Hello:
I am at present trying to wrap my head around the structure (logically) of GroupWise (I get it that mailboxes, distribution lists, and resources along with document libraries belong to post offices and many post offices which act as departmental boundaries within a larger unit called a domain that can contain more than one of them along with other objects like MTA, GWIA, etc.) but what I don't quite follow is that the last time I tried to do something that seems logical, it failed pretty hard necessitating a complete ripping out of the GW system.
What I was trying to accomplish is having more than one post office on the same server (which from my limited testing doesn't seem possible). I was additionally playing around with domains but that got me stuck. At least the way I understand post offices vs domains is:
- Post Offices are the containers that can represent a unit of an organization (if we use any large American company you might have POs for Information Technology, Customer Service, Executives, etc.) or if we use a school district I attended post offices might represent school sites (e.g. Kennedy, Mitchel, Chavez, 3rd Street, etc.)
- Domains are the larger building blocks that represent organizations (e.g. Fremont Unified, Novell, Microsoft, etc.)
This ability to "partition out" my organization into distinct units was one of the "selling points" for me when I decided to pick up GroupWise as a hobby and try to deploy it internally for my various teams. Well at least my understanding seems to have failed me as I was unable to have multiple post offices and/or domains on the same server. The reason I thought this might be possible is let's take a school district in a small town with 4 sites and one central office; to save on resources, all sites except the Jr. High send their files back to a server at the central office thus it would make sense to have all sites as Post Offices all residing on the same GroupWise server thus freeing up more budget in the longer term.
If we take the same small-town school district and acknowledge the high school in the town that for the longest time was it's own separate GroupWise system and let's say that the 4-site district and the high school district merge and become "anytown unified" and since the high school has the more beefy servers a decision is made to centralize all the GroupWise domains and Post offices on one box...yet given what I found out the hard way this is not possible and so our mythical anytown unified would seemingly need to have 6 servers (one for each school's PO one one for the central office PO and one of those could be pulling "Swiss army knife" and be doing WebAccess, calendar publishing, GWIA, etc.)
Is the above scenario and statement accurate with regards to GW 8.0? If yes, then that was in my opinion a major oversight on Novell's end at the time to water down one of the strengths of GroupWise as opposed to something like MS Exchange. As to say "throw more money at the ability to partition your org out in the form of dedicated PO servers for each department which we think is something the GW does better than Exchange but it's got this unrealistic expectation that only the largest of enterprises will ever be able to meet"
If the above is not the case with regards to GroupWise 8, I would like to know what is the "proper" way to have multiple domains and/or post offices on the same box?
I have played with all manner of port number settings for the various components, done some toying around with link configuration and gotten no where except being able to send email to an exchange server in my lab and not being able to reply back. After enough messing about, I finally just broke the whole thing to where nothing would start (all my POs were closed complaining about port conflicts even though I set each and every port setting on every POA and on the MTA and GWIA to unique values).
Thanks for taking the time to read this and I appreciate any help given
Thanks:
Carly G. Fleischmann
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Disclaimers: I am often responding from mobile and so I apologize for the bad formatting and any auto-correct mistakes that might happen. 2) I have a team of advocates, assistants, and advisors who assist me in writing, responding to, and managing posts and community engagement; such advocates, assistants and/or advisors will clearly identify themself along with their role. Any opinions expressed by my team are the opinions of that individual and do not necessarily represent my opinions or those of my support team unless otherwise noted.
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