Happy 30th Birthday “GroupWise”

In 1989 I was working for a small law firm in Englewood, Colorado.  The attorneys had had an “Apple Talk” network for about 6 months, because they wanted to have email between themselves.  Unfortunately, every time they got an email notification, the entire network crashed.  As you might have realized, Apple is no longer in the networking business 😉 .

The legal secretaries had a Wang OIS system with a whopping 30 MB hard drive, and even with only 5 attorneys and 16 total employees, we were struggling daily to keep enough hard drive space.  We were constantly archiving files to floppy disks to try to keep enough space to continue working.  A consulting company came in and told us that we could have this “NetWare network with WordPerfect” and replace that Wang system once and for all – oh, and it had email.  And a 320 MB hard drive plus a memory card with 8 MB of memory.  That would last use forever!  Or maybe a year or two – but I digress.

Just a few months before, on August 8, 1988, WordPerfect Corporation had come out with a new product that had a menu system, calendar, email, text editor (maybe something else?), and renamed it from Library 1.0 to WordPerfect Office 2.0.  It, in combination with WordPerfect 5.0 (the WordProcessor) and DataPerfect 2.0, would solve all of our computing problems. What we now know as GroupWise, albeit by another name, was born.  It really did solve all of our problems for many years.  So much so that that law firm didn’t even bother to upgrade to Windows until about 1998.  Who needed Windows when you could be typing in a WordPerfect document, press a couple of keystrokes to pop to DataPerfect, look up an address, and have that address populated into the address block of a letter.  Or be in the middle of composing a document, have an email arrive, and swap out to your email client, read the email, reply, and then pop right back to where you left off in WordPerfect.

My “GroupWise” experience is almost as old as the product itself!  And while I wasn’t there in 1988, I did indeed start with WordPerfect Office 2.0, the first iteration of GroupWise.  In 1994 I was on the WordPerfect Office 4.0b beta when Novell, Inc. bought WordPerfect Corporation.  Many of us on the beta were slightly annoyed when a beta drop seemed to include absolutely nothing but a dozen or so 3-1/2″ floppies with the only noticeable change being all of the splash screens and branding changing to “Symmetry”, and then smirks when about 10 days later we had another drop named “GroupWise 4.1”.  Novell had neglected to check to see if the name “Symmetry” was trademarked before making all of the branding changes to the product.

My GroupWise (WordPerfect Office 2.0) anniversary won’t be for about 6 months or so.  But I can say that WordPerfect Office 2.0 changed my life.  Not that many people can say that about a 1980s software!

Happy birthday GroupWise!

BrainShare Attendees! Come and see us.

Paul Lamontagne and I are here in Salt Lake City.  We will be speaking at BrainShare, and have a special offer for BrainShare attendees.  There are a limited number of our GroupWise 2014 Upgrade Guides in the Novell Book Store.

Bonus Offer with the purchase of either:

 

The Caledonia Upgrade Guide for GroupWise 2014 – Upgrading/Migrating to New Server (including NetWare)

The Caledonia Upgrade Guide for GroupWise 2014 – Upgrading in-Place on Linux or Windows

 

Find Danita and Paul during the conference, have them BOTH sign your book and receive a free one month Membership to The Caledonia Power Administrator Resource members’ site.

 

Once both have signed your book either Danita or Paul will hand you a coupon code good for a one month Free Trial at The Caledonia Power Administrator Resource members site.

 

http://www.caledonia.net/ for more information

https://postie.caledonia.net/store/ to Order your Subscription

Find us at the Salt Palace on Twitter Danita  @GWGoddess Paul @GroupWiseGuy

Both Paul and Danita will be at Squatters on Monday evening for the Brew Fest (Danita has some other obligations that night too, so she’ll be there only at the beginning).

Additionally, here are the session times where you can be sure to find us.

 

Danita:

Knowledge Partner/Support Forums Booth – whenever she’s not somewhere else :-_

TUT5124 – Upgrading to GroupWise 2014: Tips, Tricks and Best Practices –

 

Paul:

TUT4946 – Upgrading and Deploying the GroupWise 2014 Windows Client – 

TUT5124 – Upgrading to GroupWise 2014: Tips, Tricks and Best Practices –

ATT8358 – Streaming Virtualized Applications using ZENworks Application Virtualization

ATT8357 – Deploy the ZENworks Adaptive Agent using Network Discovery

 

 

 

What’s New – July, 2014

 

July was a pretty slow month, as Danita went on vacation.  Here’s what’s been happening since our last update:

[toc]

New Wiki Content

New Webinar Content

  • No Caledonia Webinar in July, but we participated in a GroupWise and Friends webinar – http://blog.netmail.com/upgrading-groupwise-clients

 

New How-To Video Content

Q&A

Members Log Analysis

Don’t forget one of the top benefits of your membership.  Upload your logs to us monthly (any day you choose, but only once a month please, unless we ask for follow-up).  Go upload your logs now here.

