First, a few words from the horse's mouth and then also from our experience.
According to Dean Lythgoe, Director of Product Management for Novell Collaboration Solutions...
We recently evaluated the initial quality of GroupWise 2012 as we near the first 90 day mark of the release. We first evaluated Novell’s production GroupWise systems. The feedback from both the backend perspective and the helpdesk perspective has been very positive. In fact, according to Kevin Crutchfield, “we are not aware of any serious inhibitors for GroupWise 2012. You might find this interesting – here at Novell we are still running GroupWise 2012 shipping code/agents. We have not identified anything that warrants updating our Novell production system.”
We also spoke with our Novell Technical Services group to see what call volume has been like and what types of issues have been reported or escalated. The feedback from this group has also been positive. There has not been a spike in service requests or in defects resulting from those service requests. This is not to say that there have not been reported issues. Nor is it to claim that every customer has had a smooth upgrade. Some customers have reported issues and engineering has addressed those problems, made FTFs available and included the fixes in the upcoming Cardiff release. We are still on schedule for the Cardiff release and the overall number of fixes taken has been very controlled.
Here at Marvin Huffaker Consulting, we've been recommending GroupWise 2012 as a great upgrade to GroupWise 8. We've deployed GroupWise 2012 to a variety of customers and all have been quite happy with the upgrade. We have not seen any major reasons why someone should consider moving to GroupWise 2012. In our experience thus far, I would say overall GroupWise 2012 quality is a improved compared to overall GroupWise 8 quality. That is a great way to release a product and bodes well for Novell's "re:turn" (to use their own marketing language) to their roots.
