Stump the GroupWise Gurus Contest!

Morris the Magnificent (March 12, 2010)

This contest is now closed. But if you still have questions about GroupWise that you want answered, here’s another chance to ask. Back by popular demand, the second installment in our GroupWise Guru Series... introducing, Morris the Magnificent!

Note: All unanswered GroupWise questions for our gurus have been posted on our new Morris the Magnificent Blog.

Morris the Magnificent (November 10, 2009)

Hello all, It's a been a while since I had time to post, thank a great travel schedule and a fun ol' case of the piggy flu. So a few answers before we pick a winner here:

Jon, When a user sends a deferred message the message file is written to the offiles directory structure and an entry is added to the ngwdfr.db file. When you delete a user that entry should get cleaned up but I've never tested it myself, and have see the file get corrupt and cause issues many times that result in mail getting delivered that shouldn't be.

Hoboat, This is a lovely new design feature of GroupWise. To see how it is meant to work, open an message and highlight a portion of the message. Now click forward. Notice that only the highlighted part is included. This is great if you are only trying to forward part of a message. Of course if you work like I do and highlight as you read so you can see it better, well that ends up a lot of fun when you accidentally only send the last couple of sentences.

Richard, Try searching the hard drive for a gwxl2007.xla file and remove it. That is a file that the install adds to integrate GW with Excel. If you are having problems my guess would be that it is due to the presence of that particular file, since there shouldn't be anything else it is changing in regards to Excel.

Transporter, Unfortunately GroupWise doesn't have the ability to create rules for messages that affect the system as a whole. You could either use a third party tool to push out a rule to everyone. Or you could use the Subject Purge feature of GWCheck, but that one gets really dangerous and I wouldn't recommend it.

Bronken, Jon (October 29, 2009)

If a GroupWise user sends a deferred mail and then the user is fired or quits (hence the account is deleted)...is the mail still delivered?

hoboat (October 27, 2009)

In GW8, frequently when I forward an email, only the first line or so forwards. The rest of the text is blank. Why?

Jones, Richard (October 26, 2009)

When installing Groupwise 8 (after running the CleanIt utility to properly remove GroupWise 7), the Microsoft "Text Import Wizard" no longer pops up automatically for csv files. The behavior presents itself if GroupWise is installed with Office Integrations, and then they are turned off - and also presents itself if it was installed with an .mst telling the msi to NOT install integrations. I cannot seem to get this wizard to come back up without running it manually (Excel | Data | Text to Columns). I suppose a complete uninstall of Office and reinstall may accomplish what I need, but I'm hoping the GroupWise Gurus will have a solution.

Transporter (October 19, 2009)

Can you create a rule to delete a specific email from every mail box in the GroupWise system after 2 weeks?

Morris the Magnificent (October 17, 2009)

putreesha,

We'd need to know more about what is going on with that message before I could really tell you what is happening. Initial steps are to see if it's a user, machine or whole system issue. To do that have the user log in on another machine and test sending. Does the problem go away? If it does you have a client issue on the machine and usually if you uninstall office then GroupWise, then reinstall office put on it's patches then install GroupWise it will clear up.

Assuming not, you could have a user or system issue. So log in to GroupWise as yourself on the same machine that the broken message was sent from and send the same message from a different user? Is it broken? If not you have a user issue (which I kind of doubt will be the case) All I can think of to try in that case is maybe a reset client options (Google that and you find how and the drawbacks of doing it)

If it is still broken you most likely have a system wide issue. To work on that, the first thing you'd want to figure out is where is that message dying? So the best place to start is to see what the MIME of the message looks like when the message is leaving your system.

My favorite way to do that is to set my GWIA send threads to 0 in ConsoleOne on the SMTP/MIME Settings Tab of the GWIA object. In theory you aren't supposed to have to restart GWIA for that to take effect these days, but you may want to do so to be safe.

Once this is done send out a test message. You'll find the MIME encoded version of that message in the <domain>/wpgate/gwia/send folder. All messages will be building up in there so you may have to go through a few of them until you find the right one. The good news is they are plain text so you'll be able to find it easily. Once you have that you simply have to look at it to see if you have the PowerPoint attachment.

If it's there, the odds are that the issue is at the remote end or at an email filter that you have in front of your system

I hope this gets you on the right path.

The Mentor (October 16, 2009)

Neossian, We actually did some custom work for a customer who had to do a massive name change project and wrote some code to accomplish that task for them, so of course one option is to contract us to help you with that project. Now if you want to get creative to do something on your own, you could use the old API Gateway to export all the users, use a script of some sort to modify the output file to concatenate all the names and change it to an OPERATION=RENAME command and then feed that back into that gateway. Personally I haven't tried that gateway with GW8 (If anyone out there is still using it with 8 I'd love to hear how it works), though there's no reason that I know of that it shouldn't work. I have used it with the early versions of GW7 and it worked fine. But of course doing that is risky in that the gateway is no longer supported by Novell.

