Client Environment Options


The dialog box shown in Figure 7.3 looks somewhat similar to the Tools, Options, Environment dialog box as seen from the GroupWise 32-bit Windows client. Imagine, for example, that you did not want the users' mailboxes to refresh every minute, but instead every two minutes by default. Changing the Refresh Interval to a value of 2 would accomplish your design. Users can change this back to 1 or to 3 or whatever else they like. Take note, however, of the set of padlock buttons on the right side. To make sure that the users' mailboxes refresh only every two minutes, you can set the padlock button, which locks this setting so that users cannot make changes.

Tip

Client options can be set, and/or locked, on a user, post office, or domain level. If you want to set an option on an entire post office, be sure to highlight that post office, and then choose Tools, GroupWise Utilities, Client Options. If you want to set the client options for an entire domain, highlight the domain object, and then choose Tools, GroupWise Utilities, Client Options.


Any setting listed in this dialog box can be changed, which will effectively change the default options for users who have not changed their defaults. Clicking the adjacent padlock puts a locked setting in place. This will prevent users from changing their individual default, and it will also force the setting down to users who might have already changed it. If a user were to view these settings after the administrator has locked them down, they would be grayed out, and the user would not be able to modify them.

Note

You can lock client options on a user, post office, or domain level. However, if you lock them at the domain or post office level, you cannot change them anymore on a user level.


Some of the settings shown in Figure 7.3 are not available under Tools, Options in the GroupWise client. For example, if you uncheck the option Allow Shared Folder Creation, when a user goes to create a folder, the option to create a shared folder will be grayed out.

Note

The settings you configure in client options do not carry over for GroupWise users who are in GroupWise remote mode or GroupWise caching mode.


GeneralAllow Shared Folder Creation

This option takes away the capabilityor enables the capabilityfor users to share folders. This option should generally be enabled.

GeneralAllow Shared Address Book Creation

This option takes away the capabilityor enables the capabilityfor users to share address books. If you are using another address book solution, you should take away the capability to share address books. This will encourage users to use another address solution for sharing addresses.

GeneralCheck Spelling Before Send

This option is not enabled by default, but because good spelling is a dying art in this modern era of spell-checking computers, it might be a good idea to enable it.

GeneralShow Messenger Presence

This is a option is not enabled by default, but because good spelling is a dying art in this modern era of feature that is new to GroupWise 7, and thus requires the GroupWise 7 Messenger client in order to work. When a user is in his or her GroupWise 7 client, the GroupWise client can indicate whether a particular user is logged into his or her GroupWise Messenger client.

GeneralEnable Junk Mail Handling

By default, Junk Mail Handling is enabled; you might, however, want to consider whether your organization is going to use Junk Mail Handling or not. At its best, Junk Mail Handling is a feature that gives users the satisfaction of zapping junk mail. At its worst, users can flag thousands of junk mail addresses (spammers), only to find that they continue to get spam from differing addresses on the Internet. The impact on the GroupWise system is that whenever a user gets a message from the Internet, the POA must go through the Junk Mail Handling list to see whether the message to be received matches any of the addresses in the list. Chapter 25, "Configuring a Spam/Junk Mail Control Solution," goes into a lot more detail on how to manage junk mail and spam mail. Consult Chapter 25 further to see whether you should keep the Junk Mail features enabled.

Allow Use of POP/IMAP/NNTP Accounts in the Online Mailbox

These options are not enabled by default, which is a good idea. If you allow users to POP their mailboxes from other email accounts, they could bloat your message store beyond what you expect. The same goes for IMAP and NNTP. Generally, you will want to enable these features on a user-by-user basis. If you enable the POP/IMAP feature, your users will see the Accounts menu option right next to the Tools menu in their GroupWise client. From the Accounts menu, users can define a POP3 or IMAP server to retrieve messages from.

If NNTP is enabled, when a user goes to create a folder, one of the options on that folder will be to enable them to define NNTP-specific information.

If a user is in caching mode or remote mode, that user can access POP3, IMAP4, and NNTP accounts, even if you have locked those features down. The reason for this is that the GroupWise POA cannot exert control over a GroupWise information store that is on a user's hard drive. So these features cannot be controlled.

