Scalix and Blackberry Integration

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georgew
Posts: 46
Joined: Thu Dec 29, 2005 12:36 pm

Scalix and Blackberry Integration

Postby georgew » Sat Oct 18, 2008 6:20 am

First of all apologies for the negativity of this post but I'm fed up and am looking for some sort of positive feedback to convince me Scalix is still the way to go.

We have been a Scalix Enterprise house for around three years now and in that time have had something of a rough ride both with the product and the people who are meant to be supporting us. We've ben running in production since 9.4 and are now on 11.4 and in that period of time have experienced everything from great support, in the 9.4 days when we had an account that had been accidentally deleted and would restore, to diabolical support, a request for information which we logged with regards to omcontain which took 3 months to get a response, the response was that they have no information but we've chrged your support account anyways. And in the middle we had a reseller for support, who effectively sulked each time we logged a call as we wanted them to investigate and resolve the issue rather than just randomly poke around.

As for the product promises of new features seem to come and go, mostly not materialise and when they do they're a fraction of the promised feature. iCal support comes to mind. Sorry guys but you can't claim iCal support when you have to delete and recreate the profiles in iCal once a month due to incompatibilities between the two and god forbid you should date touch the calendar it screw up your entire email account so it can't be accessed through outlook and crashes and users outlook when they try to book you for a meeting.


Finally NotifyLink. I'm in the process of trialling this at the moment and honestly I'm under impressed. The documentation if you wish to set it up yourself is very poor. The hosted service took nearly two weeks to setup by notifylinks partner, it doesn't sync contacts or tasks, which is 50% of what the integration is meant to do. To top this all off I use a BB 8800 and on that the battery runs down 50% quicker and the email push requires an additional app which doesn't display on the front page or notify you on the screen if you have new emails.

Unfortunately the two choices are exchange and scalix as I see it. Pretty much the only thing keeping with Scalix at the moment is my comfort in the fact I know how good our backup strategy is, something I could never claim of Exchange and the pain and agony I would have to go through to move everyone to Exchange.

echelon
Posts: 126
Joined: Wed Jun 07, 2006 2:45 pm

Postby echelon » Sat Oct 18, 2008 7:34 am

I can't comment on the Scalix paid support, since I couldn't even get a quote for it.

We have been running Scalix 10.x with the onsite Notify Gateway v4.0. (We had initially started with the hosted IMAP gateway.) The hosted edition was also initially buggy but that has generally been resolved and a lot of it has to do with making sure the Blackberry devices have the correct network settings and latest clients.

I most cases when I call notify tech support I get through to someone immediately and the questions get resolved quickly. I think Notify is still small enough that they actually want to keep customers.

I am in the process of upgrading to Scalix 11 and NLES 4.5.2. The evaluation/test setup seemed to work well.

The ical addition in Scalix 11.x - although not complete, is also a big benefit for Linux users who prefer Thunderbird over Evolution (i.e. everyone.)

jaime.pinto
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Posts: 709
Joined: Fri Feb 23, 2007 6:50 pm
Location: Toronto - Canada

Postby jaime.pinto » Sat Oct 18, 2008 11:53 am

I agree that I have seen the full spectrum of experiences with scalix as well. But I found my own solution, and I'm just going to lay it down.

1) My "scalix support" is a gentlemen agreement with a very knowledgeable reseller in Canada 3 time zones way from me. If I hit a point of discontent, or even for simple upgrades I just email or phone him ahead of time. I give him privileged access on a specific port to the server, and for a very restricted period, and personally supervise the session. So far he has been solving all our problems. Once he finishes he send me the bill for the 1 or 2 hours that it may take and there it goes. If it requires escalation he does that himself directly with scalix, since he knows everybody there. In the overall We get the support that we need for a cost that we consider reasonable. If you call Scalix they will recommend a reliable and trustworthy reseller to work with you just like they did with me, even if across globe.

As for Notify, I also agree, a much different experience, in the sense that it feels like they are always there for you. I also started with hosted services, but quickly understood that there are technical problems on the interaction between our scalix server and their shared server across the Internet that are very difficult to overcome. So in this case I also found my own solution, which is working extremely well:

2) We purchased our own NL Ent server, and we keep it in the same rack as the scalix server. But I worked out a support arrangement with Notify in which they are the ones doing full maintenance on our server remotely when I need. All I have to do is start a web like application that gives them remote display. What used to take me 2-3 hours to learn how to do myself, always afraid I would break the whole thing, now takes them 15-20 minutes with them on the phone, and all I do is what the sequence of mouse clicks. Sometimes they ask to type a password and that is all. They also do some housekeeping on the fly as they come across inconsistencies. Much more effective.

