Scalix Connect for Blackberry Enterprise Server Beta 1

[florian]

Folks,

I really hope that we can prove out that we've learned our lesson with this one. We've announced another new product today, Scalix Connect for Blackberry Enterprise Server. And yes, it's still under development and there are a number of issues to resolve and clean up .... but .... I'm still very happy to be able to add that a very functional public beta is available for download today. So - I'll be able to have a much better sleep over the next few months, not having to respond to about 50 questions per day on when it will be available.

It's almost fully functional as well, email, calendar, contacts, tasks - all are there. The missing bits are support for RIM's latest BES version, V5, so you'll have to stick with V4.1 for the time being, and if you run multiple Scalix servers, you'll have to have a separate BES for each of them. Both restrictions will be lifted in the final 1.0 release, this is currently planned for mid/late Q3, and I think we're on track for that. Full details can be found in the Release Notes.

As for personal user experience, I've been carrying two devices for the last couple months, my trusted personal iPhone on which I've been using ActiveSync, plus a Blackberry 9000 "Bold" to see how our development on this piece is going. Given both use push-type technology to deliver email and provide for calendar and contact updates, it was quite a bit of fun to watch on a day-by-day basis, which of the two would vibrate/ring/be-annoying first in getting these bits and pieces of information to me. I can report back that they are kinda on-par now. As for personal preference, I still like the iPhone better for reading things, browsing and as a general device, however knowing that I sometimes write longer messages, the Blackberry's keyboard comes in quite handy at times. Also, my boss is happy about me using this one, as Blackberry data plans - at least here in Germany - are substantially cheaper for international roaming than the general device data plan needed by ActiveSync; not sure how this scales for other people, but with my email volume, a week in our Ottawa HQ is about 120 EUR for ActiveSync and only about 15-20 EUR for Blackberry on my Vodafone Germany plan. Sorry, dear friends at Microsoft and Apple - clear winner on this item.

The Beta is public - you can even run it against a Scalix 11.4.4 Community Edition server, althoug the final product will be available for commercial versions of Scalix only.

Good day for us, hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

Cheers from Linuxtag in Berlin
Florian