Today Novell released the second update to the ActiveSync Mobility solution for GroupWise.
A quick summary of the new features and some of the major bug fixes that customers can expect from this update.
The Update can be downloaded from the official Novell Customer Center or Patch Finder. See Documentation for specifics.
New Features:
New Authentication Source: You can now choose to use GroupWise as your authentication authority. In addition to LDAP, the administrator can choose to use the GroupWise system to authenticate devices into Mobility.
Easy Upgrade: The administrator can now seamlessly update their Mobility solution from one version to the next without having to ‘rip and replace’. This solution will preserve all of their settings and customizations that they had previously configured.
Block a User or Device: Sometimes there are rogue users or devices that are causing havoc on your system or post office. Now you can easily identify those users/devices and easily block them in order to restore stability and reliability. Even if you have a user with multiple devices – you can block one without effecting other devices for that user or other users on the system.
Monitoring: New capabilities have been added for the administrator to easily monitor the health of the POA’s and event queue within their Mobility implementation. Easily see
Status of the GW Connector and the POA's talking with the connector
Pending events to the sync engine and from the sync engine
The monitoring UI now has all of this capability:
UI on the GroupWise Connector showing the status of the GW Connector and the queue.
Functionality to query the GW Connector status. Responses should be on a green, yellow, red status basis.
Green: The connection to the POA is good and the connector is up to date in processing events from the sync engine.
Yellow: The GW Connector is behind processing sync engine events for data being sent to the POA.
Red: The connection to the POA is down.
Queues: There are two queues.
The events coming from the sync engine that need to be processed and if needed sent on to the specific POA.
The tasks to process the GroupWise event notifications from the various POA's.
Nightly Maintenance: Nightly maintenance is required to clean-up user folders that are not accessed by a device. Up to this point, folders like the junk mail folder could grow unchecked. A user would need to click on the folder to force the cleanup. Additional clean-up tasks will be added in the future as needed. The infrastructure for this capability is now complete and the clean-up of user folders was the first maintenance task. By default, this maintenance will run from midnight until 6am. The start time is configurable. The process walks through each user’s data and looks for items in folders that have ‘expired’. Expired means that the device no longer needs this data and it can be removed from the Connector database.
Restricted Attachments: If an attachment did not make it to the device because of size limitations or other failures, a notification is now available on the device that notifies the user that the attachment did not sync and why.
Bug Fixes
In addition to the new enhancements introduced in this update, there were also about 100 defects that were resolved. Many of these defects improve the overall functionality and feature set of the product while others were strictly to improve stability and reliability.
Appointments not synching to sub-calendars: If your sub-calendar folder was under your ‘Documents’ folder, synchronization was not happening.
Contacts created or edited on Device not Synching: Seemed to be happening a lot on Droid devices. Fixed a few defects related to this.
Contacts created on Droid, not Syncing: Problem if you have duplicate Frequent Contact books.
Battery life improved when Push Enabled
Events dropped, if ‘add’ event does not arrive first
Device Event Monitor could Hang, affect sending messages from Device
Sub Calendar events not updating on device in real-time
Update 2 is ‘Build 183’ for your reference.
The engineering team is deep into their next Agile Sprint and a demo is scheduled for next week. We have on more ‘sprint’ scheduled, which is simply a hardening sprint and then we will release Chinook. The plan is first calendar quarter of 2011. This release will be an accumulation of every update to that point. We do expect one more official ‘Update’ before the final release.
You can register to be notified for future updates. Check out the install documentation.
I noticed another duplicate and this time I remembered what I have done. On Tuesday evening at about 8 pm I created an appointment on my phone for 6pm on 1.2. A little bit later I modified that appointment to start at 7 pm. And now I see two appointments in Groupwise (at 6pm and at 7pm) but only one appointment on the phone.
The original entry should not have synced with groupwise before the change, because my peak-time stops at 5pm and after that syncing occurs every 12 hours. I can't be sure about that, though.
So, this leads me to wonder if there are some (known) problems with E71's calendaring?
there seem to be some problems regarding sub-calendars. They duplicate seemingly randomly on a phone (Nokia E71). I sync 3 months in history and after a few of weeks I have some (not all) entries on my phone twice or three times in November. December has only one or two while this month seems fine for now.
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