The Big EveNt has a new location for 2012

The event formerly know as WMNUG's The Big EveNt has a new home for 2012.  We'll be at Cornerstone University's Bernice Hanson Athletic Center.  It's close to I-96 and right off of Beltline.  Across the street from the Meijer Gardens, there are hotels nearby as well as the entire Celebration Cinema North complex.

We're happy to have found a new home for the event (even though we're now paying for space) and are working on a million details.  A new 501(c)3 is needed, along with a new charter as we pull the event from the rubble of WMNUG and make it stand on it's own as an IT event for all with a broader focus and more user group involvement.

The dates will be in the first week of June, we just need to pick the days and come up with deposit money somehow.

It's soul remains the same - a volunteer-driven communty event for everyone in IT.  The goals are to continue being able to keep the event free for attendees and spread the cost among our wonderful and generous sponsors.  The more sponsors the lower the cost for all, so if you've got a good contact with a company you'd like to see there please let me know!

A formal board and titles haven't been determined yet, but the core group from the previous events remain, and we're adding more folks on as people volunteer to help out.  Nice reprieve for me! 

So stop by every so often to look for updates on the event.  We're skipping this year (again) so that we have enough time to plan a great event - and yes - it does take about a year to pull something like this off.

Novell's acquisition won't affect the event, they'll still be involved, but their new "siblings" may be along for the ride as well.  We couldn't do it without Novell or GWAVA or Dell or any of the other sponsors that have helped us move this forward.

Acquisition is now complete - Novell's website has changed

The deal is done and Novell is now officially a part of the privately owned holding company Attachmate.  More changes will be coming, I expect much of management will change over at some point.  That means BrainShare is a must this year so I can get in front of the new players and let them know they need to support the local user groups and partners at least as well as we have been.

Check out the details at Novell's site and I'll dump more info here as it becomes publicly available.

GW Console - for Linux!

Tay Kratzer has a free tool out, something we've been needing for a while.  A nice little console tool for you GroupWise admins still new to Linux (like me!).  Gert has this link posted on his Twitter and at GWCheck site as well.

You can find the tool at: http://sites.google.com/site/tiarrallc/

I'm hoping to show it off at the Lunch-n-Learn coming up May 13th at my new company's offices.

Also, if you've been hearing FUD (pay attention West MI K-12 districts) about the demise of GroupWise it's just that - FUD.  Some local "partners" have been calling Novell customers saying they (the "partner") haven't heard anything from Novell about the buy out and are certain of GroupWise's imminent demise.

That's not exactly true.  We - as partners and customers - HAVE heard from Novell and Attachmate that both companies are dedicated to the future of GroupWise.  Ascot is still being worked on and is currently looking for beta sites.  The folks doing the calling are looking to improve their bottom-line by getting you to migrate to soemthing else.

So, please, ignore the FUD.  Make your decision to stay or migrate on sound information.  I hate seeing money wasted on unnecessary migrations.  I'm not against change, in fact there's some really cool stuff out there that's new and exciting - and not Novell owned - that I'd love to get my hands on.  But I'm not going to tell you to migrate to it just because I think it's cool.  In fact I won't tell you how to run your IT shop.  It's not my shop and it's not my decision.  I will however offer my opinion if you ask it, and it will be unbiased and based on my decades of experience in the field not on what makes my pocketbook fatter.

I'm done...anyone else need the soapbox?

Blogger Issues

Okay, for some reason I have yet to determine, I cannot respond to your comments.  I'm sorry about that.  But for the person who asked for a link to one of the YouTube videos I mentioned previously try this one out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGM4WrI0OZY

Be advised it's an HD video, so adjust your settings accordingly.

GroupWise client vs. Outlook 2010

Let me qualify this by saying, I've worked in a variety of email clients and email systems over the years.  I've used cc:Mail, GroupWise, Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Evolution, and custom in-house systems to name just a few.  So, it's not with any malice that I'm making this particular post, instead it's out of utter frustration.

Email clients should not be so convoluted as to be counter-intuitive and cause an end-user hours of wasted effort that should be intuitively simple.  So why did the Microsoft programmers decide that users of the Outlook client really only need 1 address book?  Seriously?  Have you kids never worked in or with an administrative support position before?  What Executive Assistant doesn't have more than one address book?

In GroupWise, it's a piece of cake to add an additional address book.  No special contortions to go through to find out how to do it, simply open your address book, click File | New Book and give it a name, viola, all done! And if you're looking for a particular contact, GroupWise (at least in version 8) searches all of your address books, not just one.

