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By Cynthia Morgan
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which goes with this article, entitled:
Conversation Place
GroupWise 5, Novell's client/server offering set to ship later this year, could be a case of good software, bad timing. The product has taken a while, and that may have given rivals Lotus and Microsoft time to catch up.
An impressive groupware/e-mail/task management environment, GroupWise 5 offers everything from SoftSolutions document routing to Web access, all controlled from a user's universal inbox. Tasks, calendaring, shared document folders, even a drag-and-drop workflow utility from FileNet share this space. Moreover, GroupWise 5 runs on Windows, NetWare and UNIX servers-Microsoft Exchange doesn't-and its collaborative computing capabilities appear to be ahead of those in the base products of either Notes or Exchange.
But GroupWise has a long way to go before it can reach Notes' 15 million-plus user base-it now has about 6 million seats-or match what Exchange gained when Microsoft added it to Win95 and NT. The NetWare associations, low-key promotion and lack of third-party extensions won't help either. And a large percentage of GroupWise's target market, NetWare servers, still run NetWare 3.x; it needs NetWare 4.0.
The universal inbox is no longer a new idea; Notes 4.0 comes with one and Exchange goes universal in Microsoft's new desktop information manager, Out-look. Indeed, Outlook overcomes one of the biggest objections to Exchange: the lack of a good contact management/scheduling package.
Finally, despite the new ability to launch a URL directly from the in-box, Novell may have trouble positioning GroupWise 5 for the booming Internet/intranet market. Notes' Web repackaging includes the coming Domino Web server and commerce options, and Microsoft recently released Catapult, the proxy server complement to its Internet Information Server.
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