Toffa International Limited is a leading provider of productivity-enhancing products designed exclusively for use with Novell's GroupWise messaging solution. Toffa customers come from a wide range of sectors and industries, but all have the need for efficient, reliable communications within their organization and around the globe-a need met by the winning combination of GroupWise and Toffa's SyncWise products.

London-based law firm Theodore Goddard is no newcomer to innovative business and technology practices. Focused into specialist groups, 175 Theodore Goddard solicitors advise on all aspects of business law from offices in London and Brussels, and through associates worldwide. Providing a full range of corporate legal services and advice since 1902, the firm's tradition of client care, combined with up-to-date skills and constant technological innovation, continues today.

With the number of lawyers using Palm* personal organizers increasing, Theodore Goddard needed a GroupWise-Palm synchronisation solution that would eliminate double appointment bookings and enable full access to GroupWise capabilities on the road. Because, when Theodore Goddard attorneys scheduled appointments with clients using their Palm devices, often they would discover when attempting to synchronise GroupWise schedules that colleagues or assistants had booked appointments in the same time slots, resulting in rescheduling hassles and increased administrative overhead. In addition, accessing GroupWise e-mail and other features required that attorneys carry along laptop computers, creating additional baggage and support needs for the company's IT staff.

After evaluating their unique user needs, Theodore Goddard IT personnel selected Toffa's SyncWise solution for keeping Palm users synchronised to their GroupWise system, reducing scheduling disasters and leveraging easy-to-use connections to any of today's Palm-connected devices.

"Our use of SyncWise over the last two years has increased rapidly," said William James, partner of Theodore Goddard. "In fact, we served as a SyncWise beta site during product development. Because of the way our GroupWise system was set up, it provided Toffa engineers with a real business with real needs to adapt and perfect the product to our requirements. The result has been a robust GroupWise-Palm synchronization product we can rely on. We can confidently use GroupWise calendaring and scheduling because our mobile users can synchronize their GroupWise scheduling through SyncWise and Palm devices to avoid conflicts. In addition, our Palm users can access their GroupWise e-mail, calendar, schedule, and notes."

Syncwise and SyncWisePro products allow 16- and 32-bit GroupWise users to detect and avoid scheduling conflicts by synchronizing GroupWise with any Palm-connected device. "For the most part, competing products are designed to interface with many systems, GroupWise being just one," said Toffa Managing Director Chris Jukes. "For example, Palm Inc. provides software for synchronising e-mail for Microsoft Outlook*, and this same software can be used to synchronise e-mail for 32-bit GroupWise installations. However, since the Palm software utilises MAPI to communicate, its functionality is limited, so we saw further GroupWise development as an opportunity niche, and especially for GroupWise 16-bit versions."

"Because we write software exclusively for GroupWise utilising the GroupWise Object API, we are able to provide a very tight integration. In fact, we nearly always win in a head-to-head comparison with competing solutions," noted Jukes. "Other solutions can only synchronize e-mail from the GroupWise inbox, and are unable to extract e-mail for other GroupWise folders. SyncWisePro provides full synchronisation to GroupWise e-mail, calendar, schedule, notes, and full compatibility with GroupWise Remote. SyncWise offers selectable synchronisation periods, and fully preserves Alarms, Private and Completed flags, etc., in both directions. In addition, SyncWise adds GroupWise features to Palm, such as location, people invited, etc."

Use of SyncWise is expanding rapidly as the product has proven itself stable and reliable as a professional time management tool. "SyncWise delivers very effective GroupWise synchronisation with Palm devices, and Toffa has provided excellent development support, patches and other technical assistance," offered James. And Toffa provides online updates to users of SyncWise to update their installations without having to download and re-install the entire software package. In turn, we continue to be very proactive with feedback to Toffa, simply because SyncWise helps our staff make the most of busy schedules."

In today's up-to-the-second legal world, keeping employees, partners and staff connected to the latest information-in the office, on the road, in hotels, airports and elsewhere-is an enterprise mandate. With SyncWise Pro installed on their GroupWise system, Theodore Goddard lawyers are now reaching for Palm devices to schedule and synchronise their GroupWise appointments, check e-mail, notes, and much more.

Toffa provides SyncWise and SyncWise Pro versions. SyncWise provides Calendar and To Do List synchronisation. SyncWisePro provides Calendar, To Do List, Address Book, e-mail and notes synchronization. Full function evaluation versions are available for download at http://www.toffa.com.

Toffa is partnering with Aether Software (www.aethersoftware.com) to produce a wireless synchronization infrastructure using modems/mobile phones and other devices to connect to a GroupWise server. Aether Software currently supports these services on Palm and Windows* CE (PocketPC) and WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) devices, and Toffa engineers are integrating SyncWisePro with Aether Software's mobile client/server technology to bring the full power of GroupWise to the road warrior, enabling full synchronisation of GroupWise (e-mail, address book, calendar, notes and task lists) to their Palm. CE, WAP phone or other device regardless of location. Toffa plans to ship this in Q3 2000.

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