The Mentor (October 16, 2009)

Yasean: The unfortunate reality and reason that we occasionally have to point to third party vendors are that sometimes the solutions we all would like simply don't exist in the product. The goods new is that there are vendors out there who write plugins that allow you to turn GroupWise into what you need. For example the formativ framework from Advansys lets you do all kinds of crazy things with the GW client. So if there is a workaround, a fix, or just the "right way" to do something the odds are that a solution will be found between all of us "Gurus" (and I include our all of our GW peers who are reading this blog in that statement), but sometimes the answer will simply have to be "Wow that's a great idea, hopefully Novell will listen and implement or fix it."

The Geek (October 15, 2009)

To thespud (October 14, 2009) GroupWise is great. GW can show me a multi-user view for 1 day only. Can it show (or even create a view) to show a mullti-user in week and month view? Thanks.

Here is an easy 3-step process to getting that done. 1. Go here. 2. Download, install & configure (<10mins) 3. You can now view as many users you would like with a plethora of views available. This even gives things like blogging & podcasting to name a couple as a bonus. The Geek

Khan, Yasean (October 15, 2009)

Firstly It is wonderful that you guys are giving us this opportunity to try and get some answers to practical problems. I disagree that this is a solution as the link you sent me to for Riva (which for a University is around the 800k mark for costing, hence not viable). Beside that being a question posed at tackling the issue within GroupWise. Why pay that much for something as simple as creating system wide categories. It also does not tackle the second question which was posed at sharing your GroupWise Folders. If you can share the view (which does not always stick), how do you get that working for multiple shared folders together with those views? Step by step would be awesome. I should be more specfic about an example: 1. You have 3 personal folders : Folder 1, 2 and 3 respectively. 2. You create a view in a fourth folder using panels of folder 1,2 and 3. (combination of emails,tasks, discussion threads/rss feeds. 3. You want to share this setup with your team. I will also like create a 3rd question based on categories and proxy. How can you get your personal categories to work with proxy account and still keep the changes. (when you go back, they reset to what they were.) Thank you for your time, Gurus! Regards, Yasean

thespud (October 14, 2009)

GroupWise is great. GW can show me a multi-user view for 1 day only. Can it show (or even create a view) to show a mullti-user in week and month view? Thanks.

Neossian (October 14, 2009)

@The Mentor - Changing to Firstname.Lastname gives us in excess of 10k conflicts and some users will STILL have spaces because their last or first name contains spaces. Any ideas on updating the preferred name?

sjrtd-TG (October 14, 2009)

Thanks Mentor. Too bad you couldn't give me what I wanted to hear. Do you know of 3rd party add-ins that would give us the ability to enter our flex schedules? We also need to automate the on-call schedules for various departments so the feature would be really cool.

putreesha (October 14, 2009)

I have an issue where a user can't email powerpoint attachments to users outside of our college. She is using Office 2003 with the Office Compatibility pack for Office 2007 - she can't upgrade to Office 2007 because she can't upgrade her Adobe 7 and Adobe 7 doesn't work with Office 2007. I installed the compability pack so she can work with the Office 2007 documents that come her way from people outside the college. The Groupwise client is version 8, but when I looked at the properties of the sent messages in her sent folder, the problem was occuring when she was on version 7 also. Usually what happens is that the email goes through but the powerpoint attachment gets dropped. The attachment is not large - usually just a slide or two. I've talked to our groupwise admins and checked the Novell Groupwise knowledge base - can't find an answer. Let me know if you need to see more documentation.

The Pirate (October 14, 2009)

To Tzu Lao (October 10, 2009): How do you configure GroupWise external busy search? Check out this Novell link.

The Pirate (October 14, 2009)

FG (October 11): You'll find the answer to your question about Nokia stopping Intellisync can be found on Novell's blog.

The Pirate (October 14, 2009)

Cheesehead, the answer to your question about importing a .csv file into the GW address book can be found on Novell Cool Solutions

The Pirate (October 14, 2009)

To Yasean Khan (October 11, 2009): 1. How can I create system wide Categories, beside the default that is there. 2. How can share my view, when my view consists of a panel that shows 3 or more folders within my GroupWise, without sharing those folders first? A quick search turned up an answer here. Come on, guys, give the Pirate questions Google can't find. Argh!

