Scalix in Hosted Environment

[cdonovan]

This is the third product that I have have looked at in the search for an alternative to Exchange. I first looked at OpenXchange, where we first went live and proceeded to bring a client live and in turn almost lost the client. Too many issues with the Outlook connector and the webmail was pretty week. We went back to exchange!

Next, Zimbra... Looked real good in test environement and handled our own company fine with server 'inside'... Brought a 'beta' client on board and things started too SLOW down bigtime!! Web client was nice but way to 'fat' for small servers and 1.5 MB pipe...

And now... Scalix! By far the best we've seen! I have our own mail and same test client on the Community version 10... So far, so good and client loves it. Outlook connector is working good and web-client too... Looks more like Outlook that OWA!! One issue, Blackberry sync which we understand is coming in version 11... We can wait!!

Our plan is to host MORE clients on the same server if we can work out some issues. We WILL be purchasing the Enterprise server for our expansion! MY issue is...

1) Can Scalix handle multiple 'Global/System address books'... Zimbra handled this quite well by keeping Global Address Books users together by domain...

2) I will have clients with the same name, ie 'Bill Smith', in different domains... Will this be a problem??

Once again... GREAT product! I hope that it can handle this!!

Chris

[florian]

Hi Chris,

thanks for your nice review!

On your open issues.... at this point, Scalix cannot properly partition the address book. If this is only relevant for webmail users, we could probably work around it using LDAP filters and multiple SWA instances, but Outlook is more difficult.

We understand the interest in a hosted version of Scalix and will be introducing GAL partitioning in an upcoming version of the product, currently scheduled for 1H/2007.

Multiple users on with the same name are not a problem; you should just created multiple mailnodes inside SAC (this will very likely also be the GAL partitioning mechanism anyway) so that the system allows you to create multiple people with the same Given Name/Last Name combination - the email address it not an issue as long as it is unique as a full string, even on a single mailnode.

Hope this helps,
Florian.

[cdonovan]

Thanks Florion... Do you work 24/7??

It will be mostly web clients.. I'm figuring on maybe 10% will require Outlook... But, you never know. We currently host using standard Sendmail/Imap about 1700 clients who are yearning for this type of product... I have applied TWICE on the Scalix website for Partner statis but no response as yet...