Dear all,

 

BrainShare day 3 - Wednesday - is always a bit special: party this night at the Delta Center and another keynote. Have a look at what happened this day, at least from my perspective.

 

I missed the first few minutes of the Wednesday keynote, but the first part I've seen was a smashing demo of Nat Friedman, showing of with the new Suse Code 10 and some very cool enhancements. This is a GroupWise bulletin, but this is where we all will go in the (near) future anyway, so let's see:

- Common code base for server, datacenter and workstation versions

- Many cool new graphical options, difficult to explain, but how about a cubical view of the desktop, with on each side a part of your work space. Movie running on one side, spreadsheet on another, and so on. Cool!

- Support for many new devices, for example music players like iPod's, including album covers, developed in cooperation with Real Networks

- OpenOffice 2.0 is strongly enhanced, includes VBA support for Excel macro's, pivot tables, super fonts

- Search wherever you want, in your files, network shares, local and fast, you can bookmark these searches and use them from anywhere

- Very strong media player F-spot, fast scrolling thru 10.000's of pictures, with several selections, like a month view over all images and tagging of images as well

- and much more

 

Novell will of course support Open Office on both Linux and Windows, also because it's now part of the exciting "Novell Open Workgroup Suite", as announced last Monday (see the Monday BS update on www.groupwiser.net/bs2006). The pricing of the workgroup suite (Linux & ZENWorks & GroupWise & OpenOffice) is very competitive, a full solution for $ 110 per user/device and annual $ 75 maintenance or a yearly $ 80 subscription if you prefer this (please: these figures might be different elsewhere, I'm not sales ;-)

 

The more complete Linux AND Netware version of the same suite is $ 150 per user/device and $ 100 maintenance. All very competitive when looking at what M$ offers ;-)

 

Next in the demo was the new GroupWise Single-button Server Migration utility, a very handy tool taking care of the complete migration process from Netware to Linux. Very cool, still in beta, but I will certainly test this soon. More cool demo's of the GroupWise Mobile Server, including the option for wireless deployment of the device client via SMS, and cool announcements from RIM: together with Novell the will offer a free BES server license and 5 client license until October 2006. I'm interested to see how the mobile operators will handle aLL of these upcoming these requests ;-)

 

More demo of the new Migration Utility from Exchange to GroupWise, meanwhile also migrating a Windows server file system to Linux, including all shares and drive letter mappings. Very cool.

 

And during the rest of the keynote we had our own Local Dutch Hero: Leo Hordijk from Newlevel in the Netherlands has been rewarded and became the Certified Professional of the Year! Congratulations Leo: when will you run for the US presidency?

 

Well, today's keynote did stretch a bit longer than usual: it took an extra half hour to show all the cool stuff. Very briefly: a cool identity management demo, very powerful, and ZENWorks demo as well. They should the (future) possibility to block devices like memory sticks and any other storage like iPod's. Very important for security savvy environments, but even better: instead of just simply blocking all devices, with ZENWorks you will be able to allow certain devices from certain people and the data will be stored on an encrypted partition. Very cool stuff, all policy based!

 

Like I mentioned before, the GroupWiseR booth at BrainShare has been a big hit. Many people visited us and we've got responses from all over the world showing interest to either start a GroupWise User Group or a NUI Special Interest Group. Will next year's GroupWiseR EMEA Tour really become a GroupWiseR Global Tour ?

 

At the end of the day we had top clear out the booth. I'd like to thank the many people that have visited us and shown their interest, but especially John Lincoln, Arnaud Delin and Tommy Mikkelsen ( I hope I didn't forget anybody ;-) for helping out with the booth attendance: thanks guys, keep up the good work!

 

So the booth is closed, but there is more to come soon. Make sure to attend the GroupWiseR EMEA Tour events anywhere in Europe, Middle East or Africa, check it out at www.groupwiser.net/emea-tour

Also make sure to mark your calendar for our big multi-day event in October 1-4, 2006 in Munich, Germany, more detailed information will soon be available at www.groupwisesummit.net.

 

Kindest regards,

 

Erno de Korte