The Mentor (October 13, 2009)

To Anonymous SNMP Guy: Well I can't take credit for the answer (Though it did mostly work back when I worked at Novell) but I can tell you you can find out how to get SNMP working with GW8 on linux here: http://www.novell.com/communities/node/9014/enabling-snmp-groupwise-8-linux. Also I strongly recommend you look into setting up GroupWise Monitor if you haven't already, it has some great monitoring features that most people overlook.

The Mentor (October 13, 2009)

Neossian, I'm sure you've figured out that spaces in email addresses = much badness. The iCal thing is probably a bug, but if you call Novell the first answer will be "Well, why do you have spaces in your email addresses?" So as painful as that is you'll need to fix it. The easiest way is to switch your default Internet address format to First.Last. This can be overridden a the system, domain or Post Office level. Doing this will also allow people to continue to receive at their old addresses. Of course you'll want to make sure you don't have anyone with the exact same first and last names in your system .

The Mentor (October 13, 2009)

sjrtd-TG, Now that is a feature that would be pretty cool to have in GroupWise. Unfortunately, there just isn't a very easy way to accomplish what you would like with the native client. I'm sure some people out there can think of other ways to accomplish this, but you have some pretty big things to overcome. First is that there is no simple method to schedule a rule to turn on or off. You can create a rule to be effective on a certain creation date for the message. So you could accomplish the reply rule part by simply having a large chained set of OR operations that basically say if a message is incoming and the create date is x date, or x date, or x date....blah blah blah until you get tired of entering in every other Friday, and then go re do the rule once you hit the last date you felt like putting in. Not fun. Second issue is that you can't set your work week up with alternating dates (Tools|Options|Calendar|Work Schedule) That setting only allows you to say you don't work any Fridays. So now if you want internal users to know that a person is out every other Friday for busy searches and such, you would need to have them send a posted, recurring, all day appointment to make sure that they block out their calendars for every other Friday. Clear as Mud?

Spiderman (October 13, 2009)

Does file attachment limits work in caching mode? We are running GW 8 w/ the latest patches. We have set mailbox quotas and also file size quotas, but does not get enforced.

Neossian (October 13, 2009)

Hey Gurus, I've got a GroupWise 7.02 system with a LOT of users all with ObjectIDs like "Roger Rabbit" and "Daffy D Duck". When emails exit via the GWIA, spaces are replaced with underscores, for incoming mail, the opposite happens. For calendar items the iCal gets generated with the original address "Roger Rabbit@Disney.com" in the MAILTO: field. The GWIA fixes the message header, but not the iCAL item. Some email systems, Exchange, think that they should reply to "Roger Rabbit@Disney.com" from the iCAL item, instead of "Roger_Rabbit@Disney.com" from the message header. Can it be fixed without changing everyone's Preferred email address to "Roger_Rabbit@Disney.com". If not, how can I easily change everyone's preferred email address? Thanks!

sjrtd-TG (October 12, 2009)

GroupWise 7.03 on SLES 10. We are getting ready to migrate from Exchange to GroupWise in 2 weeks. A question I have is how do we setup a rule that automatically puts a user out of office every other Friday on the calendar and sends an auto replies for e-mails on those scheduled out of office days?

The Mentor (October 12, 2009)

To Anonymous OES2 Linux on ESX cluster guy, Come on people! I'm sure you all can be more creative than Anonymous for your alias, plus I then have to come up with my ever so original names like the one above. The big thing to remember about GroupWise, or really of most applications is that they are unaware of when they are running on a clustered environment. So, as long as you can set up the base OS (and in this case the Linux cluster) then it will work. Here at MA we ran GroupWise on OES2 on top of ESX 3.5 for quite some time. One of the nice benefits of running on VMWare is that you also have the ability to do VM level high availability and load balancing as well, so I guess that means you get to cluster your cluster.....which may be a bit of overkill for most environments.

The Mentor (October 12, 2009)

To Anonymous ACT! guy, First, as The Mentor, I would have to recommend that regardless of any third party integration that you need, you should get your system upgraded to the latest version of GroupWise. This is the only way to ensure that you are able to get support if something goes wrong with your system, and the last thing that you want is to give people another reason to switch mail systems. To answer your questions: 1. GroupWise 8 doesn't give you more integration options for ACT! than you would have on 6.5, you would need a third party product like the one found here: http://www.redbacksystems.com/actwise 2. The upgrade from 6.5 to GroupWise 8 is not a very complicated process, and on a small system wouldn't take more than an afternoon. As for how long it would take the third party software to be installed and configured, I would recommend that you contact that vendor and explain your situation and see what they can do to help. You'll find most vendors will go out of their way to help you succeed if you just give them a chance to do so.

