A lot of questions from someone considering scalix

[cendrizzi]

I have looked at Scalix with interest for some time. Currently we have Groupwise and I have become frustrated with the system all together (7 have issues). My thoughts are leaning towards letting people switch to Outlook since 7 have decent support and then getting everyone using that. That will facilitate the changeover to Scalix or Exchange. But this comes with a lot of questions:

1. How would I migrate. The cumbersome method would be to have everyone create PST local copies from their groupwise stuff (well I and my staff would do it). Then import these PST's to the scalix server. I know exchange has some good methods, what about scalix?

2. A big deal is third party support. Groupwise has done an abysmal job on this front. Until recently you could not sync with PDA's etc. Simply having Outlook solves this (and a lot of other issues) but I'm wondering about other commn stuff (blackberries, etc). In all honesty are there some missing gaps and what are they? I need to know this as part of my decision process.

3. Outlook compatability. Is there anything missing when using the Outlook connector. Big things are being able to connect remotely through a secure encrypted connection. I want to make sure that their is basically no difference between Outlook when connected to scalix vs exchange. I know Outlook compatibility is the strong attraction of your platform and between that and your web mail you have a very attractive product.

4. Backing up. Can someone please give me a good idea of how you backup stuff. Can you do a per mail item restore. I have been looking a bit and it appears there are some creative rsync stuff. We use veritas and since they have a linux agent I'm assuming it's not too hard. The devil is always in the details though so I have to wonder about things like not taking the system offline to backup (is this possible?), etc.

5. Administration. Can you implement certain administrative features like quota's and stuff? How does it interact with AD? When you create a user in AD does it automatically create a scalix user?

6. Redundancy. How easy is it to setup a cluster, etc?

7. Can I get competitive pricing? THis is a big deal for me. It's got to be cheaper than exchange. I know CAL licensing isn't the only factor so I'll be making my decision very carefully but having the discount will help make Scalix more attractive.

8. How is Scalix doing? Are you seeing growth, etc? Obviously the financial health of Scalix is a big deal. I'm sure trying to be an alternative to Exchange is hard since it's the juggernaut. I like the product from what I've seen and would like to use Linux so I hope this could work..

Sorry this is so long. I know with looking enough I can find these answers but I figure this is one of the reaons these forums exist.

Thanks much!

[cendrizzi]

Well you don't have to reply to every one of them. :)

Seriously, I would love to hear feedback from actual users (as well as from Scalix). So if you have any feedback and can answer any questions I would really appreciate it.

[axsom1]

I can offer some of our observations of Scalix for a few of your questions.

First some background on our installation:

We migrated off of Microsoft Mail to Scalix nearly 2 years ago (version 9.0 had just released). The most important factor in our decision was Outlook compatiblity. We have 140 premium users using the system. Our message store is 15Gb in size with no limits on users mailboxes.

We have had 1 system crash ( not Scalix's fault, was bitten by the LVM Kernel Panic bug ) and did not lose any emails or comprimise the mailstores integrity. We initially installed the system with Fedora Core but changed the OS to CentOS about a year into our lifecycle. We've also gone through two major Scalix upgrades (v9.0 - > 9.2.1 -> 10.0.1) without any serious issues. We have yet to have a system error (Scalix or OS) that causes users to lose mail.

My insight on your questions:

1. How would I migrate. The cumbersome method would be to have everyone create PST local copies from their groupwise stuff (well I and my staff would do it). Then import these PST's to the scalix server. I know exchange has some good methods, what about scalix?

I can tell you that this is how we did it, but Microsoft Mail is more of a POP server anyhow so this was not an issue since everyone using Outlook already had a .pst. I can't answer if there are any other nifty migration tools available.

2. A big deal is third party support. Groupwise has done an abysmal job on this front. Until recently you could not sync with PDA's etc. Simply having Outlook solves this (and a lot of other issues) but I'm wondering about other commn stuff (blackberries, etc). In all honesty are there some missing gaps and what are they? I need to know this as part of my decision process.

It's my understanding Scalix does not offically support 3rd party plugins. Scalix Support could offer you a better idea of what they do support. We do have many PDA's working without issues, but have had problems with wireless phones (specifically those that only look for Exchange profiles).

We do run into issues with applications that want to install an Outlook plugin, but that's been few and far between. Usually what happens is the user gets a forms error but basic mail continues to function.

3. Outlook compatability. Is there anything missing when using the Outlook connector. Big things are being able to connect remotely through a secure encrypted connection. I want to make sure that their is basically no difference between Outlook when connected to scalix vs exchange. I know Outlook compatibility is the strong attraction of your platform and between that and your web mail you have a very attractive product.

So far the only thing that I've really noticed is that Scalix doesn't support custom forms in Outlook and S/MIME (and of course 3rd party plugins, but some do work just not officially supported). Custom forms is not an issue for us since we don't require that. Our workaround for S/MIME has been to use encrypted zip files for confidential email until S/MIME is fully supported.

Oh, almost forgot, you also can't have multiple services when using Scalix Connect. Basically, you can't have POP accounts configured with your Scalix Connect profile. If you can, I haven't ever been able to get it to work.

