Hi all. Check out this interview I had with SilverDane, a great GroupWise and collaboration focussed company.

I spoke to with Gloria Heasley, who recently joined SilverDane in the capacity of Marketing Manager.

Gert: Who is SilverDane ?
Gloria: SilverDane Corporation is a team of professionals committed to developing and providing solutions that synergize an organization’s email and collaboration systems, in particular GroupWise. Our products aim to maximize the functionality and efficiency of GroupWise by providing additional integrated features such as email archiving and meeting room management.

SilverDane currently has four products on offer, namely Archive™, Meet Me™, Draft Me™ and Link Me™, with SilverDane Archive™ being our flagship. Whilst we may not have the extensive range of products that some of our competitors have on offer, we pride ourselves on the focus and dedication which we place on making our products unsurpassed in functionality, features and incorporated technology.

All of our staff are selected for the passion they have for excellence and their commitment to exceptional customer service. We listen and respond to customer requirements, we keep abreast of issues and legislation affecting the use of email applications and we have strong partnerships with organizations such as Novell, Microsoft, Sun and Oracle to ensure that we deliver user-friendly, comprehensive and industry leading solutions.

Gert: What brought you guys to GroupWise?
Gloria: Working as certified Novell resellers in Australia, the founders were continually frustrated by the lack of technology partners providing business efficient solutions with tight integration of email for organisations using GroupWise, particularly in the area of email archiving and retention. While there were a few options available, none could adequately meet the requirements established by our customers. Thus, a small group decided to branch out and form SilverDane to purpose build tools to meet this growing need for applications that would extend the security, performance, and functionality of GroupWise.

Gert: How is SilverDane’s archiving solution different from competitors?
Gloria: SilverDane Archive™ is the only product available for GroupWise that features stubbing. With stubbing the message store is reduced considerably because the message body and attachments are stored in the archive, rather than the email application. Users, however, can still securely access all their messaging data from within their GroupWise client via a stub, making our product extremely user‐friendly, minimising the need for any training and enabling organizations to have seamless implementations. Moreover, SilverDane Archive™ fully indexes all emails and attachments and in so doing provides powerful capabilities for users to conduct searches within both messages and attachments.

Unlike many other products available, SilverDane Archive™ can guarantee legislative compliance. Our software is not policy based. It captures every single email, appointment, task, phone message and note that is created or received in GroupWise, thereby ensuring evidentiary integrity and compliance with retention regulations. With our business intelligent grooming, items can be categorized and expired as necessary but a permanent record of all items and activity is retained.

SilverDane Archive™ also offers greater scalability than our competitors by combining the technologies of our partners, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and the Linux community, with true single instancing of email data, including attachments. Stubbing and single instancing combine to make the email system work more efficiently and reduce the associated costs of storage, maintenance and back-up.

We believe our product really stands out from the other software available so we encourage people to contact us for a free 30 day trial.

Gert: What platform do you support / or need?
Gloria: SilverDane Archive™ is a truly cross platform solution supporting:

• multiple email systems, namely Novell GroupWise 7.03 and above, and Microsoft Exchange 2003 and 2007. Lotus Notes support is due for release in early 2010.
• multiple operating systems – both Windows and Linux support is provided;
• multiple databases – MS SQL, Oracle and MySQL are all supported.

Despite our expanding support for other email platforms, SilverDane continues to have an exceptionally strong dedication to its GroupWise customer base and also its relationship with Novell. In providing support for Exchange and Lotus Notes we are seeking to provide our existing customers with more flexibility but our core focus is still with GroupWise.

We were the first to market with support for SOAP; the first to market with stubbing for GroupWise; the first to market with support for Service Pack 3.0 for GroupWise, taking advantage of the new functionality that Novell had enabled in the API. SilverDane continues to work closely with Novell to enhance our product and take rapid advantage of new technologies that will benefit our customers.

Gert: What does the future hold for SilverDane and Archive?
Gloria: Our product development schedule and road map currently extends through to 2015. Unfortunately, much of this information is classified as commercial in confidence. I can, however, assure you that SilverDane invests over 50% of our revenue into research and development to ensure that we continue to be first to market with breakthrough technology that meets regulatory compliance and supports open standards. We will also continue to work hand-in-hand with Novell to ensure that we support all new releases of GroupWise within three months of the release date, including the forthcoming Bonsai.

Gert: Where to go to for support, info, demo and other questions?
Gloria: For more information, please go to our website: www.silverdane.com. You can also send any questions to archive@silverdane.com or use the same email address to request a webinar or a free 30 day trial. Existing customers and those trialling our product are given access to our elite support including online call logging and management, telephone support and access to our knowledgebase.

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