the floodgates have opened. Scalix 11.4.4 has been made available for Evaluation and Community Edition downloads as well as for commercial purchase. ActiveSync 1.0 is also available as part of that Eval and shipments have begun. This marks a major milestone of one of the most challenging software development projects I've been involved in. Documentation, Release Notes and details on those releases can be found in the usual places.
If you want to play around with all of this, the quickest way is to fill out our Evaluation form, you'll get the download links within minutes of you doing this.
11.4.4 does not bring any new features; this is by design. It provides more than 200 fixes and stability improvements, so you really want to upgrade your Scalix 11.4 installation to this latest service release. A major area of improvement is support for Windows Vista, Vista 64-bit and Outlook 2007, where we have resolved the all known stability issues as well as added support for Windows Desktop Search. If you use SmartCache, it will provide for a local Index of your mail that can be searched from both the desktop and from within Outlook 2007, resulting in a great search experience.
The No Features thing is by design. From now on, we'll be very strict on what can be added in a patch release, i.e. in something that changes in the 3rd digit only. We will also start maintaining 2 releases at the same time, so when Scalix 11.5 appears in Q3 with a good number of new features, there will still be 11.4.x patch releases and that will go on until 12 appears, at which point we'll be maintaining 11.5 and 12. So: clear separation between feature releases and patches/service packs, making the decision to upgrade or not easier and more lightweight.
We'll start talking about 11.5 soon, and again, another patch for 11.4, 11.4.5 is on the to-do list (not much to do yet, this is really watching for Bugzilla reports and stuff coming in through technical support, although rumor is that the long-standing Can't-print-month-view-in-SWA-bug has been fixed yesterday and that fix will be published in 11.4.5). Also, I trust that in spite of our heavy-lifting on the QA/test front for ActiveSync 1.0, we'll probably have missed something and we'll therefore also publish a 1.0.1 at some point.
Don't let this stop you from using it today, I've been running ActiveSync in production for the last 9 months, the initial experience has been, errhh, intermittent, but right now I'm very happy and have stopped carrying that extra IMAP setup around on my iPhone, that I had, just in case. It's all good, jolly, happy and reliable for me now, and with a 7 GB mailbox and 200-400 messages per day passing through, that means something. I told the AS development team yesterday that, when I finally closed all the Bugzilla entries for 11.4.4 and AS 1.0 as I usually do myself, this generated 465 emails to my account in a very short timeframe. That very iPhone was sitting on my desk next to me when I did it and I thought that this would drive it crazy. Well, in a way it did because the vibrating alarm almost didn't stop anymore, but the messages came in in real time, and they disappeared as quickly as I deleted them (well, I don't really need to know by email that "This bug is closed now...", but that's the way Bugzilla works, and there are other notifications I don't want to miss, so can't turn 'em off) and when I was finished, my Inbox was as pristine and in-sync as ever. No funny signs of stale messages and timeouts that have haunted me through the early eval period. Good stuff, indeed, and I don't say that because I have to.
And ... for those really waiting for mobility stuff, but who are not using ActiveSync-enabled devices and rather prefer the red pill over the blue one (or the other way around, that's very much dependent on how you see it...
)... stay tuned, we'll have good news for you very, very soon.Anyway, get all this good stuff in any shape or form, and happy to see your feedback, at last.
Best,
Florian