4. Backing up. Can someone please give me a good idea of how you backup stuff. Can you do a per mail item restore. I have been looking a bit and it appears there are some creative rsync stuff. We use veritas and since they have a linux agent I'm assuming it's not too hard. The devil is always in the details though so I have to wonder about things like not taking the system offline to backup (is this possible?), etc.

I know this is a hot issue and from what I've gathered the Scalix folks are working hard to make this easier. We currently just do an offline backup nightly. We don't have a policy for single item mail restore, so if a user deletes a piece of mail then empties the trash can we tell them "bummer". Now if they lost their mailbox, we would restore the message store to a standy server and export the users mailbox to a .pst.

There's tons of ways to go about it, so it's what would work easiest for you and your companies policy.

5. Administration. Can you implement certain administrative features like quota's and stuff? How does it interact with AD? When you create a user in AD does it automatically create a scalix user?

You can implement mailbox quotas, restrict users with service levels, etc. Can't comment on the AD integration since we aren't AD enabled (couldn't afford the upgrade, one of the reasons we chose Scalix over Exchange).

6. Redundancy. How easy is it to setup a cluster, etc?

No experience here, but I know it's possible.

7. Can I get competitive pricing? THis is a big deal for me. It's got to be cheaper than exchange. I know CAL licensing isn't the only factor so I'll be making my decision very carefully but having the discount will help make Scalix more attractive.

8. How is Scalix doing? Are you seeing growth, etc?

Of course these are better left for Scalix staff, but Scalix was 1/3 the price of Exchange. That didn't include Anti-Virus scanning, Backup software, Anti-Spam...all the little "add-ons" that you need in addition to the core Exchange product.

Hope this helps you out a little. Feel free to ask me any questions you may have and I can try to answer as best I can.

Regards,
John

[ScalixSupport]

1. How would I migrate. The cumbersome method would be to have everyone create PST local copies from their groupwise stuff (well I and my staff would do it). Then import these PST's to the scalix server. I know exchange has some good methods, what about scalix?

This is really a question of how do you want to skin the cat. There are many ways. Some people who have a lot of mail tell their users to export whatever they want to keep in a local PST and then start from scratch. Some want to migrate messages, contacts and appointments to the new system. For those we provide migration tools (EShuttle). Make no mistake, the migration phase is the most complicated phase while introducing a new mail system and professional services or support incidents are a viable yet affordable option.

3. Outlook compatability. Is there anything missing when using the Outlook connector. Big things are being able to connect remotely through a secure encrypted connection. I want to make sure that their is basically no difference between Outlook when connected to scalix vs exchange. I know Outlook compatibility is the strong attraction of your platform and between that and your web mail you have a very attractive product.

You will need an underlying protocol encryption, e.g. an encrypted VPN connection or a tunneld connection thru ssh.

6. Redundancy. How easy is it to setup a cluster, etc?

This is an enterprise feature, meaning we provide support and instructions on how to set this up for paying customers. The cluster setup is fairly easy, support or professional services are more than happy to assist you in installation.

7. Can I get competitive pricing? THis is a big deal for me. It's got to be cheaper than exchange. I know CAL licensing isn't the only factor so I'll be making my decision very carefully but having the discount will help make Scalix more attractive.

I can get you in touch with sales on that one, but I believe we have a promotion currently going for competitive upgrades / sidegrades. Please contact info at scalix dot com for pricing information.

8. How is Scalix doing? Are you seeing growth, etc? Obviously the financial health of Scalix is a big deal. I'm sure trying to be an alternative to Exchange is hard since it's the juggernaut. I like the product from what I've seen and would like to use Linux so I hope this could work..

We are doing great!!!

Cheers,

Sascha.

[cendrizzi]

Thanks for the responses. Very insightful.

Just curious but is there a working list of features we can expect to see. Perhaps my biggest concern is the connecting remotely using Outlook. While I could offer a VPN tunnel solution as described, it would be a fair bit more cumbersome than what my users are used to (just popping open their email client anywhere). Is this being worked on?

I'm glad a better restore solution is in the works too, that would greatly simply things by having a simple restore per item capability.

I'm curious also why Outlook plugins don't always work. Why would this be? I mean if it works with Outlook does it really matter what server it's connecting to?

P.S. I'm waiting for sales to call me back.

[florian]

Candrizzi,

Outlook over secure connection is something we're working on, I just can't give you a committed date yet. Out of curiosity, would you require Outlook over https or would be using a SSL-secured proprietary TCP-based protocol (something similar to IMAPS, but proprietary and using a different port number) good enough for you? Also - would you need to use multiple scalix servers (because of multiple locations) and, if so, would they all be available from the outside or would you need a bridgehead server?

On the backup issue, the next release will have a feature that will make recovering deleted items (the most common reason for having to restore a single item) a lot easier without having to go to any backup as well as improvements in our backup tool interface. You might also want to check out SEP's Sesam product (www.sep.de) which integrates with Scalix for backup and restore.

Should you have trouble reaching anyone in sales, please contact me at <myfirstname>@scalix.com and I will make sure you get some feedback asap.

Thx,
Florian.

[jjjheimer]

Resurrecting this thread - can you provide an update on the engineering status of a secure connection between Outlook and Scalix?

[florian]

No date for that, it is not going to be in Scalix 11 and we'll consider it for a subsequent release next year.

Florian.