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01.29.09
Personal Productivity Functions For Enterprises By GroupWise 8
 By Bill Ives
I have visited Novell and written about they use wikis within their own enterprise (see Making Wikis Work at Novell) So I was interested when they approached me about a new product in the enterprise 2.0 space.
I spoke with Wendy Steinle - Director of Product Marketing at Novell, Alex Evans - Product Manager, Groupwise, and Travis Grandpre - Product Marketing Manager about GroupWise® 8, their cross-platform e-mail and calendaring solution. I have With support for Windows, Linux, Mac, and the Web, GroupWise 8 gives customers a personal productivity solution at a low total cost of ownership. It offers a customizable dashboard that allows users to interact with traditional tools such as e-mail, calendar, contacts and task lists, as well as leverage popular Web 2.0-enabled team workspaces, blogs, RSS feeds and applications.
People are still wedded to email for many communication and collaboration functions. GroupWise 8 provides a means to connect traditional tools such as email with enterprise 2.0 applications. It allows you to have access to multiple applications through a single interface. It looks at four main aspects of personal productivity: time management, task management, contact management, and interaction with enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools. These are all exposed through the Home Views as seen in the screen shot below.
GroupWise 8 acts like a mashup but in a Windows, Linux, or Mac client. You can customize the interface with multiple columns to include as much or as little as you want. As we discussed, this is a completely different approach than I find on my Mac desktop where email, calendaring, and contact management are all in separate applications that are opened in individual windows. The Novell team pointed out that going back and forth between all these separate windows can result in confusion and extra time finding the right app. I would not disagree based on my own experience. The addition of web panels brings in the Web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 world. You can maximize or minimize each of the panels within the desktop by double clicking on the header. You can also create multiple home views - each customized for maximum productivity for different projects, roles, etc. (e.g. a home view for primary job responsibility, a home view for a particular trip or project, a home view for personal needs, etc.).
The calendar function allows you to reach outside the enterprise to check the calendars of anyone operating a calendar open to "busy checking." Novell uses the Apple iCal protocol for this and it works with Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, and Google gmail but ironically not iCal at this point. Alex mentioned that the Danish government recently spent about $800,000 (US) to "busy check" enable across their various calendar applications and reported that this saved them cost savings on over $10,000,000 (US). This feature is now available out of the box with Groupwise 8. See screen shot below.
Continue reading article this article.
About the Author:
Dr. Bill Ives is an independent consultant and writer who has worked with Fortune 100 companies in business uses of emerging technologies for over 20 years. For several years he led the Knowledge Management Practice for a large consulting firm.. Now he primarily helps companies with their business blogs. He is also the VP of Social Media and blogger for TVissimo, a new TV schedule search engine. Prior to consulting, Dr. Ives was a Research Associate at Harvard University exploring the effects of media on cognition. He obtained his Ph. D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Toronto. Bill can be reached at his blog: Portals and KM. He also writes for the FastForward blog and the AppGap blog.
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