Groupwise and Outlook

Groupwise is a nice product by Novell for e-mail and collaboration.

It is NOT compatible with Outlook. I just installed Groupwise 6 on a Vista machine with Outlook 2007 and this was what happened:

  • Groupwise installed and rebooted the machine.
  • Vista wanted to block the setup upon reboot. I let the setup continue.
  • Groupwise starts. When I want to make a message, GW compains about the address book that cannot be found and exits.
  • When restarting it, it asked my credentials and started … Outlook !
  • Aside from Groupwise Outlook was empty: no other accounts, no exsting mail messages, no addresses, no to do lists. Nothing.

I uninstalled Groupwise. After which Outlook wouldn’t start: “Outlook won’t load because service GWMSP1.dll not started”.
This is what I considered doing:

  • looking for the PST files in order to reimport them;
  • recreating the existing accounts (but there was no way of creating new accounts and it would not have brought back the old messages
  • uninstalling Outlook and reinstalling it (but that wouldn’t have solved problems in the registry)
  • reformat the machine and reinstall Windows, then Office

After quite some time of reflection and looking around I found

https://forums.cnet.com/5208-6129_102-0.html?forumID=29&threadID=18051&messageID=196513

where it is advised to delete the Groupwise profile in the registry. That solved the problem.

I saved myself reinstalling my machine…