Its ability to work easily on older hardware and relative immunity to virus has made the progression to the GroupWise 7 collaboration suite a logical step for TAFE Tasmania.

The organization is three quarters the way through its client rollout, which when complete will total some 2500 desktops across 15 sites around the state.

The client version will run on Windows XP machines, which themselves are replacing older Windows 2000 PCs.

Prior to the rollout, which began late last year on the server side, TAFE Tasmania ran GroupWise 5.5.

"It is a big jump. We have jumped [GroupWise] 6 and 6.5. So you have got an antiquated 1990s client going to a cutting edge version," said Matt Gray, Team Leader, IT support and infrastructure at TAFE Tasmania.

Gray said the newer version had many compelling features, but signaled out security.

"GroupWise 7 provides a level of security that other collaboration packages are not offering at the moment. With the low number of security and virus issues and the low level of administrative overhead, GroupWise fits our organisations needs."

On the server side, GroupWise 7 Postoffices and Message Transfer Agent (MTA) are running on Netware 6.5.

Gray was equally impressed with its performance and ease to implement.

"The server side of the product runs on older hardware without any noticeable level of performance degradation, and the reliability of the product makes my job easier to convince our management team we have implemented the right choice for mail within TAFE," he said.

Looking ahead, Gray said TAFE Tasmania will evaluate some of the portable options to run on top GroupWise. It currently has some Blackberry products on trial amongst the IT staff.