Summary: News about Novell's mail and what it is doing to/for Microsoft

News about Novell is scarce, but occasionally we find interesting stuff. Microsoft Skype gets conjoined with Novell Groupwise after work from SkyPRO (worked with Novell before).

There is a retreat away from Groupwise (many move to Microsoft), but justified fear of Fog Computing keeps some existing clients with Groupwise (for now). The LAPD story is being used as ammunition in other contexts, like the article "Spanish Bank Boosts Cloud Software Prospects". There are statements there like "CIOs still think twice before betting too heavily on cloud computing. In December 2011, for example, the Los Angeles Police Department scaled back its cloud computing agreement with Google, citing security concerns. It is shifting back to a more traditional email service from Novell, which will run on LAPD servers."

This Groupwise-related story still appears in some venues/outlets [1, 2, 3] that state stuff like:

Consider that Google jsut lost 13,000 out of the 30,000 seats for its Los Angeles contract because the Los Angeles Police Department chose to remain on Novell GroupWise, citing security issues with Google's cloud computing model.

As we explained before, proprietary Groupwise is not secure either, so it's just a talking point which would be hard to defend. The same goes for privacy. ⬆