Novell South Africa has announced the immediate local availability of the next instalment in its popular GroupWise 7 collaboration server.
Bundled with a new set of migration tools and a complimentary licence for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (SLES 9), Novell believes this release could well enable it to garner additional market share in the collaboration server space, which is currently dominated by Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes.
"Our timing for the release of GroupWise 7 couldn`t be better," says Allison Singh, systems engineer at Novell South Africa, "since many customers are at a point where they are weighing up their options in terms of the future path they will follow from a collaboration perspective.
"With a compelling feature set the market has been asking for, a bundled licence for a SUSE Linux server and a truly rock-solid set of migration tools, those customers feeling disillusioned with their current solutions are guaranteed an easy transition to Novell GroupWise 7 and access to the functionality they would normally have had to break their budgets on," he says.
Singh says Novell`s primary motivation behind bundling a SLES 9 licence with GroupWise 7 is that one of the barriers to migration has classically been the need to purchase an additional operating system licence, which is used for the server that will run the new collaboration server.
"We`ve solved this problem by giving our customers a free licence for SLES," he says. "This not only reduces the costs they would normally incur, but makes their lives substantially more simple. They also get a taste of the enterprise readiness of Linux and the value this platform can bring to their IT environment."
Taking a closer look at the feature set GroupWise 7 boasts, the new version offers several updates, with new features designed to increase end-user productivity through integrated e-mail and instant messaging.
The company has also taken a hard-line with security and interoperability, guaranteeing customers a lower total cost of ownership through a more diligent approach to user permissions. The new release also brings with it the ability to utilise GroupWise with existing collaboration suite client software like Microsoft Outlook, as well as the ability to install GroupWise 7 on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Novell`s Open Enterprise Server or Microsoft`s Windows Server 2003.
"Overall, we believe we have a truly compelling value proposition with GroupWise 7 and through the local Linux ecosystem we`ve spent the past two years building in SA, have the right level of skills to assist customers through this transition.
"We are therefore convinced that customers will see that going GroupWise 7 is the first step in reducing their IT costs and building a more open and standards-based IT environment," Singh concludes.
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