GroupWise 8 has a great new feature: embedded web pages! You can now use “panel view” for folders in a whole new way. GW8 lets you setup panels that show web pages. As soon as I heard about this feature, the wheels in my head started turning. Our company uses a lot of web based applications. This new feature of GroupWise is enabling what I call “Application Folders”. This is really just a folder in panel view, but I am going to show you how it can be much more than just an embedded web page.

First, pick a web based application that you use. It helps if the application uses cookies to store login information, but it's OK if it doesn't too. For this example, I am going to use a web based accounting mini-app that we wrote in-house. This mini-app is a database of follow up calls on Accounts Receivable invoices. It's not uncommon for the folks that use the app to also have GroupWise tasks and e-mails they might need to refer to during their follow up calls.

Now that we have selected an application, another important piece of the puzzle is GroupWise categories. If you are not already using these, you should be. Our demonstration accounting employee is using categories, and marking any Accounts Receivable e-mails and tasks with a category of “Accounts Receivable”. The e-mails are just in the main mailbox for the sake of this demonstration, but could be in a subfolder as well. This employee has also been marking all A.R. tasks with the category of “Accounts Receivable”.

Now, we create a folder that is going to be our “Application Folder”.

• Once the folder is created, right click on it, and go to “Properties”.

• Click on the Display tab, and go to View By, and select Panels.

• Click on Customize Panels.

• We are going to use a 2 column layout, so select 2 columns.

Click to view.

Now, we will create a couple of new panels to use.

Click on New Panel. In the new panel window:

• give this panel a name, we'll use “AR Follow Up”

• select the radio button for “selected web page”

• enter the URL for the web application you want to embed and click OK

Click to view.

Now we need to create 2 more panels for this example. One will be for all of our AR related e-mail, the other will be for our AR tasks. Click on New Panel, and in the new panel window:

• Give this panel a name, we will use AR Mail.

• Click the radio button for “selected folder”

• Click the “Change Folder” button, and select the folder where your mail is located and hit OK.

• Click the “Filter” button, and then choose the “Accounts Receivable” category.

• Hit OK, and OK again.

Click to view.

You should be back at the Customize Panels window. Only one more panel to create, the panel for our AR Tasks. Once again, click “New Panel” and follow the steps you did for the AR mail, but this time name the panel AR Tasks, and select the Tasklist folder instead of the mailbox. Be sure to set the filter to use our “Accounts Receivable” category. Hit OK when you are done, and you will be back at the Customize Panels window. Now we can setup the order we want the panels to appear.

Select our web app first, we named it “AR Follow UP”, and then click on the add button next to column one. Then select the AR Mail and AR Tasks panels, and add them to column two.

Click to view.

Now we are ready to see how it looks. Click OK and OK again to finish up, and we will see our “application folder”.

Now we have a folder that presents a web application, and any relevant e-mails and tasks that we might need when using that application. This will be a big time saver for a lot of our employees, as we have quite a few web based applications that cover many areas of the business – sales, accounting, engineering, company intranet, etc.....

Here's what the final product looks like:

Click to view.