I've just flipped the switch to sync over the changed web pages; with this, Scalix 11.4 is available for download now.
This is an exciting new release; I've been using it myself for the past 2 months (well, the final version and some development stuff before that, that is!) and I just love it. Couple things in brief:
SWA has a new fresh look; some have commented it a bit too bold, I personally love it and enjoy using it quite a bit more. And for the others, there is a switch to go back to the old version - we have introduced user-selectable themes into the product and a SDK to create your own theme will be released soon.
Also in SWA, I can now look at multiple calendars at once using the new calendar overlay modes. For me, this is highly useful as I like to split my personal, work and travel calendars into separate folders, now I can combine them as needed.
Webmail access has become more snappy and fast as well; I have the 3rd-largest mailbox in our company at 4,1 GB, and a couple 100,000 items across a number of folders - only one of our more active sales guys and my CEO beats me on this. With this new release, load times have decreased, switching between messages is faster than before and some processing, including sending of messages happens in the background. It's way more useable than ever before for people like me.
- Speaking of multiple calendars, I now have some in my mailbox that I don't maintain myself at all, or anybody else, for the matter. These are, for example, schedules of my favourite sports teams (and I'll load the Euro 2008 football championships schedule pretty soon (for our American friends - it's the real thing I am talking about here
) - being German, there's an open tab with our Italian friends that needs to be closed. On the more serious side, I also have a couple of national holiday schedules - I regularly work with and in the US, Canada, the UK and Germany, so I need to track all of those (who outside Canada knows that they had 'Victoria Day' last Monday.... hmp... probably the brits do? Or is this a different Victoria?).
Now... 11.4 has a fancy new feature called proxy folders that let's the server keep track of such calendar feeds as available on the Internet and showing them through all your Scalix clients of choice - being a regular user of SWA, Outlook as well as Apple's iCal, I like this quite a bit. It doesn't stop with WebCal calendars, I get my favourite newsfeeds on world news, IT industry topics through RSS as well, right in all my clients. And our internal Subversion repository offers change logs through RSS - so I can track work going on in development using my email client - very useful.
The Apple user in me can now schedule meetings in iCal as well and see Free/Busy information right in that client - we have further extended CalDAV support in this release. Sunbird 0.8 can be used and also we've managed to support Firefox 3.0 (on the Beta 5 level, quick smoke testing done on recently released RC1) for SWA.
Outlook 2007 support is improved, SmartCache has better useability, stability and error management. SSL connections now use the Windows certificate store and one can connect to a Scalix server using a hostname alias and an IP address as well - for someone like me who's often doing temporary setups without proper DNS for testing, this is an invaluable feature. All that runs and is supported on Vista, couple smaller items to sort out, but it's basically good to go! (Well, as long as that Vista thing runs within a VM on my Mac desktop, which it does for me, and I can simply close it if I've had enough of it, that is!)
All of the above is available in the free community edition; no changes to licensing or pricing for this release, as promised, and nothing planned for the near future either.
Now, for those of you running Small Business or Enterprise Edition, there are more news.
First, you can add built-in AntiSpam and ZeroHour AntiVirus, powered by Commtouch's RPD technology (see http://www.commtouch.com for details on how this works). This is an online service with a really good detection rate and extremely low false positives. It is a for-cost option, but given recent experience, I must say it's well worth it. We switched from using a homegrown SpamAssassin/Blacklists-based solution to these features a couple weeks back and the amount of Spam that reaches my Inbox has gone down by 90% - and all that remains is actually tagged as 'possible Spam' by the solution, only about 1 message per day slips through. Given my volume of email, that's great. The additional level of Virus protection adds a further layer of security in a sensitive area - that's good as well.
Second, we'll start shipping the optional ActiveSync module soon - this hasn't made this initial ship date as we're still refining some of the operations and it's in internal Beta right now. I am confident that we'll have something ready next month - coincidentally aligned with Apple's launch of the iPhone 2.0 software that includes ActiveSync support - I look forward dumping all Nokia and Blackberry devices I have used in the past for a single device that then hopefully meets all my mobile needs.
So as you see - this is packed with new stuff; along the lines, we have fixed a good number of bugs too, so I'll again dare saying (I have used this before, but we're still moving forward) that this is the best Scalix 11, ever.
More details on all changes and fixes can be found here:
http://www.scalix.com/enterprise/technology/news_11.4.php
http://downloads.scalix.com/.community/11.4/RELEASE_NOTES.html
And again, it's available for download and purchase now, in the usual spots!
So... upward and onward - now what's next?
The internal codename for 11.4 was 'Snowmobile' as it has kept us busy through winter and early spring. Most snow is gone for the year (well, at least at our office locations and I can bet you that it lasted for a while in Ottawa), so we'll now switch gears and look out for blue skies and open waters - next planned release is 11.5, called 'Bluenose' and for those of you who are not familiar with that name and associated history, have a look at the Canadian 10-cent coin or check Google for it. I've done a tourist cruise on the Bluenose II a good 15 years back (had to get up at 4 am to grab the tickets, was well worth it), so we'll see to create something that's worth carrying the name.
If you have any comments on 11.4 and how look like it, please post them here - all feedback appreciated.
Cheers,
Florian