8 Ball, Corner Pocket: Managing Tasks with GroupWise 8

by Phil Karren

Novell Connection Magazine - December 2008

Here's an excerpt:

With the release of GroupWise 8 last month, many customers are buzzing about the Home View, the robust contact management and the cross-boundary calendaring. But another significant enhancement, one equally able to boost productivity for your end users, is in the area of task management.

In fact, as we met with GroupWise customers early in the development cycle to find out what they wanted in the next release, we found almost everyone cares a lot about managing tasks. This makes sense, because in combination with just about any smart phone (and GroupWise Mobile Server or BlackBerry Enterprise Server), GroupWise can be a powerful productivity management system—one that helps users optimize their time and take care of their tasks at work and even in their personal lives.

Those meetings with customers made it clear that there was a need for a robust personal productivity dashboard that integrates not only e-mail, calendars, contacts, team workspaces and the other elements that represent where and how work gets done, but the tasks that represent the work itself.

A staggering amount of information, assignments, appointments and requests comes at each of us every day through electronic means. David Allen, a productivity guru, talks about achieving “stress-free productivity” and offers a sensible system for managing the e-deluge with the following five steps:

1. Collect all the “stuff” that comes at you every day. For most of our users, that stuff comes to their mailbox in GroupWise.

• Process the stuff, narrowing it down to things you want to deal with.

• Organize the items left into categories: next actions, appointments, someday, delegate or discard.

• Review all the things you have to do.

• Pick the next and most important thing to do, and get it done.

The new GroupWise 8 client can help your users perform all of these steps more effectively, as well as come up with their own methods to handle all of the work that comes their way.

Read the rest of the article here