Letter to the Editor

By Kari Woolf: Novell Representative

To the Editor,

Several articles have appeared in The Santa Clara concerning the university's plans to migrate from Novell GroupWise to Gmail. As the marketing manager for GroupWise, I'd like to provide some facts that should be considered in the journalistic analysis.

First, Santa Clara is running the GroupWise 7 client. This client was released in 2005 and obviously lacks the user interface enhancements, mobile device support and other new features of more recent versions, including GroupWise 2012. I won't question the decisions of the university's information technology department, but Santa Clara users should recognize that they are not leveraging anything close to present-day GroupWise capabilities.

More importantly, customers migrating to Gmail from any other e-mail solution often encounter unanticipated "gotchas." The issues it presents in areas like uptime, security and data governance remain pressing. In addition, Gmail does not deliver important end-user features like message retraction and tracking, offline mode, personal e-mail archiving, freedom from limits on mailbox and attachment size and more.

There's much more to GroupWise than The Santa Clara's coverage would indicate. I invite interested readers to get the facts.