Yesterday two separate events made me think to myself “GroupWise is broken!”  Of course GroupWise wasn’t broken either time, but it made me chuckle, because as administrators and consultants we’ve all heard this from users at one time or another, and just shook our heads when it was realized that it was “User Error” pure and simple.  While normally I don’t go bragging about how dumb I’ve been, one of the issues could probably be experienced by any iPhone user in a hurry, so I thought I’d best document it here (and get ready for the snickering to come!).

Yesterday morning, in a daze that was precipitated by it being first thing in the morning and no coffee yet, I reached for my iPhone to check the mail that had delivered overnight.  I had one particular message open and could not read the attachment.  Now, if you are an iPhone user, you know that some attachments received on the iPhone simply are not properly visible (like messages “forwarded as attachment” or other document types like WordPerfect or OpenOffice).  Since I could not read the attachment, my next step was to go to GW Mail and look at the message in WebAccess.  I punched the little round “Home” button at the bottom center of the iPhone to get back to the Springboard, opened GW Mail, and to my utter dismay, the message was not there!  Indeed, the next message in the list, which I had not read, was marked open, and the message I was looking for was just GONE.  So, my first inclination was that somehow GroupWise was “mixing up messages” and also and messing with my caffeine starved brain.

Those of you with an iPhone will be aware that when you are reading a message in portrait mode, the soft “Delete” button is right above the hard “Home” button on the iPhone.  After my shock of “GroupWise being broken” so early in the morning, I did a little bit of testing and found that it is actually not that difficult to delete a message that is open in the Mail app while pressing the Home button if you are in a hurry, have big fingers, or are just clumsy (all of the above describing me!).  I’ve had an iPhone for 2 years now, and my guess is that I’ve deleted more than one message in this manner.  Just not one that I was purposefully looking for that very next moment.  The way to actively prevent this of course is to click the “folder” button at the top left of the iPhone (labeled Inbox if that’s the folder you are in) to return to the message list before pressing that Home button.  Or just being a lot more careful about how you rush through your day.  Slowing down is probably good for all of us!

The second incident yesterday that had me wondering why GroupWise had eaten my message, was even more mysterious.  I received an email that I wanted to convert to an appointment.  I’ve used “change to” so many times I could do it in my sleep (or so I thought).  So, I right-clicked on the message in the list, chose “change to” and the message disappeared.  I scoured the trash.  I did a full text search for something I knew was in the message.  Nothing.  So I did a right-click on another message just to look, and “archive” was right above “change to”.  Guess where my message was??

So, the moral of the story here is that we’re all “users” at one time or another.  No matter how long we’ve used GroupWise, no matter how much we think we know about the program, stuff happens.  Actually it’s probably more likely that those of us who really “do know what we’re doing” on most days are more likely to assume that “GroupWise is broken” than your average user, because we never make mistakes 🙂

This week is bound to get better!

Happy GroupWising.

Danita