Since I don't hate Gropewise, I can't blog about hating it personally, though there are, of course, many colleagues who do. They hate what happened to them during the migration, they hate that it's not what they had before, and they hate that all the hype on which it was sold to them, has turned out to be mere hype and not substance. They hate that a user requirements document drawn up several years ago at the start of the project has bound them for life, despite requirements - and technology - having moved on considerably in the interim.
They hate nameless, faceless feeback email addresses rather than flesh-and-blood people to scream their frustration at. And they hate the sympathetic looks colleagues elsewhere give them when they splutter about Gropewise. "Gropewise?", these colleagues say. "Oh, we've just dumped that! Didn't work for us - we're a university, not a government department. We've gone to Outlook."
I don't hate Gropewise. In fact, the fact that it's not Microsoft is a distinct advantage to me, though the one thing that I do dislike about it is its habit, these last few days, of reducing us Macsters to the gutter level of Microsoft slaves. By bombing out. Not quite an "illegal operation", or a "general protection fault", and it doesn't scramble the entire OS... but on an inherently stable system, to get an error message saying that Gropewise has lost contact with the Post Office and will now terminate... is a sick reminder of how flakey the Microsoft world is, and how everyone who inhabits it just has to put up with that. Sad, sad, sad.
But given the strength of feeling against Gropewise in some quarters, it does raise the question: is Gropewise a good or a bad thing? And, as with any debate, the best possible arbiter is... Googlefight!
A Googlefight between "love groupwise" and "hate groupwise" delivers the loving option the winner by 253 000 to 94 600. A Googlefight between "groupwise rocks" and "groupwise sucks" likewise has the rocking option ahead by 119 000 to 29 200.
So that's that then - the product itself bears the approval of the Universe. Of course, the local installation and configuration of it might be something else, entirely....