Morris the Magnificent (October 12, 2009)

Response to: Stumper1934 (October 09, 2009) >>What TCP/IP Port does GroupWise Monitor connect on to the GroupWise High Availability service (gwha) when it tells >> the gwha to restart a GroupWise service? Stumper, gwha is a xinetd service and you can find the port gwha uses in /etc/xinetd.d/gwha. You can change the port here if you feel the need. Notice the last line; "disable = no" To enable the gwha service you must either delete this line or edit it to say "disable = yes", after which it's a good idea to restart the xinetd service: "/etc/init.d/xinetd restart" service gwha { socket_type = stream user = root server = /opt/novell/groupwise/agents/bin/gwha wait = no instances = 10 protocol = tcp type = UNLISTED port = 8400 disable = no } At ease!! The Colonel

Morris the Magnificent (October 12, 2009)

Response to Stumper1934 (October 09, 2009) >>>Why do you have to do a manual First Run of the GroupWise Linux services to have the [@...] syntax in the gwha.conf Stumper, the agent (including GWIA and WebAccess) installs do not have the smarts to know what each object name is, ie, provo.utah for a Provo POA in a Utah domain. The install only knows about the startup file needed to start the agent. You may ask, "well, why does it need the object name in the first place, why not just use the @startupfile syntax in the gwha.conf?" Good question Private Stumper (sorry, couldn't resist). In the case of running GW in a OES cluster environment, if gwha.conf used the @startupfile syntax, then each agent that is clustered would need to have a unique startup file name. Novell thought it wiser to have gwha.conf use the actual agent object name instead. Not sure I understand the second part of your question; "What else is being done on that Linux server other than the gwha.conf file being changed into production syntax in the [ ] area?" If you're asking are other files being modified under the covers? If so the answer is no. gwha.conf is the only config file being modified on agent startup. At ease, The Colonel

Khan, Yasean (October 12, 2009)

The 2 Questions I posted, can be addressed to any Guru :) Who is up for the challenge?

Cheesehead (October 11, 2009)

Is there an easy way to import a .csv or Excel file into the GW address book?

Khan, Yasean (October 11, 2009)

2 Questions: 1. How can I create system wide Categories, beside the default that is there. 2. How can share my view, when my view consists of a panel that shows 3 or more folders within my GroupWise, without sharing those folders first?

FG (October 11, 2009)

Nokia is stopping with Intellisync. What are my possibilities in the future when I am running a Groupwise Mobile Server on Linux at the moment, which is completely related to Intellisync?

Anonymous (October 11, 2009)

Can i setup Groupwise 8 SP1 in a OES2 Clustered Linux environment, where the clusters are running on VMware ESX 3.5?

Tzu Lao (October 10, 2009)

How do you configure GroupWise external busy search?

Anonymous (October 10, 2009)

We are STILL on GW 6.5 (125 users) on a Novell server. 5 users on Mac (old web access is limited for their use, but at least they can use something). The rest of our users use the fat client 6.5.7 on WinXP. We also have a BES server for our 15 Blackberry users. Last year our Sales Mgr headed implementation of an ACT by Sage implementation for 14 users (soon to add 7 more). This Sales Mgr was the only person in the building anti-GW & pro-Outlook. They could not get Act to integrate with the GroupWise client. We ended up putting in a small Term Server for Outlook/Act to work together. This isn't working real well since these users are now forced to flip back & forth from Outlook to GW when they need to use their calendars or see any of the docs in the library of GW (their frustration is growing). This Sales Mgr is starting to get others to agree with him about switching the company to Outlook. I know this would be TOOOO costly for us to switch everything we use GW for!!! Not to mention I'm unsure where our doc libraries would end up. I feel like I may have a chance to finally upgrade to GW 8 with the promotions you are running this month. 1. Would GW 8 integrated directly to Act so we could get rid of Outlook once & for all? Or would we need a 3rd party product? I found one 3rd party product that says it will work with our current version of GW. 2. I have limited in-house resources for installation & training. How quickly could we really get this up & working with Act?

Stumper1934 (October 09, 2009)

Why do you have to do a manual First Run of the GroupWise Linux services to have the [@...] syntax in the gwha.conf converted over to the production syntax? What else is being done on that Linux server other than the gwha.conf file being changed into production syntax in the [ ] area?

Stumper1934 (October 09, 2009)

What TCP/IP Port does GroupWise Monitor connect on to the GroupWise High Availability service (gwha) when it tells the gwha to restart a GroupWise service?

Stumper1934 (October 09, 2009)

Can you explain the flow of communications between the GroupWise (GW) Calender Publishing Host (CPH) servlet and the various GWPOAs and the users out on the Internet doing Free/Busy searchs and Subscribing to GW user calendars? What does the CPH do on startup? How does the CPH get its updates as users make changes to their Published calendars?

Anonymous (October 08, 2009)

How to setup the GroupWise 8 (running on Linux) SNMP support? Is it OK or broken?