You can call it "outsourcing" support on both cases.
Image Jaime
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florian
Scalix
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Posts: 3852
Joined: Fri Dec 24, 2004 8:16 am
Location: Frankfurt, Germany
Contact:

Re: Scalix and Blackberry Integration

Postby florian » Sat Oct 18, 2008 12:12 pm

Couple of things I am interested in....

georgew wrote:... to diabolical support, a request for information which we logged with regards to omcontain which took 3 months to get a response, the response was that they have no information but we've chrged your support account anyways.


Can you PM me (or email me, address is well known, <givenname>@scalix.com) with the Support Ticket Number that you're referring to here? I'd like to review this.

And in the middle we had a reseller for support, who effectively sulked each time we logged a call as we wanted them to investigate and resolve the issue rather than just randomly poke around.


If you want to tell me through one of the above-mentioned channels who that reseller is, I'll review that as well and/or get back to you with further recommendations on who to work with.

As for the product promises of new features seem to come and go, mostly not materialise and when they do they're a fraction of the promised feature. iCal support comes to mind. Sorry guys but you can't claim iCal support when you have to delete and recreate the profiles in iCal once a month due to incompatibilities between the two and god forbid you should date touch the calendar it screw up your entire email account so it can't be accessed through outlook and crashes and users outlook when they try to book you for a meeting.


Can you explain that item in more detail? I've been a Mac user for ages and have been using iCal since we started supporting it. It's been a rough ride in the beginning, as it was all new technology and Apple's client has gone through a couple of updates as well, improving things. I'm pretty happy with the current version - using Apple iCal 3.0.5 with Scalix 11.4.2. We recently took part in calconnect.org's latest interop and actually did work with the Apple client development folks to drill down into a couple further compatibility issues on both sides; those will be fixed in one of the next updates. The most serious limitation currently is the Free/Busy-publish behaviour, I hope we can complete that for the 11.4.3 patch, although it might take us until 11.5.

Thanks for your ongoing trust and support, although it seems that you've see this from various perspectives. Let me know if I can help and I'll see what I can do,

Florian.
Florian von Kurnatowski, Die Harder!

jangi
Posts: 193
Joined: Fri May 16, 2008 2:12 am

Postby jangi » Mon Oct 20, 2008 12:47 am

My two cents on BlackBerry support... due to RIM being, let's just leave it as "less than open", full integration is not likely in the near future. If you are a "glass half full" kind of person, then maybe someday it will happen.

The BlackBerry "Messages" system integrates with a BES or BIS server. BES only works with Exchange or Notes. BIS works with POP/IMAP, but unless you're a wireless carrier I'm not sure how to get it. I'm not even sure if they run the BIS software, it may be hosted by RIM themselves. One major complaint with using BIS is the speed. I've seen 30+ minute delivery times when I setup with an IMAP account. This has to do with how often the BIS server is checking your mail account. NotifyLink, Funambol, and other 3rd party vendors, all require the installation of a proprietary java mail client which may or may not be used in "push" mode. Here is the best of both worlds:

Setup a BIS email address for your BB:
EMail address: bob@vzw.blackberry.net
Auto BCC: bob@myscalixserver.com

On scalix, issue the commands:

sxaa --user jangi --redirect bob@vzw.blackberry.net --retain --not --header "bob@vzw.blackberry.net" --title BlackBerry
sxaa --user jangi --file "Sent" --header "jangi@vzw.blackberry.net" --title BlackBerry-Sent

This will redirect all incoming email from bob@myscalixserver.com to his BB, instantly (I can finish reading my email on my BB before Outlook even has a copy). Also, it will BCC bob's scalix account on all email sent from the BB, and file it in a folder named "Sent."
AFAIK, it is not possible to file it in the Sent Items folder due to a Scalix limitation.

Free, completely integrated, works out of the box.

For those of you hoping that Astrasync will solve this once it is available (and Scalix supports Activesync), unfortunately not. Astrasync will install a separate email client that will not integrate with the "Messages" screen.
http://forum.astrasync.com/Default.aspx?g=posts&t=5
"Legal Issues".... Oh, and they don't support HTML messages yet.

As for contact/calendar syncing I think this message is already long enough. :roll:

chengcsw
Posts: 20
Joined: Sat May 24, 2008 9:31 am

Does the patch work with BBDM 4.7?

Postby chengcsw » Wed Nov 26, 2008 12:44 am

I am using the followings:
    Scalix 1.14.2
    Scalix Outlook Connector 1.14.2
    BBDM v4.7
    Blackberry 8700v
    Outlook 2003
    Windows XP SP3


Doesthe patch include with Outlook connector work with BBDM v4.7?


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