Other GroupWise News of Interest

 

What’s New – June, 2014

Here’s what’s been happening since our last update:

[toc]

New Wiki Content

New Webinar Content

  • 2014-06-11 Advanced WebAccess Configuration

 

New How-To Video Content

Q&A

Members Log Analysis

Don’t forget one of the top benefits of your membership.  Upload your logs to us monthly (any day you choose, but only once a month please, unless we ask for follow-up).  Go upload your logs now here.

Other GroupWise News of Interest

 

What’s New – May, 2014

Here’s what’s been happening since our last update:

[toc]

New Wiki Content

New Webinar Content

  • No Member Webinar in May

 

New How-To Video Content

Q&A

 

Members Log Analysis

Don’t forget one of the top benefits of your membership.  Upload your logs to us monthly (any day you choose, but only once a month please, unless we ask for follow-up).  Go upload your logs now here.

Other GroupWise News of Interest

GroupWise 2014: Getting there

GroupWise 2014 has been out for about 6 weeks now, and we’ve been contacted by many customers asking about our experiences, and how they can most effectively get from where they are (often still on NetWare) to where they want to be with GroupWise 2014.

 

Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici, / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici, / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 

We’d like to help you cut through the maze of options, information, questions and concerns about your upgrade to GroupWise 2014.  Not only have we done hundreds of GroupWise upgrades over the course of our careers, we’re right in the trenches with GroupWise 2014.  Here are a few ways we can assist with your migration/upgrade.

The Caledonia Upgrade Guide for GroupWise 2014

Can you believe that we’ve been writing upgrade guides since GroupWise 6.0?  These guides are designed to give a confident GroupWise administrator step-by-step instructions on how to implement new GroupWise versions.  We not only give you a step-by-step upgrade guide, but also provide you with insight all along the way so that you can understand what has changed, why, and how to deal with the new changes without headache.  These guides are available for in-place upgrades, moving from one server to another (including moving from NetWare), in both PDF and print versions.  Click Here to find out more about these guides.

The Caledonia GroupWise Power Administrators Resource

While we believe our upgrade guides are very thorough, we also realize that sometimes folks just need a bit more help, or simply want to know all they can about their GroupWise system.  To better serve those customers, we have created the Caledonia GroupWise Power Administrators Resource. This membership site will give you benefits beyond our upgrade guides.  Any administrator who joins with at least a quarterly membership, will receive the PDF guides for free (monthly members will receive the guides when their second monthly payment has been made).  Not only are our upgrade guides included, but also all the other PDF versions of books with Danita Zanrè as author or co-author.  That includes the GroupWise Mobility Service Guide, Moving GroupWise, and any other books she writes in the future.  Additionally, members receive monthly members only webinars, replays of all earlier webinars, video how-tos, private wiki and more.  If you are contemplating a GroupWise 2014 upgrade, and feel like you could benefit from some additional assistance, this is the place to be.  Click Here to check it all out.

Personalized GroupWise Consulting

We also provide comprehensive consulting to get you where you want to go.  Last year, we did over 50 GroupWise upgrades, and all but one were remote.  Here’s a little link to our Facebook album that shows some of the locations we “visited” (you need not have a Facebook account to see these pictures.  We can provide remote consulting through your own VPN or remote access solution, or our own online methods.  Thus, even if you have no reliable remote access solution, we’ll make it happen!

What types of services do we provide?  Other than procuring your hardware and licenses, we will do your GroupWise upgrade from start to finish (we’ve even assisted folks with putting the DVD in a new physical server and walking through an installation until we could get to the point to bind an IP address and get remote access), or any part that you choose.  You might ask that we look over your plan and give you recommendations.  You might choose to have a thorough health-check of your current system before you jump in.  You might want us to come in after you have installed your server and are ready for the final GroupWise upgrade (and/or migration).  No GroupWise consulting job is too small or too large.  You do what you are comfortable with, and we’ll do the rest.  And, if you are a member of the Caledonia GroupWise Power Administrators Resource, our consulting rates will be discounted 15% for you!

 

We’d love to “get you there”.  Just click our “Contact Us” link on the menu, and we’ll get the conversation started!

Happy GroupWising!

danitasigblue

Importing Active Directory Users with Dots in Names

If you are intending to import GroupWise users from Active Directory, and those users have dots in their names (for example, danita.zanre), you will have a problem.  A dot is not an allowed GroupWise userid, and the import procedure through the new Administration Console will to allow for this.

Fear not!  My friend Morris has created a little utility that can assist.  You can download it here –  AD-GWImport

[UPDATE}

Note that the Readme lists a Linux version, but it is not available yet for Linux – only for Windows!

