As aficionados of this blog (yes, both of you) may know, I am wont to distort Szekspir on occasion...and in this case, it would be to say: "Groupwise, Groupwise; wherefore art thou, Groupwise? For thou art not on my home PC, my Blackberry or the Web, so where the frak* ART thou???"
Was it only in June I said "Jou Groupwi'se m***!"...and Transplant_Ed was moved to ask "GroupWise or GroupWoes?" back in March,I see...because the woes double and redouble; the wont's are even more frequent, and the sound of despair is heard in UCTland. Which place could start with another lower-case letter, as some T-shirts are seen to, as it would then aptly describe the predicament.
MY FRAKKIN'* GROUPWISE ACCOUNT IS INACCESSIBLE!!!
AGAIN!!
Not that I wanted any email this weekend, not really: only the exercise programme emailed to me by a biokineticist (the back is sort of improving, thank you; but I keep having to TRY to work from home!!); only info on how/whether I would be going to Brazil; only whether some arrangements regarding impending trips to Pretoria will happen or not...and I can get no dates more recent than 10/9 via my home installation of G'wise, and the Web server comes back with
- despite my having changed my password - AGAIN!! - via the ICTS service.
Really, folks, really: Groupwise is a piece of shit, and we can do better. PLEASE!!??
* = Perfectly respectable word; they use it a lot in Battlestar Galactica.
13/09/2009, 20:28
Simples! Give up on inadequate institutional services and embrace the Cloud - GMail in this case.
14/09/2009, 09:09
May have been more fundamental than GroupWoes - my BlackBerry email service from *uct was refusing to validate and required multiple re-entries of my password. I see that *uct's *ict(iciou)s website says that "The problem affecting the GroupWise Staff post office 2 (PO2) has been resolved. We apologise for any inconvenience experienced.Last updated on Monday, 14 September 2009 @ 07:31 SAST."
So, we enjoyed an enforced weekend rest from mundane travel arrangements for elderly academics with bad backs who probably shouldn't be travelling anyway ;-)
GMail does help - but then you have the irritating advertising crap that comes with Gmail, which adds another problem, namely that some banks (eg ABSA) will not permit gmail accounts for their secure banking (that may have changed, but they wouldn't when I converted some years back). That said the BB monitors both mail accounts well enough for me, and does ThunderBird on our Linux laptop - and they avoid the adverts (if not the bots that place them).
You also miss the utility of the institutional calendar and appointments function - which could mean the occasional missed meeting - even if you do use another calendar client such as Google's calendar, Mozilla's Lightning, the Evil Empire's option.
'course Google has other useful tools for collaboration and research: Google Docs and Google Forms (see our own *uct blogger oer-uct for comment on the latter): http://blogs.uct.ac.za/blog/oer-uct/2009/06/25/oer-survey-and-the-magic-of-google-forms)
14/09/2009, 10:09
To AJC and T_Ed...
I've looked at clouds from both sides now, from near and far, and still somehow, it's IMAP's attractions I prefer...B-)
And who you calling elderly there, T_Ed...??
Ditto for the Balckberry, BTW: said I needed a password change when I DID that, and RECENTLY!!!
Basically, the system sucks - big time. My son tells me Google will do the whole institutional thing for you - with academic addresses, and presumably no advertising - if you ask them.
Time to suck it in and ask, UCT!!!
14/09/2009, 10:16
...and I really love the way my mailbox Cabinet keeps changing: things appear in it with cryptic titles like "To-do search" and "To-do search 1". WTF???
14/09/2009, 14:55
As a long-time convert to Google, I fail to see what Gropewise offers that Google doesn't (only better. And more.) The one thing I'd thought "cute" about Gropewise was the ability to retract emails sent in haste (assuming sense kicked in before the addressee opened them) - but Google offers this too, these days. Together with mailboxers far far bigger than UCT's paltry offering, and themes to customise the look and feel of your mailbox (the beach one even reflects the season and time of day), lots of Google Labs features to try out, and of course complete integration with the rest of the suite of Google offerings.
Google recently had an outage - well within it's target of 99.9% uptime. My fond memories of UCT's email uptime (post PMail, that is) would suggest that *downtime* is closer to 99.9%.
(As an interesting aside - I have a Gropewise account on the UWC system, and have never experienced any problems with that. Might it just be that the problem is not Gropewise, but.... ICTS???)
14/09/2009, 16:52
see next blog...B-)
14/09/2009, 16:57
You can IMAP to GMail no problem: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=75725
15/09/2009, 12:05
IMAP, or POP3. Or read it in whatever client you choose (Apple's mail client, for example :) )