So Long GroupWise; It’s Not You, It’s Me.

GroupWise, please sit down. We need to talk.

We’ve been together a long time, you and me. Ten years at two different universities. It’s been a wild ride.

When we met, it was a bit dicey at first, especially when the President went on vacation and an out-of-0ffice autoreply rule wasn’t set correctly, causing a message loop that took the entire email system down for a week. But things got better after that, and I started teaching training classes for people to learn all about you.

Through the years you grew, coloring your calendar items, customizing your subject lines, sprucing up your interface… Sure, there were problems that always gnawed in the back of my brain, such as your document library system nobody could ever figure out how to use, your arcane messaging rules, your proprietary archive system with its inherent instability, your feature-crippled Mac clients, your document viewer that never quite previewed documents correctly, your problematic web client, and your constant struggle with Microsoft to co-exist peacefully with MS Office collaboration features in the Windows environment (to name a few). However, I turned the other cheek and chose to take a strengths-perspective approach. And, I don’t deny you were quite popular in many circles.

But I realized I needed more. You were email and calendaring, but I wanted to collaborate. Instead of emailing a colleague across campus to ask a quick question, I wanted to send her an instant message. Instead of trading dozens of email messages back and forth between 8 co-workers to draft the text of a mass email message, I wanted to create a document in one location and share with others to work on simultaneously as a group. I wanted to take those documents, and email attachments, and quickly post them on a website I could share with my employees without requiring them to know a single thing about HTML. I wanted to use the same system across the enterprise in order to leverage all of these features to collaborate with students as well.

And then Google Apps came along, giving me all of these things, and more. We had good times, GroupWise, but it’s time to move on into the next decade of the 21st century.

Be seeing you.