Q. Luca D. wrote: Greetings from Switzerland. My Question: Is it possible to get the global address book from GroupWise local on the iPhone without search function?
A. No, it's not possible. Because a global address book could potentially be larger than the amount of memory the device has to store contacts, we do not allow the sync of the address book. For most people, selecting to sync their Frequent Contacts book is enough, as it has everyone that they would send mail to on a regular basis.
We work with many companies that really want to sync the central address book, because most communication is within the company. Bad decision from Novell in my opinion.
Novell says there's the concern that the SAB could be too large. Shouldn't that be in the administrator's hands to decide? For instance, our company has fewer than 60 employees, so syncing the SAB would not be a problem at all even for the ancient Windows Mobile devices a few users here still have. In addition, back in the GMS days, you could configure it to sync just a particular distribution list instead of the entire SAB. This would be useful functionality for organizations that want to sync a specific subset of corporate users to mobile devices.
Suggesting using the frequent contacts is a terrible idea. For many people, the FC is just full of junk. After all, unless you change the default settings (and many don't), every single person you ever e-mail is in there. Syncing the FC might in fact be much, MUCH worse than syncing the SAB. It's easy to get thousands of addresses in the FC even though the SAB may only have a small number of contacts.
Really the only workaround today is for users to create a new PAB and then drag contacts from the SAB to this newly created PAB. But again, that's only a workaround.