significant amount of any organization’s intellectual property flows through its e-mail. However, I expect that concern will be resolved over time as legal precedence is set and the vendors become more compliance savvy in their SaaS offerings.

Organizations will benefit from SaaS e-mail because it will spur more innovation by the vendors. The e-mail client is an example. The web client has made significant technological progress because of consumer web e-mail. It will likely replace the desktop client in the future because of the advantages it provides a SaaS e-mail vendor. A SaaS vendor will not want to, or possibly be able to, upgrade desktop clients – that is difficult enough today for organizations with on-premise deployments.

The change in the delivery model also provides many benefits. For example, not many organizations can say today that they are providing e-mail services for less than $10 a month per user. The economies of scale that the vendors can bring to this market will make the price point of SaaS e-mail very attractive. In addition, getting e-mail off of IT’s responsibility list will free them to work on other projects that may lend competitive advantage to an organization.

A price war is a possibility. There is a significant amount of revenue at stake in this market. IBM is starting at $10 per user per month for Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging. Microsoft Exchange Online is also $10 per user per month. Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) suite of tools for enterprises is starting at $50 per year per user. Cisco (PostPath) and Yahoo! (Zimbra) have yet to announce pricing.

So it begins, the great battle of our time.” - Gandalf, Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

The growing impact of free webmail on enterprise e-mail

Blogger: Larry Cannell

A recent report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project entitled "Use of Cloud Computing Applications and Services" found, not surprisingly, that the most popular cloud computing service is webmail. What I found the most interesting is:

1. How popular webmail is compared to other cloud services. There’s a significant gap between webmail and the second most popular service (online photo storage).
2. The differing levels of use across age groups. The survey reported that 77% of respondents age 18-29 use webmail services but only 44% of those age 50-64.fs

These findings indicate an accelerating swing in attitudes toward e-mail that enterprises are surely starting to see.

It’s interesting to note that many (perhaps most) people in the youngest age group (18-29) never experienced an e-mail environment other than webmail. To them e-mail = webmail. It’s simple: I sign up, I send e-mail.

If only providing enterprise e-mail was that simple. Keeping e-mail flowing is tough work, more work than is apparent to most users. Directories have to be up to date, shared calendars and meeting scheduling aren’t trivial, plus there’s dealing with spam, and so forth.

This is a clear no-win situation for IT. E-mail is expected to be easy but the reality is quite different. This is the basis for our Burton Group report “Software as a Service Enterprise E-Mail: Get Ready to Go Beyond the Grind.”

Given this huge disparity between expectations and reality, it’s no wonder that some big names are jumping into the enterprise e-mail market with SaaS offerings. These include: Cisco, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Yahoo!.

Although some may only see SaaS as a convenience, the approach can also remove barriers that previously held competitors back in a software-in-a-box world. For one, implementation risk shifts from IT to service provider. For example, an enterprise that is adverse to implementing PostPath (as an alternative to Exchange Server) might be willing to have Cisco take that risk and provide a Exchange-compatible service (presumably for less cost). And delivering it as SaaS means its inexpensive to try.

Lastly, this new e-mail market will be very competitive because enterprises budget a lot of money to provide e-mail and most of it is not being spent on software. That is the revenue up for grabs here and it is MUCH more than just software licenses and maintenance.

Bill Pray is right when he says the "E-Mail Market is Getting Interesting Again."

Top 5 Trends for NextGen Authoring

Blogger: Craig Roth

I’ve been researching trends in next-generation (NextGen) content authoring since the spring and I just ran across a fun blast from the past. It’s a review of the very first version of Microsoft Word for Windows in Software Magazine. The article quotes Bill Gates saying that Microsoft Word is "the word processor designed for the 1990s".  Now, here we are within sight of the 2010s and the 13th version of Microsoft Office, and the question that comes to my mind is this: are we still using the word processor of the 1990s? Or more accurately, are we still caught in the paradigm of the tools of the 1990s (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, email), even though needs for collaboration, reuse, living documents, and quicker authoring cycles have evolved?

