I was contacted by a very good GroupWise customer in the Netherlands this week. They have to change the 'Preferred EMail ID' for all of their 2500 users early next week. They had seen a demo of GWAVA Vertigo and they were wondering how GWAVA's Vertigo could help make this work easier. We extended one of Vertigo's features for them today, send them a new version and now they're able to do this in a much simpler and cost effective way. They love it !!! (and it was the customer who urged me to say this, not me ;-)

Now, let me give you a quick overview of what the 'Preferred EMail ID' does first. In the 'old' days with GroupWise 5.x we used SMTP/GWIA aliasses in order to use specific email addresses like 'r.vanbueren@gwava.com' for a GroupWise mailbox. Using GWIA aliasses however has a couple of big disadvantages and should be avoided when possible nowadays because there is a better option now. The address set as GWIA alias is not being used in e.g. VCF's (electronic business cards), is not being used in the GroupWise System Address Book and not being used for S/MIME certificates for Secure Messaging. If you want to know more about Secure Messaging btw, check out Tay Kratzer's masterpiece 'the GroupWise 7 Administration Guide in which you find a chapter about Secure Messaging. In those cases GroupWise uses the address being defined by the 'Preferred Address Format' instead.

Since GroupWise 6.5 we can avoid using GWIA aliasses and can be very specific on what kind of address we want to use for a particular user, because Novell allows us to override the 'Preferred Address Format' on a user level. Novell made a nice option in ConsoleOne to bulk-convert GWIA aliasses to these 'Preferred Email ID's too. Some people have never seen that option and I know some companies are still using GWIA aliasses! This 'Preferred EMail ID' is then used within the whole GroupWise system. So it's used for VCF's, S/MIME etc.

Most European customers, like this one in particular, can't live without this 'Preferred EMail ID' because they like to use both the First name and Last name in their e-mail addresses. But they can't use the default 'Preffered Address Format' in order to do so for several reasons:

1) userid@Internet domain name -> doesn't provide what's needed
2) firstname.lastname@Internet domain name -> doesn't either, because some people have spaces in their last name. Like with my name this would result in 'roel.van Bueren@gwava.com' which is not a valid email address because of the space in it.
3) first initial last name@internet domain name -> same issue as issue number 2

So, this override field is used a lot but managing for multiple users can be quite hard from within ConsoleOne because it means you have to go into the details screen of every single mailbox to change it.

Have a look at this Flash video which not only you shows you one way of changing the Preferred EMail ID but also shows you how to change multiple properties of a user's mailbox.