Do: Develop and follow a regular maintenance schedule. This is something that your consultant or the manufacturer can suggest. Most groupware systems allow you to automate maintenance routines and will also allow you to schedule the routines during off-peak hours to avoid user impact. Regular scheduled maintenance is the key to a reliable system.

Don’t: Don’t expect unskilled or unfocused IS staff to administer and support a groupware system. This is especially true in a large environment. Many times companies who have several hundred, or even thousands of users, expect one administrator to run the network infrastructure, the servers, the groupware system, and several other systems and applications. Groupware systems are complex and deserve focused attention. If your organization cannot afford a dedicated administrator, at least make sure the administrator has received whatever training is available and make sure you have a good relationship with a highly skilled consultant. You can also distribute the administration duties among several people to ease the load on a single person. Your groupware system will become mission critical to your organization. An administrator who knows a lot about one thing is sometimes more valuable than one who knows a little about many things.

Don’t: Don’t be surprised when the groupware system finds quirks in your environment or when your environment creates quirks with the groupware system. A complex system such as this will sometimes react slightly differently in each environment. Most of the issues you find will be small, but you will need to be willing to work with them or work around them.

Do: Perform internal alpha and beta test phases before implementation to discover the quirks that might occur in your specific network environment. Alpha testing should be done in a lab environment separate from the production system. Experienced and inexperienced users should run through written test matrices, and report whether the outcome of common procedures is as expected.

Beta tests should be performed with a limited roll-out on the production system. Choose a small workgroup of users who are willing to go through training, use the product, and report any problems they may find. Survey the users at the end of the beta period to gather information they may not have reported during the beta.

These extra steps of alpha and beta testing are, believe it or not, very beneficial. When I first participated in a roll-out that included these tests, I thought they were unnecessary roadblocks to the actual implementation. However, every time these testing procedures were followed, we found issues that were much easier to deal with before full implementation. Many times we discovered show-stopping bugs, reported them to the manufacturer, and received a field test patch within a few days allowing us to proceed. Very few users were impacted by the problems because they were discovered in the testing phase.

In short, many IT professionals act as though there is never enough time to test, but plenty of time to troubleshoot…that is until they find themselves in the throes of debugging a poorly implemented production system. Real users are a lot more critical and unforgiving than beta testers, so make sure that you don’t short change the testing portion of your deployment plan.

Planning

involves designing the system architecture, putting the system intheright environment, setting aside enough resources, and planning for growth. You might also consider hiring an experienced professional as a consultant.

Do: Put a lot of
time and effort into designing the system architecture. Make sure
that management knows that groupware is more than an application.
It is a complex system that requires proper planning and resources.

Don’t: Don’t force
a groupware system into an environment that will not allow the system
to do its job. If you want users to really use the system, then give
it hearty, dedicated resources instead of pulling an old server out
of the closet, or making do with a server that is already taxed. If
you want users to share data, not just two-line messages, then make
sure the network infrastructure has enough bandwidth to support the
communication your organization wishes to benefit from.

Do: Start out with
dedicated servers that have plenty of disk space and plenty of memory
(specifics are recommended for individual systems from their manufacturers).
Some groupware systems separate administrative processes from messaging
processes to some extent. In the spirit of dedicating resources, it’s
a good idea to isolate the core administrative processes on a separate
server, away from the day-to-day message traffic. For example, Novell
GroupWise uses a “Domain”, which is a database that houses administrative
information about the rest of the system. Putting this database and
its MTA (Message Transfer Agent) on a dedicated server will reduce
the chances of corruption and will give you gates, or shut off valves
if you will, when you need to isolate a problem during troubleshooting.

Do: Plan for growth.
Your users will use this system more than you expect. They will quickly
learn that they can’t live without every feature and function, so
plan for it. Purchase more disk space than you think you need. Buy
a more sizable server than you think you need. Also, build in fail-safes.
Novell GroupWise allows to you to configure multiple agents to service
a single post office. Configure an extra agent to be activated in
times of emergency or unusually high traffic, and have the resources
to support it.

Do: Consider hiring
a consultant during the planning phase to help with the design of
the system. Do yourself (and your company) a favor and contract an
experienced professional to review your current environment, make
recommendations for changes, produce an architectural overview of
an ideal system (with guidelines to get your system there), and to
suggest an implementation schedule. Realistically, most IS departments
have the ability to perform the install and the roll-out to the end-users.
If you are wondering where to spend your money, put it into the design
rather than hired hands to push buttons during the implementation.
I can’t stress this enough: a poorly designed system will have bottlenecks,
will not run efficiently and will not give you the return on your
investment that a properly designed groupware system can deliver.

I can’t stress this enough:
a poorly designed system will have bottlenecks, will not run efficiently
and will not give you the return on your investment that a properly
designed groupware system can deliver.