Well, from the title of this post you can guess I think there is something more: NextGen authoring.  The core authoring suite has certainly evolved and will continue to play a major part in the lives of information workers.  But I have identified several trends that point out how much further these tools have to go and how valuable some categories outside the core suite can be. The trends are:

• Collaborative authoring
• Content reuse
• Living documents
• Freshness preference
• Dangerous findability

To a large extent, organizations haven't tackled these needs head-on because they are not a pain point. Indeed, they have become a numb point. Authors have become used to clumsy workarounds such as e-mailing files around for comment, creating a new request for proposal by copying an old one then hollowing it out, or click-and-dragging sections of slides from one presentation into a starter template to generate a new presentation (thereby leaving multiple fragmented versions of slides scattered and out of sync across enterprise file stores). They are so used to this by now they don't generally think of tools to make this better.

But some information workers have decided not to sit waiting for the organization to give them new tools. They've applied new methods of collaborating, finding, and reusing content with existing productivity suites, collaborative workspaces, and web conferencing. They've also begun using tools that have evolved along with NextGen authoring needs such as wikis, blogs, XML authoring, mind mapping, concept mapping, and note management. These tools have proven that authors don't mind authoring collaboratively, in small chunks, and doing a little bit of metatagging if it gets them something in return.  And once authors are primed for granular reuse, the standard productivity suite can evolve into something much more useful than Bill Gates could have conceived when praising that first Windows word processor in 1990.

Five Reasons the Enterprise Messaging / E-Mail Market is Getting Interesting Again

Blogger:  Bill Pray

    

1.       Choice – For years Microsoft and IBM have dominated this market with Exchange and Notes, with Novell and Oracle holding onto a small share of loyal customers. With Google, Yahoo! (Zimbra) and Cisco (recently announced the PostPath acquisition) all pushing into the market, enterprises have some options to consider. Novell and Oracle both have major releases scheduled before end of the year also. Choice and competition are good for a mature market because they will foster lower prices and innovation.

 

2.       SaaS – The primary reason Google, Yahoo! and Cisco are interesting is that they are Software as a Service offerings for e-mail. Both Microsoft and IBM have similar offerings in the works. The SaaS model gives enterprise a new delivery model to consider. Larry Cannel covers this in depth in a recently published report that Burton Group customers can access here.  In addition, Burton Group customers can read the results and analysis by Craig Roth of recent Burton Group / Ziff Davis survey on SaaS here.   Also, Jack Santos goes in depth on IT strategy, SaaS, and Google in the document found here.

 

3.       Social Software – The social software evolution is taking e-mail back to its roots as an asynchronous communication method and providing interesting new ways for e-mail to fulfill this role in larger collaboration systems or platforms.

         

4.       Mashups – The interface for e-mail is becoming interesting again with mashups.  Check out any of these six solutions to see what I mean:  Zenbe, Orgoo, Fuser, TopicR, Goowy, and Jubii.  These have been labeled by some as e-mail aggregators, but many of the features delivered demonstrate that there is much more than e-mail aggregation going on here.  Perhaps one of the most interesting mashups that is still in the “playing with the idea” stage is Adobe’s Genesis project.

 

5.       Legal Decisions – As I have previously blogged, the courts continue to delve into defining e-mail’s legal status through decisions that present challenges to users and enterprises alike. Compliance and e-discovery are becoming “block and tackle” e-mail issues that need to be addressed by enterprises, with the courts continuing to add complexity through new legal decisions. 

Note:  This is a cross-posting from the Le Collaborateur blog.

GroupWise 8 Released to Open Beta

Blogger:  Bill Pray

Novell GroupWise 8 released to open beta last week. As a former product manager for GroupWise, I think Novell customers will be pleased with the enhancements – otherwise, I didn’t do a very good job.  But, having worked on the product, let me share some insight I have on this release that might be of interest. 

While Novell doesn’t spend much marketing effort to compete with IBM and Microsoft in the enterprise messaging market, Novell does continue to develop and maintain GroupWise for their established customer base. Most market estimates place Novell’s single digit enterprise messaging market share at a distant third to IBM and Microsoft. But GroupWise is a good example of how e-mail systems once entrenched, tend to stay.

It has taken Novell a long time to deliver on GroupWise 8.  GroupWise 7 released in August 2005. However, GroupWise customers will find some nice “delighters” in this next release, as Novell spent a significant portion of its development effort on the end user experience.