Client AccessClient Licensing

Under the Client Access tab shown in Figure 7.4, you will see two kinds of client licensing:

  • Full License Mailboxes: Windows/Cross Platform client access.

  • Limited License Mailboxes: NonWindows/Cross Platform client access, such as WebAccess/Wireless, POP3, and IMAP4.

Figure 7.4. The Client Access menu


Note

If you are using a client that uses the Windows or Cross Platform client to access the GroupWise message store, this is still considered a full license mailbox.


GroupWise is licensed per mailbox. However, Novell licenses the mailboxes in such a manner that there are two access methods (and two prices of mailboxes); they are Windows/Cross Platform client access or limited client access. When a mailbox is accessed via the GroupWise Windows or Cross Platform client, the mailbox is stamped in the GroupWise system as a full license mailbox. After the Windows or Cross Platform client accesses a mailbox, that mailbox is considered a full license mailbox for its life (even if you rename the user). If a user accesses a mailbox only via a limited client connection, for example Outlook Express as a POP3 client, that mailbox is considered a limited license mailbox.

The notion of the mailbox types is relevant for customers who must determine how many licenses of GroupWise they need to report to Novell or a Novell partner in order to assess the correct licensing and maintenance fees. By default, all mailboxes are considered full license mailboxes. If you were to create a new mailbox for a user you do not want to use the Windows or Cross Platform client (in an effort to decrease the cost of the mailbox), it would be wise to do the following:

1.

Create the user.

2.

In ConsoleOne, highlight the user and select Tools, GroupWise Utilities, Client Options, Environment, Client Access.

3.

Change the Client Licensing selection to limited license mailbox.

The process of determining how many of your current users are using limited license mailboxes requires a GWCHECK job, and looking at the right place to gather the information. This process is explained in Chapter 17.

Client AccessClient Login Mode

With this selection in this section of the Environment options, you can control how much flexibility GroupWise has to make copies of a user's mailbox for additional speed or functionality. GroupWise has always had a remote mode. With GroupWise 6.x and GroupWise 7, caching mode has been added. The caching mode does all that remote mode ever did, and more. The caching mode allows the GroupWise client to receive regular automatic updates to the caching mailbox, as well as keep a live connection with the GroupWise POA, which is necessary for functions such as busy search or cross-post-office proxy. Another advantage to caching mode is that the GroupWise client needs to chat far less with the GroupWise POA in order to read data from the GroupWise information store. Also, if the POA goes down for some reason, when the GroupWise client is in caching mode, the GroupWise client doesn't even blink.

Warning

The caching mode feature replicates a user's entire mailbox down to that user's local hard drive. If in your GroupWise system you do not have a message expiration policy, and the GWCHECK-Mailbox/Library Maintenance procedures to enforce the expiration policy, your users could have more data than can be contained on their local hard drive. Experience has shown that this can lead to problematic behavior of Windows computers, sometimes making it even impossible to reboot properly.


The GroupWise client can interact with the GroupWise user's mailbox when it is in one of three locations:

  • The post office (the standard GroupWise client mode)

  • A copy of the user's mailbox in remote mode

  • A copy of the user's mailbox in caching mode

If you do not want your users to use remote mode or caching mode, you can disable these modes.

Almost always, if you need your users to have remote connectivity to their mailboxes, you will want to encourage your users to use caching mode. Here are some reasons that support using caching mode. Imagine that you have a couple of users who connect over a slow WAN link to their post office. Because the caching mode is much less chatty than a normal client/server connection to the POA, you could force some users to use caching mode. To do this, highlight the individual, and then go into Tools, GroupWise Utilities, Client Options and select the check box Force "Caching" Mode After: X Days. A value of 0 means that the next time users log in they will be forced to caching mode, and they will be kept in caching mode going forward.

The feature By Default, Show Login Mode Drop-Down List on Client Toolbar is useful for this reason. If your users were previously GroupWise 5x users, they never saw the online or caching options in their GroupWise client. Rather than confusing your GroupWise 5x users, or leaving them to make the decision to go to caching mode, you can just hide this feature by unchecking this option.

The GroupWise client is capable of establishing a live remote connection with a message transfer agent (MTA). This MTA opens a link to the user's post office, and the POA accesses the user's mail.

