GWAnywhere Provides Carrier-Agnostic Mobility for GroupWise at the College of the Holy Cross
The College of the Holy Cross is a highly selective, four year, undergraduate, liberal arts institution that is ranked among the nation's leading four year colleges. Founded in 1843 in Worcester, MA, Holy Cross is the oldest Catholic College in New England. With approximately 2,700 students, Holy Cross is renowned for its academic excellence and mentoring, as well as its state-of-the-art facilities and technology. The College relies on Novell GroupWise for its collaboration and messaging needs.
"We were looking for an enterprise-class wireless sync solution that would allow the senior management of the school to be connected to their GroupWise data, regardless of where they were or what wireless carrier they were subscribing to," explains Rebecca Chickering, Technical Services Engineer at the College of the Holy Cross. "Currently, we have unified our hand-held devices on the Palm Treo OS and all our users, including myself, are very happy with our Treo smartphones. We have been using them since April and we find that the Treo 650s are working really well. We decided to go with GWAnywhere after we tried another solution which required that our mail be routed through their servers; this wasn't a good solution for us. A third solution we looked at was much too costly. At the college, we use three different wireless carriers and we were happy that GWAnywhere allows us to preserve this freedom by being completely carrier-agnostic.
"The mobile users have been very happy with GWAnywhere. The synchronization of GroupWise email, appointments, tasks and contacts is completely transparent for the end users and they are just satisfied that they can travel light. All the information they typically need is now made available to them through their Treo smartphone and they like that.
"As the person administering the GWAnywhere server, it was a simple set up and run. The Messaging Architects support engineers were quick and helpful in addressing any questions that I had and we had GWAnywhere up and running in no time. If there is one thing that we would like to see with respect to GWAnywhere, it would be to have the robust OneBridge back-end technology that powers GWAnywhere run on a Linux platform. Overall, my experience with Messaging Architects has been very positive and I feel that their GWAnywhere mobile platform has increased end-user efficiency and productivity and added value to our investment in the GroupWise collaboration system," concludes Chickering.
Rebecca Chickering
Technical Services Engineer
College of the Holy Cross