Perhaps one the most significant differentiators in this release is that Novell can now tout a complete and functional enterprise messaging solution from the server to the desktop for Linux. Novell has been using its own Linux desktop internally for several years. As a result, there was significant pressure on the GroupWise team to bring the GroupWise Linux client up to snuff. The Linux client in GroupWise 8 is arguably one of the richest Linux e-mail clients in the market. Unfortunately for Linux aficionados, it is not open source. For GroupWise customers, this also means a very rich Mac client, as the two clients share the same code base.

In addition to the Linux development, GroupWise contact management, task management and calendaring have been enhanced significantly – bringing them on par (or even slightly better, depending upon your opinion) with Exchange and Notes.

Two major pain points for GroupWise that are not fixed in this release are the weak Outlook connector and no iPhone support.

Overall, GroupWise customers should be happy with this next version and it should help Novell to retain customers. Now, Novell needs to find a large, credible partner to help them provide a robust hosted GroupWise offering or potentially watch their customer base dwindle away as SaaS e-mail solutions become more viable for enterprises.

Note:  This is a cross-posting from the Le Collaborateur blog.

Another 800 LB Gorilla Jumps In - Cisco Acquiring PostPath

Blogger:  Bill Pray

Microsoft and IBM have long dominated the enterprise messaging market, with Novell and Oracle holding onto a small and loyal set of customers. Google continues to threaten to enter this market but, as my colleague Guy Creese points out, still has a ways to go. This market hasn't changed much in several years, other than it's slow evolution in becoming integrated with hot new technologies like social networking. Now Cisco has jumped into the enterprise messaging market with the announcement of the acquisition of PostPath.

On the surface, Cisco has the size and resources to potentially challenge Microsoft's and IBM's dominance of the enterprise e-mail market. However, like Google, Cisco has a ways to go and displacing Microsoft and IBM as a preferred e-mail solution vendor will be very difficult. 

The e-mail market is established. To win, you have to take market share from Microsoft or IBM.  Their solutions are mature, integrated, and entrenched. Once in place, e-mail solutions tend to stay. 

Cisco's software-as-a-service (SaaS) approach, ability to tie the PostPath solution to their existing collaborative technologies (notably WebEx), and knowledge of enterprise IT give them a shot taking market share. Initially, it is clear that Cisco is targeting Microsoft. 

It won't be easy. Cisco has to answer the questions of why and how for enterprises. Why would an organization want to incur the cost to leave an e-mail solution that works for them today and how would an organization actually migrate to the Cisco solution?   

Both Microsoft and IBM are launching SaaS offerings that include e-mail and are meeting their customers' enterprise messaging needs. Cisco is going to need a strong "Why" story. And if they don't offer an easy "How" answer, then even a good "Why" story might not be enough to persuade many customers to leave their current solution. But, hey, this is technology. Anything can happen.

Note:  This is a cross-posting from the Le Collaborateur blog.

Email Overload: A Little Help From Microsoft

Blogger: Craig Roth

In June, Google announced an "Email addict" feature that was kind of a gag response to people complaining about email overload.  When you press a "take a break" button, the screen turns gray and locked the user out of email until you clicked again.  I had posted my own suggestions of how an email tool could help with email overload at http://knowledgeforward.wordpress.com/2008/06/08/google-lands-crushing-blow-to-email-addiction-with-new-feature/.

I was just turned on to Email Prioritizer from Office Labs which seems like a nice (and real) response to Google’s gag approach with its “Email Addict” feature. It hits on one of the features I wrote about: mail arrival schedules. I’d also recommend that Microsoft add automated scheduling options (hourly, morning/noon/evening, etc) to the manual option provided. This would simulate the cycle of the postman coming to deliver the mail, and leave your brain free outside those times to concentrate.

One nit: the description of the tool on their website annoyingly equated “do not disturb” as allowing you to “work without interruptions”. Unless you have toasts turned on email doesn’t interrupt you. And if that bothers you, the feature is already there to turn them off. I’d say email is a distraction or a temptation, not an interruption. The reason I’m picky is that there is a lot of great research around “interruption science” (for example, see interruptions.net) that mostly can’t help or doesn't apply to this situation.  One needs different approaches and has different goals and metrics when dealing with distractions versus interruptions.

Note: This is a cross-posting from the KnowledgeForward blog