It's been a long time coming, but the Hotpatch 3 bundle for GroupWise 8 SP2 was finally released yesterday. The hotpatch includes a slew of significant bug fixes for the server back end as well as the client.  We had experienced various agent patches and quite a few different client crashes.  Novell has been really good about fixing those issues along the way and providing updated code, but it's good to see an "Official" hot patch.  The prior release was in January 2011, nearly 9 months ago.  Last year, Novell had committed to two hot patches per service pack, approximately three months apart. So it is interesting to go 9 full months between hot patches with no major service pack on the horizon. In fact, I am speculating that the upcoming release of GroupWise Ascot has taken priority and focus of the developers, putting GroupWise 8 in the back seat. That's just my guess.

I updated our production GroupWise systems last night with the hot patch, and have not seen any problems so far. However, I'm most interested in how the client performs. The Server back end has been pretty stable since GW8 SP2 HP2, and the client is where I've experienced most issues lately.

You can download the hotpatch here: Download Novell GroupWise 8SP2 Hotpatch 3 Here
(You must have active maintenance on GroupWise to obtain access to these patches)

You can view the release notes including defect fixes at the same link.  For reference, the GroupWise 8 SP2 HP3 build numbers are:

Windows Client: Build 96933, Dated 9/14/2011
Server Agents: Build 96933, Dated 9/13/2011