As always, let us know if we can assist with your upgrade!

danitasigblue

What’s New – April, 2014

Here’s what’s been happening since our last update:

[toc]

New Wiki Content

 

New Webinar Content

New How-To Video Content

Q&A

Members Log Analysis

Don’t forget one of the top benefits of your membership.  Upload your logs to us monthly (any day you choose, but only once a month please, unless we ask for follow-up).  Go upload your logs now here.

Other GroupWise News of Interest

 

When an error’s not an error – GroupWise 2014 Notes

GroupWise 2014 upgrades are in full swing.  I’ve personally been involved in four already, and the Novell forums are starting to see some action regarding GroupWise 2014.  Of course, in the forums that means we are seeing problem reports, and a lot of simple confusion as to how the new upgrade and administration works.  Folks rarely pop over to forums.novell.com just to say “I upgraded and it was awesome”.  By the way, if you upgrade and it’s awesome, I’d recommend that you DO go to forums.novell.com and tell the folks there just that!  While we all know that support forums usually contain mostly gripes, complaints and problems, it’s nice to see the successes too!

Anyway, today’s topic is error messages that aren’t really errors, and how not to panic 🙂 .  I’ll specifically show you two error messages that you may see that really don’t mean what they seem to mean!

inigo_montoya

 

iManager Plugin Java.net Error

iManager Plugin Error

When you first install the iManager Plugin, there is no prompt or indication that it needs configuration.  Thus, the first time you attempt to use it, you get a very elusive error that leads you to believe something is terribly wrong.  Just click the “GroupWise Configuration” tab to set up the plugin!

The Object is in the Pending Operation State

Occasionally you will click “save” on an operation and IMMEDIATELY see this error message:

Pending Operation State

Pending Operation State

The confusion arises when this happens immediately after you save a change.  It can deceive you into thinking that your change was not saved, when in fact this error is simply telling you that your change WAS saved, and now you cannot make new changes until the prior changes have been completed.  You will probably never see this on a single PO system, but if you are centrally managing objects from the primary domain  admin service, you will frequently see this when modifying an object on a secondary domain.

I hope this will help some of you feel more in control when you see these new error messages and wonder what you might have done wrong!  The answer is probably “nothing”!

Happy GroupWising

 

danitasigblue

The installation routine crashed when I upgraded a domain! I lived to tell the tale.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

This week I ran into an interesting situation attempting to upgrade a secondary domain to GroupWise 2014.  Well, in reality I had no problem upgrading the domain.  It upgraded perfectly.  I simply could not get the admin service to configure and launch.  We actually ran the system this way for a few days, with the domain and post office upgraded, and users happily accessing the post office with the GroupWise 2014 client and GroupWise 2014 WebAccess while I tried to ferret out the issue (thanks to some smart people at Novell!)  I could manage the system just fine from the primary domain, so I just took a deep breath and patiently waited for Novell to figure out what was up.  What was clear was that each time I would click “finish” on the installation/upgrade screen, the admin service would crash and create a core file, but we were getting no useful information in any logs.

If you’ve read our Upgrade Guide for GroupWise 2014, we mention a few times that the admin service seems very particular about having everything “just so” in your GroupWise system.  In our “moving” guide for GroupWise 2014, we have you edit the path to the domain in ConsoleOne before you move the domain to the new server.  On an in-place upgrade (such as the one I was working on), one would assume there would be nothing to modify.  However, it seems I ran up against an issue where the domain location in the wpdomain.db file was not the same location in my gwha.conf file.  The wpdomain.db file has values for both UNC and Linux settings.  My Linux setting was set to:

/mnt/lochgelly/GRPWISE/domains/caledoni

The mta file for my domain listed in the gwha.conf pointed to

/media/nss/GRPWISE/domains/caledoni

If you’ve been around here awhile, you will recall a blog post I wrote on how to configure ConsoleOne to allow you to manage GroupWise on Linux properly both from a Windows workstation, and from ConsoleOne directly on Linux.  In this particular instance, this is why the upgrade was failing.  To refresh your memory on why you might end up with paths similar to the above, check it out here:

Administering Your Linux GroupWise Domain from Linux and Windows

It was easy enough to fix.  I reinstalled the ConsoleOne snapins on my Linux server (they get removed during the GroupWise 2014 installation), edited the location of the domain to the true path, and not the mount point path, and reran the upgrade procedure.

Note, I still had an odd issue with a blank error message popping up at the end of the upgrade configuration process, and the admin service would not restart automatically.  Since there were no errors in the admin service log, and the service had not crashed, I simply restarted the service manually, and voilà!  Everything was configured properly.

Hopefully this will help someone else out there from getting “stuck” in this process!

danitasigblue