By Marc Potter Sr. Vice President, Business Development Marvin Huffaker Consulting, Inc.

GWAVACon. A place to bask in the glory of GroupWise. Conversation of how our beloved email system dominates the email space, No Microsoft Bigots to squash our euphoria. And although BrainShare is the “Master of the Novell Universe”, GWAVACon holds their own.

I understood there were reports of 500 attendees or so. The best yet for GWAVACon, and a great indication that GroupWise is still gaining customers. I seem to recall from Richard Bliss' Keynote, that there are more GroupWise 7 installs than MS Exchange 2003 installs! That is a very powerful statement. To me it paints a picture that GroupWise is still gaining ground, and we need to spread the word. What better place than Dallas, Texas at GWAVACon.

Our Journey
Some say the reward is in the thrill of the chase. The ride that makes the destination worth while. Well, Marvin and I had plenty of fun on our ride to the GroupWise Mecca. After almost missing getting a rental car (by five minutes) navigating the Dallas tollways (searching for change at every stop), we finally ended up at the wonderful three moon hotel (they were all out of stars). Note to self, make sure to book hotel well in advance and for the right amount of days! Anyway, what doesn't kill you (or get you killed) will make you stronger, and the final prize much sweeter. Day one, we show up to the Marriott, and the GWAVACon people really pulled out all the stops. This place was top shelf. Breakfast was fantastic, coffee was hot and just what we needed on short sleep. The staff was fantastic, the GWAVA folks were on top of their game. We wanted for nothing, coffee was abundant, snacks were always in reach. Hunger was not an option for the GWAVA folks.

As My Laptop Gently Weeps...
a preview of the New GroupWise aka Bonsai
Director of GroupWise Engineering Ken Muir and Product Manager Phil Karren spoke about the New GroupWise version named Bonsai due Fall 2007. This is good stuff people. If you liked the direction of GroupWise 7, (who doesn't), then you will love the next generation. I can't possible cover all the great things Ken and Phil spoke about, but here are a few things I snuggled up to.

Ken made a point to try to demo Bonsai on a live system, and he even said several times, that this is work in process so expect this demo to crash. My first thought was that he was preparing us for the worst, but in reality he was preparing us for one of my favorite new features of crash recovery. Ken wrote a message and left it up during the demo waiting for a crash, but ironically as much as he tried for the system to crash by itself, no luck. Ken had to actually force the system to crash. In the real world, an open email would be lost in a crash if it wasn't previously saved in draft, and who realistically does that. With this new feature, the next time you stay up late crafting that perfect email that says all the right things just before your battery dies on your laptop (yes, I own that one), with Bonsai, you would return to GroupWise with a option to recover your email. If the application crashes, no more lost emails!

Next is the new Address Book Features which will give superior Contact Management. If you liked Outlook's contact management, wait to see Bonsai, it will knock your socks off. Picture that last time you wanted to search for all the emails from a specific person. Contact management, history, and voilà! All the messages from that contact in one place without searching different folders, and filters.

To cap off the highlights:
Busy Search across Organizations and PO's
Subscribe to Calenders
Compose Messages with Word / Open Office
Insert Spreadsheets into messages

Novell in the House
What would a GroupWise conference be without representation from Novell's Brass! John Dragoon, Chief Marketing Officer for Novell, gave the Keynote that in my opinion, reinforced the reasons behind our business of specializing in Novell. After his speech, he took time to take questions from the audience, and he wasn't afraid to address some of the hard ones.

A Star is Born...
Richard Bliss (VP of Marketing, Gwava) stole the show with his keynote about how Novell and GroupWise are making great strides industry wide. Richard took the time to address head on some fallacies about Novell and GroupWise. We all know that Microsoft's marketing machine makes it tough for us at times to keep customers focused on the truth. The simple truth that I came away with is that after all the hype about Microsoft Exchange leading the market, here are some facts.

First, The total ranking of the top three email systems are by user. Exchange on NT is included in these calculations. Exchange for NT is a legacy product.
Next, there are more users on GroupWise 6.5 and 7 than Exchange 2003 and 2007. This implies that more new users are choosing alternate solutions to Exchange.
Further, Lotus Notes (the perceived number 2) gets their user count from installations in incredibly large companies. Lotus Notes is a system that entrenches itself into the infrastructure, and email is actually a very small part of it.

With those things considered, that makes Novell actually the fastest growing email platform today for typical messaging customers.

The Redjuju Connection
Of course the highlight as far as we are concerned was the GroupWise Migration sessions. Bravo! Spectacular! Oh yeah, did I mention that there was this guy giving it with the same name as my company! Well it just so happens it was Marvin Huffaker, our very own El Presidente. The presentation was very well received. A copy of the presentation is available on our website at http://www.redjuju.com/resources/presentations/index.htm

Good Show!
Great people, a great place to meet the GroupWise faithful. GWAVACon is a must see. If you don't believe me, just ask Marvin....

About Marvin Huffaker Consulting
Marvin Huffaker Consulting, Inc. is a company that specializes in Email solutions. We can be contacted Toll Free at 1-888-690-0013. You can find additional contact info here.