Some [possibly] dumb questions

[mgapper]

First I will apologise if these topics are inappropriate or just totally dumb, but please bear with me.

I am looking at Scalix for three distinct scenarios but don't know whether it is functional or appropriate as a solution.

1: For a volunteer fire brigade messaging system, where we also need calendaring/scheduling to make up availability lists etc. Also to distribute announcements to the members in general or to just the officers or specific officers and members. Some members have existing external email accounts, others would be purely local users. Any suggestions / comments?

2: for personal use - I have a distributed network and a number of email addresses, some wired some wireless running a mix of Linux, windows 2K and windows XP. It is a pain to always have to go back to one specific system to check emails. Again - - comments / suggestions?

3. A client runs a small business network, locked into Windows for accounting apps etc. They have a registered [hosted] website with its own domain name. They run, currently, 5 email addresses on the remote domain. Currently use Outlook as the exclusive email app. What they want is shared calendaring and address book accesible by each employee from any internal system. There is one dedicated server available which is not locked into an operating system - i.e. it is currently only a file server with no actual applications being run from it.

Am I looking at the wrong product for these problems or not. If not, then how easy is it for a complete beginner to set up and manage. [well OK not really a complete beginner, but someone who feels like a total idiot at times <G>]

Michael

[mgapper]

Well thanks for the lack of help . . guess I struck one of those moral/philosophical issues that nobody wants to touch.

So how do I configure it to check numerous email addresses from different ISPs and transfer those messages to a central mail store WITHOUT deleting them from the original server - thus allowing members to also access the mail from systems outsidethe station network?
mg

[florian]

Michael,

first of all, there are no dumb questions (not sure about inappropriate though in general... :-) but yours aren't).

Apologies for not providing faster response on our side, but as you might know our new version Scalix 10 has just come out a little more than a week ago and obviously this has created a large tidal wave of interest, customers wanting to upgrade, new deployments and one or the other support issue. We're fortunate to be swamped bringing this great product to market. Guess one victim of this are some threads on this forum that haven't received the attention they certainly deserve. Again, we're sorry for that and will try our best to get through the backlog.

On your scenarios:

1. Scalix can certainly be used in your Fire Brigade scenario (actually our Support Guys are great firefighters as well!). We do provide group calendaring, free/busy functionality and other elements to that. In addition, Scalix has distribution lists, which can also be hierarchically nested. Scalix can also include external email addresses in distribution lists and/or Scalix accounts can have auto-forwards if that's needed. Depending on your number of users you might even get along with the free community edition version of the product; should you require a commercial license, you'll be glad to here that we provide special pricing for non-profit organisations and i believe you would qualify here. Please contact our sales department for further details on this.

2. Scalix can be configured - via a Linux tool called fetchmail - to collect emails from various accounts and move them into one or multiple Scalix mailboxes, so even though I don't fully understand your scenario, but I guess it could be done.

3. Absolutely can Scalix be used to provide the functionality you require here, given that you are willing to turn your spare server into a Linux box (which is a good idea anyway). In this case, as in your private use case, you can absolutely use our free Community Edition product.

Just give it a try - i believe if you look for help for your specific configuration situations, searching on this very forum will provide a lot of helpful pointers.

Good luck and enjoy the first steps with our product - just give it a try, it's really easy and simple to setup as well.

Florian.

[mgapper]

Thanks for the reply [and restoration of faith!!!]

I have the download and have installed to a "spare" machine that I have running SUSE 10 - found the workaround to recognise the OS, thanks - and I will be trying it out in all of the scenarios over the next few weeks. I have also set up another spare machine as an FC4 box so it will be interesting to compare them. I guess it won't work on Debian??

The fire-brigade issue is still less than 25 users so I guess I can still get by with the community edition there. I am trying to fight back after upper level management decreed a "microsoft-only" policy for all applications!!!!!!! [We are only one of just over 1200 brigades within the department - roughly 60,000 firefighters - and I really think that there has to be a better solution than Internet Explorer * Outlook Express + MS Office for all applications]

Michael

[florian]

Michael,

thanks for your response; SuSE 10 and FC4 should both be fine and look pretty similar. debian is not supported and quite different - if you look around the forum, people have gotten it to work, but you can't use the installer and I wouldn't really recommend trying - lot's of work with little or no benefit over the other OSs from a Scalix point of view.

The firefighting thing is interesting; if I may ask, what country is this - US? I believe especially organisations dealing with public money should look at alternatives - and in many countries they really have to - and look for free or open source Linux-based alternatives.

:-) We're absolutely ready to talk to them even big time and make serious proposals on what could be done.

Good luck with your installs,
Florian.