Anyone using Groupwise?

[prizmm]

I just got my Axim and I am havinga time trying to get this thing all sync'ed up. I want to use it with my groupwise 5.5 at work. SHould I use Intellisync or use the Outlook plugin for groupwise? Has anyone tried using it with the Outlook plugin? I am an experienced Outlook user, so i wouldnt mind continuing with outlook. I tried using Intellisync, but it doesnt seem to be workign smoothly, always getting errors while syncing, some of the folders sync and some dont. Anyway, just wondering if anyone has experience sync'ing with Novell Groupwise and/or the Outllok plugin for groupwise. Thanks

[dwant]

To get my Axim to sync with GroupWise, using Intellisync, I had to remove Outlook from my PC. Once I removed Outlook everything works just like it did when I owned a Palm 515.
Hope this helps

[fishdave]

My company is switching from Outlook to Groupwise. I prefer outlook but what do you do. I have been testing out how to connect my Axim to groupwise and have found that there are two utilities that can do this the first as mentioned above is intellisync, the other is Portamail. Portamail sent me a bata version for PPC 2002. They both seem to work well. Intellisync is slow, but adds a lot of control. Portamail, is quick, but lacks controls and I have not figured out how to get the contacts to work. My major headache with the conversion from outlook to groupwise and subsequent syncs is that the contacts I imported from outlook are not syncing well in my Axim. I have resigned, at this point, to not sync my contacts.

Hope this helps.

[dwinget]

Where is Portamail's web site? I would like to test out the utility. Ever since I upgraded to Pocket PC 2002, Intellisync has been giving me error messages such as "application data cannot be read". I am running Windows 2000 Professional on my workstation and am trying to sync with GroupWise 6 service pack 2. For a while, I synced with Outlook and had the IP address of the GroupWise server entered as the POP and SMTP server. However, my workplace is now requiring me to use the GroupWise Client so that I can monitor the resource scheduling. I have Intellisync 5.0 and am not quite sure if I should upgrade to the newest version. If Portamail is more stable, then I will probably make the switch. I am also interested in seeing how the field mapping is in Portamail. Intellisync only synchronizes the work addresses and ignores the home addresses and phone numbers. This makes it difficult to synchronize personal contacts.
Your help is deeply appreciated.
:confused:

[fishdave]

Portamail is currently in beta for PPC2002. I found them on http://www.pocketgear.com/software_detail.asp?id=5105. They have not posted the beta yet but emailed to me the other day. The program is smaller and from what I could tell only syncs mail,tasks, and calender, no contacts at the moment. They maybe working on this since it is a beta. They do have a tab that allows control of the contacts.

They do not have a web site but they do respond to emails. There email address is support@antecs.com

As far as my experiances with intellisync, it seems to to a pretty good job. If I enter the contacts directly into groupwise all is good. If I use oultlook contacts ported into groupwise I get errors. I guess the best thing is to start from scratch in groupwise and hand enter it all. This is a real pain but I may have to do it. I am currently talking to my local IS group to see if they can find a utility that will take a CSV file and import it into groupwise on my desktop. If I can get this to work on the desktop I may not have to enter by hand, I hope so, we will see.

The only saving grace in all of this is that I have my contacts on my home computer, which uses outlook, as a back up for all of my contacts. Groupwise address books will map to outlook catagories, whcih seems resonable to me.

By the way dwant, thanks for the email earlier.

David

[dwant]

dwinget

Upgrade to Intellisync 5.01 (I think that is the latest) I had 5.0 but there was an issue with groupwise, the upgrade took care of the problem. I too keep a backup of my files on my home computer using Outlook. FishDave has a good point, enter your contacts in GroupWise and let Intellisync put them in the contact categories.

Dwant

[fishdave]

I am currently using version 5.01.01 It seems to work well overall. Do you know if there is a way to get more than 4 folders mapped into your email? I am also finding that you cannot put attachments to emails on a SD card. Do you have this issue?

