Degrees's Journal: Work email (GroupWise) upgrade today

Today was GroupWise upgrade day. We upgraded 30 servers from version 7.foos.bars to 8.0.0 (+)*

It was almost a perfect. By 14:00 everything was done except the one WebAccess server. Turns out I pointed at the wrong (older) version of Tomcat during the re-install** and it took a while to figure it out. I had to ask a co-worker to find the problem, because I don't yet grok where all the Apache and Tomcat pieces live, especially since they move locations when you advance your OS to newer versions. This was an older OS with the new Tomcat, and I missed it.

The new WebAccess has AJAX-y goodness now, so when you scroll the mouse wheel, the web server fetches more data to display without a page reload. It's subtle, but much nicer. The web pages act a whole lot more like the fat client now.

The real star of the day is the Linux fat client. It *finally* looks and acts like the GW 7 Windows fat client. It's got the customizable home view, color codes based on category, implements custom tab views. I didn't see anything missing from the GW 7 Windows client, although I think that there was a least one feature that didn't make it. I think it was the DMS, which we don't use anyway.

It now has a Notify feature that can pop up when you get new mail. That's been in GW since version 4 (or before) so it's good that it finally made it.

The GW 8 Windows fat client did get some new features, but I haven't played with them yet. I was just happy my settings and custom applets worked as if nothing had changed. The best kinds of upgrades are the painless ones. ;-)

*I've got pre-release service pack code, so that I can test a bug we found a little while ago.

**This is the one component I wanted to rip and re-install, so that weren't any legacy pieces of code still getting loaded. If the thing were to ever flake out, I'd have that remorse of not doing it right the first time. So I spent a little more time today in hopes of less maintence problems tomorrow.