Outlook on the other hand has you doing mental gyrations that rival my cat's physical contortions while sleeping.  (Maine Coon kitties are large and manage to get themselves into the weirdest pretzel-y sleeping positions).  The Microsoft documentation isn't much help, instead if you need to create another book in Outlook check out the blog postings that come up in an internet search...they're much more helpful.

It makes me wonder if Microsoft ever consults their non-technical user base.  Those users for whom Office and Outlook were supposedly written. Because, from my viewpoint anyway, it sure doesn't seem like it.  The ribbons features in Office 2010 have generated more support calls than I remember for any previous releases and the complaints I've been hearing from non-technical (i.e. not IT staff) users make it clear that no one consulted them on the changes.

Reader Warning: A bit of a Rant follows

Which may be the big driver behind the moves to OpenOffice and LibreOffice.  There simply aren't that many users that need all of the extra "bulk" that's been added to Microsoft Office lately.  Maybe Microsoft should rethink the various versions of Office...have a "Lite" version for basic users of word processing and spreadsheets, a "Standard" version for office workers who need a bit more graphical capabilities, a "Pro" to be the Standard + Database functionality, and then an "Expert" for the heft that is the current version of Office Pro.  And price it accordingly, because these days it's really hard to beat free licensing.

GroupWise IMAP error of NO LOGIN - fixed!

I was called in to help a customer who's environment is all new to me.  They were having issues with migrating email via IMAP from GroupWise to Google Apps.  They kept getting an authentication error whenever they tried for two sites.  The rest of their post offices went fine, it was just these two (with different admins) having the issue.

After digging around in their system for awhile and not seeing anything that jumped out at me, I was given access to an email account that I could use to test with.  I reset the GroupWise password and tried to telnet in.  (The story about telnetting from XP is another story...).  Each time I could telnet to port 143 okay, but received the following error:

NO LOGIN GroupWise Login Failed

and on occassion I'd get this:

BAD LOGIN

No error number and nothing more descriptive than that message in the GWIA either.  I scratched my head a bit, did much Google and Knowledgebase searching to no avail.  I checked the post office links and found they were using UNC, changed that to IP and still no go.  I unchecked LDAP and checked eDirectory and still no go, so I tried POP3.   Back to the Post Office Links and finally something popped at me, the GWIA was set to being Direct only.  I set it to C/S and Direct and tried POP3 again.  This time POP3 errored out, but with a more useful error that led me to trying out WebAccess.  WebAccess popped a similar error which was quickly resolved by change the eDirectory password for the user and then both POP3 and WebAccess worked.  IMAP however, still refused to work. 

I verified that GWIA didn't have LDAP service enabled, because the POA already had it enabled.  IMAP and POP3 were both enabled on GWIA and not on the POA - just as they should be.  No help there.  The Security Tab in the POA had the "Source" of the password set to LDAP, I toggled it to eDirectory and still no go, so I set it back to LDAP.

Then I ran across a very old TID about Default Class of Service, only it was referring to POP3 not IMAP.  I figured it couldn't hurt to check it out, and there was the final piece of the puzzle.  IMAP had been set to Prevent access.  I switched that to Allow access and tried again.  Happy, happy, joy, joy!  It worked!  I went back through all the previous changes setting them to their original configuration - except for Default Class of Service and now I received that dreaded NO LOGIN erro, but this time it was delayed, as if it was trying to authenticate.  I changed the Post Office Links back from Direct Only to C/S and Direct and things worked again.

So final changes were this:

1. Change Default Class of Service to Allow Access for IMAP4
2. Change Post Office Links to C/S and Direct

Hope this helps someone!

GroupWise Ascot on YouTube

Alex Evans and his crew have been busy posting videos demoing some of the changes being made to GroupWise Ascot (next rev of GroupWise).  I strongly recommend you take a look at them.  Lots of positive changes are being proposed and there are several changes that I know I've been waiting for.

If you've got a few minutes, drop in, take a look, and leave a comment on the videos.  I know Alex and the team would like some more input from heavy GroupWise users and I know any comments would be much appreciated.  I'm really liking what I'm seeing so far and it makes me hopeful that perhaps I can get my new job to switch back to GroupWise...or at least let me make a GroupWise system for me to use.  :)

For those of you in the MidWest that can/could make it, Open Horizons is having it's first event in Indiana.  I'm hoping to bring a similar event with Open Horizons to Michigan before Summer is out.  Stayed tuned as I need to coordinate with Norm, who's busy planning a wedding, starting a business, being a dad, heading up Open Horizons MidWest, and providing support to the Novell community at large.