[dwant]

There is a readme file on the Intellisync CD that has a hint for more folders, I have 6 folders (including the Novell address book and my frequent contacts. Maybe I found the limit and didn't realize it.
David

[dwinget]

Thanks for your replies. I ended up reformatting my hard drive to get rid of the problematic Outlook files. I also had to hard reset my Pocket PC to uninstall Intellisync. I made a backup of my data on my memory card first. I am finally back online and Intellisync seems to be working OK, with the exception of the contacts. The contacts are on my Pocket PC, but not in GroupWise. Intellisync does not like my contacts. I will probably have to key in the contacts in GroupWise unless I find some data conversion tool. I know it is possible for GroupWise to import data from Outlook Express. If I can only get the contacts from my Pocket PC to Outlook Express. At least I am not getting pop up error messages.
:D

[dwant]

dwinget
This sounds so familiar. I did not go as far as reformatting the hard drive but I did not through the removal process. Create address books in GroupWise that match your categories on the Axim. I did several, IT for the folks who work for me, IT business for business contacts and a couple of others. There does seem to be a limit. I then made sure everyone on the Axim was in a category for the address books in GW. Another thing that helped, go to field mapping for your contacts in Intellisync and change the GroupWise map for Organization to blank. I then mapped the GW department field to the company field on the Axim. This was a big factor in getting GW to cooperate.
Hope this helps
dwant

[fishdave]

There is a program that can convert a csv file that you can export out of outlook that allows you to import the contacts into groupwise. I am currently in the process of getting this to work on my system The web link for this program is http://www.slewis.org/software/gwimpexp.exe

Dwant interesting comment on the orginization field. I was working on a csv import today and noticed that it created a bunch of sperate company/orginization entries. I did not have any individual company entries in outlook just indications for people on what company they were with. Remapping in intellisync might really help since it looks like groupwise handles it quite differently.

Thanks,

[fishdave]

Well- I just figured something out yesterday. I notice that everytime I synced intellisync to my contacts on my PDA (note all of my contacts originally came from outlook) that it would get at least one more contact into my groupwise addressbook. Well, while I was at work, and working on a new document, I just kept syncing the contacts. Well after about 70 syncs, I got all my contacts into the addressbook. Oh, one other thing, I had to remap the fields. The main field that I worked with was orginization was remapped to Department. I have not had a chance to test this throughly or see if I can sync with outlook at home and groupwise at work. I will post any new findings I run into.

[meadowsd123]

I've been using Intellisynce 5.01 with GroupWise 5.5 for a little over a month. It works, but not as well as it should.

The good:
(1) I can sync my contacts, mail, todo, and calendar, but there are numerous issues.

The bad:
(1) This software is way to expensive for how well it works.
(2) There is a message limit when syncing your email. I'm not sure what the actual limit is, but something around 75-100 messages in your inbox will cause Intellisync to blow up. The work around is to move all your messages to another folder, but this is very problematic for users that get a lot of mail.
(3) You have to manually launch Intellisync after ActiveSync connects. Yes, there is an option to have Intellisync sync on the first connection or every connection, however this works sporatically. This is especially irrating when I'm syncing wirelessly because there is no way to manually launch intellisync on my laptop when I'm not near it.
(4) Painfully slow and is always asking you to login to GroupWise if you aren't already logged into GroupWise. Why they can't include a password option in Intellisync is beyond me.

What version of Activesync is everyone using with Intellisync? I'm using 3.6 and I'm curious if anyone has had better luck with 3.5.

[dwinget]

I agree that Intellisync does not work as good as it should. I have had several issues. For some reason, my device's USB driver kept reverting back to an older version which was not compatible with Intellisync. I ended up deleting the inf file out of the windows inf folder and purposely chose the wrong device driver. After a failed connection, Windows 2000 finally let me update the driver without reverting.

Something has also got to be done about the field mapping between the contacts in GroupWise and on the device. GroupWise only has one address field and Intellisync maps it to the work address. When I enter someone's home address inside of GroupWise, it appears as the work address on the Pocket PC. Intellisync will also reject tasks or calendar events if you assign them to a category on your device before you sync.

I wish someone would create a version of the GroupWise client for the Pocket PC platform.

ActiveSync 3.6 works for me better than 3.5.