I recently spoke with Wendy Steinle – Director of Product Marketing at Novell, Alex Evans – Product Manager, Groupwise, and Travis Grandpre – Product Marketing Manager about GroupWise® 8, Novell’s cross-platform e-mail and calendaring solution. I have written about how Novell uses wikis within their own enterprise (seeMaking Wikis Work at Novell) and I was interested to learn more about their products in this space. With support for Windows, Linux, Mac, and the Web, GroupWise 8 gives customers a personal productivity solution at a low total cost of ownership. It offers a customizable dashboard that allows users to interact with traditional tools such as e-mail, calendar, contacts and task lists, as well as leverage popular Web 2.0-enabled team workspaces, blogs, RSS feeds and applications.

People are still wedded to email for many communication and collaboration functions. GroupWise 8 provides a means to connect traditional tools such as email with enterprise 2.0 applications. It allows you to have access to multiple applications through a single interface.  It looks at four main aspects of personal productivity: time management, task management, contact management, and interaction with enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools. These are all exposed through the Home Views as seen in the screen shot below.

GroupWise 8 acts like a mashup but in a Windows, Linux, or Mac client.  You can customize the interface with multiple columns to include as much or as little as you want.  As we discussed, this is a completely different approach than I find on my Mac desktop where email, calendaring, and contact management are all in separate applications that are opened in individual windows. The Novell team pointed out that going back and forth between all these separate windows can result in confusion and extra time finding the right app. I would not disagree based on my own experience.  The addition of web panels brings in the Web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 world.  You can maximize or minimize each of the panels within the desktop by double clicking on the header. You can also create multiple home views – each customized for maximum productivity for different projects, roles, etc. (e.g. a home view for primary job responsibility, a home view for a particular trip or project, a home view for personal needs, etc.). 

The calendar function allows you to reach outside the enterprise to check the calendars of anyone operating a calendar open to “busy checking.” Novell uses the Apple iCal protocol for this and it works with Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, and Google gmail but ironically not iCal at this point. Alex mentioned that the Danish government recently spent about $800,000 (US) to “busy check” enable across their various calendar applications and reported that this saved them cost savings on over $10,000,000 (US). This feature is now available out of the box with Groupwise 8. See screen shot below.

The GroupWise 8 task management feature allows you to drag and drop items from email into a personal task management function. You can then create parent and child relationships between tasks and have multiple layer hierarchies.  This capability will integrate with tools such as Microsoft project and many of the enterprise 2.0 project management tools that have open APIs. You can also launch these tools within the GroupWise 8 workspace.  It also works with Novell’s own Teaming + Conferencing application that includes blogs and wikis. 

The contact management allows users to embed relevant information like maps, photos and personal details into the contact file, providing a single location to help track, manage and build their business relationships. It also allows you to browse by photos, a nice feature. And, within a contact, you can see all communications with that person and add your own notes so your discussion history and next steps are at your fingertips.  You can also search across components within the suite. See the screen shot below. 

GroupWise 8 supports hundreds of mobile devices, including iPhone, BlackBerry and Palm.  See the Novell site on GroupWise for more details. It looks like a very useful package that serves as a connection between old school communication and collaboration tools and enterprise 2.0