The Views Tab

On the Views tab of the Environment Options dialog, there are several options:

  • Read Next After Accept, Decline, or Delete. Generally you want to enable this feature, because it makes browsing messages easier.

  • Open New View After Send. This feature is generally best kept unchecked, to allow users to make their own choice as to how the GroupWise client behaves.

  • Allowable Read Views. This feature is new to GroupWise 7. This allows the administrator to indicate whether a user is able to view messages in either text or HTML format. For some GroupWise customers, HTML formatting may be considered a virus threat, and as such they may want to disable viewing of HTML messages.

  • Allowable Compose Views. This feature is new to GroupWise 7. This allows the administrator to indicate whether a user is able to compose messages in either text or HTML format.

  • Disable HTML View. There are many reasons you might want to disable HTML viewing. The HTML viewing enables features from Microsoft Internet Explorer. With this design, HTML viewing could possibly enable browser-based viruses or browser-based security breaches. The downside to disabling this is that you take away a major feature that might be necessary for users to receive legitimate communication.

How users view messages is an important part of the users' productivity. Make choices that work for your environment; however, generally you do not want to lock these preferences down.

File LocationArchive Directory

From the File Location tab in the Environment Options box, GroupWise users can archive their messages to a location other than their mailbox. If there is a message expiration policy of 90 days, users who archive will have recourse for saving messages that are important enough to them to retain beyond those 90 days. It should be noted that there are some organizations that don't want, or cannot accept, the legal liability associated with archived messages. If your organization does not want users to archive, keep the path blank and click the padlock button.

Note

If your users have defined their own archive paths, and then you lock the archive path with a blank path, when the users log back in they will not be able to archive anything, nor will they have access to any previous archives.


Many organizations find they do need an archiving solution, but that solution must be centralized.

File LocationCustom Views

Custom Views is part of a somewhat obscure but useful feature in the GroupWise Windows client. If a user has a standard message, or even a template message that he or she often sends, that user can save that message in the form of a "custom view" file. The File Location tab simply indicates where custom views should be saved and retrieved by default.

Cleanup

In the Cleanup tab in the Environment Options box, you can specify just how mail messages should be cleaned up. The options in this tab can be useful for implementing a message retention policy. Using Mailbox/Library Maintenance jobs (GWCHECK) is a more effective method for implementing a message retention policy. All the cleanup options set here, except the archive options, are performed by the POA during a process called nightly user upkeep (nightly user upkeep is enabled by default on the POA). If the auto-archive feature has been selected, the archiving operation takes place when the GroupWise client logs in each day. The client must do the archiving because the POA usually does not have rights or even access to the user's archive path.

CleanupAllow Purge of Items Not Backed Up

With GroupWise 6.x and 7 and the Smart Purge and Backup/Restore system, GroupWise can be configured to not automatically purge items that are deleted from the trash. Thus, before a backup has been done, nothing will truly be purged from the information store.

This is a powerful feature, but if your organization does not intend to use this, it's useless to have this feature enabled. In fact, with this feature enabled and used incorrectly, the information store will grow at an exponential rate. It's best to leave this option checked, until you are sure you've completely implemented the software for the Smart Purge and Backup/Restore system. Configuring and using these options is explained in Chapter 28.

CleanupPerform Maintenance Purges on Caching/Remote

This is a new feature to GroupWise 7. Prior to GroupWise 7, when a user downloaded mail in his or her Caching or Remote mailbox, the email was in a sense within the user's control, rather than within the GroupWise system's control. Now, with this feature enabled, and the GroupWise 7 client deployed, if an item is removed as a result of the Cleanup options, it is removed from the caching or remote mailbox also.

Threshold

The Threshold tab in the Environment Options box has to do with when users are connected directly to their post office via direct mode. Direct mode is a connectivity mode you can set on any post office. When a user is connected in direct mode, the threshold value determines the number of recipients of a message, within the post office the sender is on, who will have their user databases written to by the sender's GroupWise client.

Warning

Do not regularly allow your users to connect directly to their post office via direct mode; this opens you up for all kinds of corruption if used on a regular basis.




NOVELL GroupWise 7 Administrator Solutions Guide
Novell GroupWise 7 Administrator Solutions Guide
ISBN: 0672327880
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 320
Authors: Tay Kratzer

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