Corporation grade email/scheduling solution (like Outlook or Groupwise)?

[superboyac]

Hi everyone, I work for the city of Los Angeles, and in our department we use Novell Groupwise as our email client as well as scheduling/addressbook/overall network administration solution.  Now, I don't know or understand some of the "under the hood" workings that make up the network administration aspect of it, but I know that as a email system (including the addressbook and calendar), it really sucks big time.  I mean it's horrible.  You have barely any options for anything, and using the program makes you feel about as much in control as a yahoo email account.

Interestingly enough, the mayor appointed a new director of our department, and I was just reading her little introduction biography, and in it she said her pet peeve is the Groupwise email and how she's going to try to make a push for Outlook (I cheered out loud!).  Now, I'm no fan of Outlook/Exchange, but I'm pretty sure it's magnitudes better than Groupwise as far as from a user standpoint.  (I've hear Groupwise is good for security and stuff, but I'm stricly talking about functinality).

So, my question to you all is this...can anyone tell me if Outlook would really be better than Groupwise, at least for the email/calendar aspect?  Also, even though I doubt they will consider anything besides Outlook or Groupwise, can anyone recommend other solutions that might fit a large, integrated corporation?  I doubt the Bat! will be a good solution for something like this.

And we use IMAP email, I'm pretty sure.  It has unbelievably bad filtering options, horrible signature options, horrible reply-to settings, and to top it off, the administration has a 45-day limit on email messages, after which they are purged from the system.  If you want to keep mail, you have to go through this archiving process which is a pain in the butt, and even when they're archived, you can't export it in a format that will be usuable in any other email client.  Otherwise I would always archive everything and send it to my Bat! folder so I can store them inside a good program in case I need to use it later.

[superboyac]

Here's a better question...what's better for a corporate collaboration system:  Novell Groupwise, MS Exchange/Outlook, or Lotus Notes?

[Rover]

Do you know what version of Groupwise you are using?  It sounds like a lot of your problems are related to how it is administered, will that change with a new mail system?

I use groupwise at one of my client sites and it's not bad.  I'm not using it heavily tho.

Kerio makes a mail server that contains a lot of outlook features in a web based system.  You can also add an adapter to allow Outlook clients to use the system just as if it were Exchange.

So many options!

[superboyac]

Yeah, you know, I don't know anything about how Groupwise is actually administered.  We are using version 6.5 I think, and an even older version of the server (although I'm not positive).  It's just such a plain and unimpressive program.  I'm sure there's a lot of things set up under the hood that makes it somewhat attractive to the IT (as I found out when I almost ranted against it to one of the IT guys), but the end user stuff is just so dull and limited.  I mean, you can't do anything with the emails, just read and write back pretty much.  It doesn't even allow you to use the ">" symbol for replies.  I can count the tweaking options for the entire end user interface on one hand.  In my opinion, it's just crappy.

Like I said, I'm no fan of Outlook, but this makes Outlook seem like a filet mignon.  I really really hope the director makes a big push for Outlook, and hopefully the IT department will just have to suck it up and deal with it.  There's no reason to give the users the crappiest interface possible just because it's easy on the IT department.  I'm sure there are ways to make Outlook/Exchange just as secure as Groupwise.