Thoughts of the day

Can I post this on the GroupWise forums as well as my blog at http://gwbliss.blogspot.com?

This is great information that is useful to other GroupWise administrators struggling to keep GroupWise in place against the Exchange threat.

Absolutely you can. There is more to it than that too. Exchange 2007 is blimping out, it requires more resources and hardware than Exchange 2003. It also MANDATES that you use Windows 2003 64 bit edition, which requires a 64 bit processor.

If your users are complaining of GroupWise stability, you move them to caching mode. That way when you roll a POA to another node, the chance of them noticing it is eliminated. Of course if the people that make the decision to actually perform that change are lax about it, you have bigger problems that you need to deal with.

They are also talking about a hosted Exchange solution, and I can only *begin* to imagine how great that wouldn't be. I put the user experience and ease of use before my wants and desires. And at no point would I ever induce MS Exchange on my users. Of course that's not my decision now, is it?

homey... exchange has changed an awful lot since version 5. I'd take it over groupwise and notes any day of the week.

The war is over and novell lost, bro.

-bp

It's still not secure. Can you still log in as the exadmin service and you read messages. If that still works (and I bet it does) you have a problem. If you hit your mailbox quota, can you still receive email messages?

It goes further than just Exchange though, it's the OS (Windows) and file system (NTFS) it's contained on. Exchange 2003 is better than Exchange 5.5, but for 2007 you need a server farm to run it on. I read the recommended hardware list for it and hit the floor.

I can run GroupWise on anything, and I do mean anything.

Notes is a no-go unless you like to make custom apps, like what Chrysler does.

I've played on both sides of the fence, both Microsoft and Novell, and quite thoroughly.

I can watch the evening news without fear. Why? Because they're going to tell me that there is a new virus that's sweeping the planet. But I know that I'm not going to be putting out a nightmare of a fire the next day because of a bug in some obscure service on one of my Microsoft servers that I couldn't service pack because one of my custom apps would stop working has caused my entire directory services structure to be compromised. There's a mouthful.

And why don't I worry? Because I'm running Netware and eDirectory.

But to each their own. I'm glad you've got a system that works well. You are one of the few I know that has succeeded with Exchange and I attribute that success to your talent, not the maker of the product. :)

Groupwise was great in 1996.

>>In Outlook, what happens if you lose your PST/OST? You are shit out of a mailbox.

What are you on about? Outlook in cached Exchange mode uses a local .ost file. It works the same way as Groupwise - the desktop has a slave copy of the server-based mailbox. You can blow away the desktop and resync. I'm not sure where the 'out of a mailbox' comes from. PST files are never recommended as the primary storage location for Exchange email. It's reasonable for archiving. However, almost half of Outlook users do not connect to an Exchange Server. Those folks do use .pst files, but as we know, legacy internet protocols POP3 and IMAP4 both have ways to keep content on the server.

>>You have multiple methods of access.

Indeed. Most messaging/collaboration/groupware solutions do. Exchange certainly does. I can even call my mailbox on the phone and have my messages read to me.

>>Having Exchange is a great way to screw productivity simply because it's got a big target painted on it.

Really? Even the US army uses it (the biggest Exchange customer). I have not seen a painted target reduce productivity. Please elaborate.

>>When you tie the OS in with the services it provides, you sacrifice the security.

How so? Controlling the entire path may actually increase security. Or are you suggesting the 'all your eggs in one basket' is not secure?

>>When you allow the sort of scripting that is present in Outlook to run on your client

What scripting is that?

>>You can (or at least you could) view anyones email box in Exchange.

Yes, every single messaging and collaboration system has this ability. It is not the default for Exchange and changing it to be so is an auditable event. There are utilities for Groupwise to set proxy access globally, aren't there?

I am not saying Exchange is the best solution for your company. Groupwise may well be the best tool for your situation. I am suggesting your boss would have no reason to fear for his job implementing the most successful and popular messaging and collaboration solution.

It sounds like you feel you have a good system in place and your boss has an itch to scratch. Either way, I think you have a long way to go in securing your position for the status quo. Is there really a good ROI for making the change to Exchange?

When you place all the files in a single database, which is the norm for Outlook (ost/pst), and you suffer corruption in the file what happens to it? You lose data. GroupWise puts the messages as independently compressed and encrypted. If I happen to lose one, I'm not out of a mailbox. When you start archiving files, which removes them from the server, you become vulnerable to losing the message unless you back that file up. Both email systems can archive, but it is less of a necessity to do with GroupWise.

Four to one. That's the approximate message store size of Exchange vs GroupWise. Single instance storage and compression give the ability to not only store more data, but to only have one copy of the message hanging around on the server.

When is the last time you heard about a virus that affected GroupWise? I know that the address books in Outlook have been traditionally been used to re-launch attacks from infected machines to infect other machines. I've watched Exchange SMTP gateways get compromised due to a lack of a patch or just lackluster security. Is that a problem of the product, or the administrator? Could be either. Sometimes applying the patch will prevent applications from working correctly. I've seen that happen more times than I care to remember.

Having the OS and mail services together 'may' increase security because you are in control of the entire security model. May is a good word to use here. When you allow a mail system to seamlessly integrate to the OS that it runs on, which is how Exchange is built, you have an instance where an exploit can allow the server itself to be compromised.

You don't have that ability with GroupWise. You can't really compromise the agents. The services that are run can be run on multiple platforms (Windows, Netware, Linux) and don't require anything from the server other than a place to work (RAM & processor), access to the data (disk storage), and network connectivity. The security is handled separately by eDirectory.

VB scripting, which is used by administrators and sometimes some messages to perform tasks within the Outlook client.

Setting global proxy access? You need to go into a mailbox in order to set proxy rights unless you use a third party utility and that would still require supervisor rights to eDirectory. Plus, you would in the case of GW 7, need it to be a trusted application.

In Exchange, the files are stored on the server and protected by... NTFS permissions? The class I took for Exchange D&I showed how logging in as Exadmin would give you the ability to walk through the mail server and read any messages you like without knowledge of the user.

In GroupWise you would have to reset a users password in order to get into the mailbox, or to grant proxy access at which point you've blown your cover. Also, global proxy access rights will set off a flag during a GWCheck on Contents stating 'user has granted global proxy rights'.

He really does have something to fear. Our culture dictates that email is the lifeblood of the company. Hosted email has limits to storage allocation. You need to pull it from wherever it resides. When it resides out of the office, you are talking about pulling it across the internet. The bandwidth we would use alone would not lend itself well to a hosted solution. There are costs involved with Exchange that aren't immediately apparent. If the true price tag comes back to upper management, and they saw the time and labor involved with a conversion of this scale would end up the idea would be dead before it stood up.

Of course, that'll never really happen because he's mastered the art of misdirection. He'll cover up the costs with paper.

I've crafted virtually every aspect of the GroupWise system of where I work and I would pit it against any other mail solution out there.

I almost forgot something... check out this link: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/05/us_army_linux_integration/ Granted, it's not email related but it says makes a statement.