* NetMail forms basis of open source Hula, but where does that leave GroupWise?
I sometimes think Novell has bugged my office. No sooner had I sent off the newsletter in which I talked about users’ worries about the future of GroupWise that Novell issued a press release outlining GroupWise’s roadmap.
And on the same day I discussed that roadmap and wondered why Novell had so many different mail and collaboration products, came the announcement at LinuxWorld that Novell was turning over its NetMail software to the open source community. NetMail will form the basis of a new collaborative software project called Hula. It’s “collaborative” in both senses: It will be collaboration software like GroupWise, and it will be a collaborative development as most open source projects are.
In announcing this during his LinuxWorld keynote address, Novell CEO Jack Messman said: “There will always be a need for a heavy-duty groupware server program like GroupWise or Lotus Notes, but there’s also a need for an entry-level program.” Messman said it was his hope that Hula “…will become to collaboration software what Apache is to Web services.” Well, Apache is the most widely used Web server; it even drove Novell out of the Web server business. GroupWise users take note. This is all reminiscent of Novell’s public posturing about NetWare in the run up to Open Enterprise Server (OES). Now before the PR machine jumps on me for predicting the demise of GroupWise, I’m not doing that. I’m simply drawing parallels between the treatment of NetWare vis-a-vis OES and GroupWise vis-a-vis Hula.
Now let me reiterate that I like OES. It’s a very good migration path from NetWare to SuSE as a server operating system. But I have no illusions that this is simply the “next version” of NetWare, or that pure NetWare development will continue. It is, perhaps, the best transitional software to ever come out of a major vendor, but it is definitely transitional software for the old-line NetWare faithful.
There was another significant announcement at LinuxWorld, one that may have indicated the path to retirement of the third part of the old Novell triumvirate of services. We’ll look at that in the next issue.
