Scalix iPhone Client

[florian]

Well, obviously high-quality bug and relevant bug reports are always more than welcome and that will certainly be true for the beta version. On the general go-to-market policy, a) again given the contractual obligations we have here, there is no choice or decision to be made, it's simply not possible, and b) even if we could decide on it, we would probably keep this feature on the commercial side of things. With the size of dev team we have and everything else to be able to produce, develop and maintain our product, we got bills to pay as well and it is our dual licensing model that allows us to provide pretty extensive functionality for free to the community.

Something's gotta give at some point, though.

Florian

[sledgehammer89]

Ok, thanks again for the informations.

It was one hope to sync contacts / calender with Linux. Now I know to have a closer look at the sqlite db files on the iPhone.

[Stefan Dierkes]

There will be a public beta, time-bombed, but otherwise not restricted in any way, hopefully stll this year.
[...]
Cheers,
Florian.

Florian,
I am shocked about this time-frame. We have already several iPhone users in our company (including myself) and there is NO WAY to synch contact and calendar data with Scalix since iTunes 7.6 and iPhone OS 2. ActiveSynch has been announced for Scalix 11.4 and later for August 2008. It is still not there and now you say "hopefully this year". Not even as a alpha, beta or closed beta version. There is only a Scalix internal beta version. I suggest that you open this for company beta testers immediately!
Otherwise our company users force us to switch from Scalix to MS Exchange.
Stefan

[florian]

Stefan,

software development is not a fully predictable business, especially when working with components like client devices that are not fully under your control; as an example, iPhone changed their ActiveSync implementation quite considerably between 2.0.0, 2.0.1, 2.0.2 and again for 2.1.0.

Delays happen and even the world's largest software company shipped their next-gen operating system about a year late, so what we are seeing here, as unhappy as I am about this personally, is not something I would myself describe as "shocking". You can trust that we're not holding back anything willfully as it is obviously in our best interest to get this to market as quickly as possible and that's what we're working on and will do.

I will not roll out the entire history, but we ran into a couple of unexpected roadblocks in the course of this project, including more server-side changes than we originally anticipated, which created additional dependencies and made things more complex.

The internal version that we're currently using with some of our own devices is not in a packaging/documentation state that we could simply ship it and it has a couple of assumptions built-in that would apply to our environment but not to customer setups, so it can't easily be transferred; the Beta version we're preparing is different in that respect. Furthermore, to make the public beta program successful for everyone, we need to have beta support resources and data collection in place, otherwise we can't support it or won't learn anything from it; if we do this as a fire drill, we would lose time on the dev side in order to finish off the final product.

With this being said, I don't see how we could change our planning right now and we'll continue to work hard to get this out.

Florian.

[billb3]

If this is the case, you should really update the website so others are not misled.

http://www.scalix.com/enterprise/produc ... vesync.php

Scalix ActiveSync will be released in Q3 2008.

[florian]

Thanks, it seems we missed that one. We had already changed a couple other places on the website.

This is now fixed.

Florian

[grassu]

and there is another one:
http://www.scalix.com/enterprise/technology/mobileclients_activesync.php

[florian]

tx. fixed.

F.

[IDtheTarget]

On the general go-to-market policy, a) again given the contractual obligations we have here, there is no choice or decision to be made, it's simply not possible, and b) even if we could decide on it, we would probably keep this feature on the commercial side of things. With the size of dev team we have and everything else to be able to produce, develop and maintain our product, we got bills to pay as well and it is our dual licensing model that allows us to provide pretty extensive functionality for free to the community.

Something's gotta give at some point, though.

Florian

Would it be possible to sell just the ActiveSync add-on for the Community Server? My company just purchased Scalix, and the ActiveSync looks like just what we need. I have a personal email server that hosts five people, and only two of us have iPhones. It would be wonderful if I could somehow change my personal email server to Scalix, for both experience installing/administering the box, as well as for the convenience. However, since I have my box working, it wouldn't be worth switching if I couldn't add the iPhone functionality for my wife and I.

I'd be willing to purchase the ActiveSync add-on, if it could be installed on the Community Server.

Thanks!

[florian]

At this point, no. Scalix ActiveSync doesn't ship yet and pricing hasn't been fully announced, but think low-two-digit-range, one-time, per-user, so it's very cheap. Given our international setup with customers in over 50 countries, and quite a lot of partners involved, resellers, distributors, plus a certain amount of license fees that needs to go to Microsoft for every purchase of that product, the transaction cost of managing this would be prohibitively high and we would be losing money on small deals like yours.

For the time being, the lowest entry point to get Scalix with ActiveSync will be Small Business Edition, 20 User Starter Kit, plus respective ActiveSync licenses, with the smallest pack being 5, total cost somewhere in the 600-700 USD/EUR range, depending on market.

Sorry if that doesn't work for you, but there are economic realities we have to face and we don't really make much profit even of this product and that's needed for our ability to maintain our overall portfolio, including the free CE product line.

Best,
Florian

[tuxx-home.at]

Sorry for hijacking this old thread, but as you guys talked about using the Scalix Webaccess on the iPhone: I just tried that, but it doesn't work.

It just says, that my browser on the iPhone is not supported. Is that something that will be fixed in the next upcoming release or do I need to change the UserAgent string for the iPhone Safari?

[florian]

Hi,

first of all, for basic email check, http://<your.scalix.server.name>/m - i.e. the Scalix Mobile web client - will work.

Scalix does not support Safari as a browser for SWA in general; this will change in 11.5, however the official level of support is for Safari running on Windows and Mac OS/X Desktop.

We're already running such a server internally and I was curious about whether Safari on my iPhone would be able to handle this as well; it did startup and got me logged in, however at some point during the load of my inbox, Safari crashed and threw me back to the iPhone's main screen.

As there are no debug interfaces available for Safari on the iPhone, this is really nothing we can follow up on. There are also no plans to officially support Safari on iPhone for SWA. SWA is really designed for a minimum screen resolution of 1024/768, so user experience will be pretty bad; in addition, SWA uses over 100.000 lines of Java Script code and is to be considered one of the most complex and demanding AJAX applications on the market; I'd assume that the iPhone simply does not have sufficient resources in terms of memory, CPU and others to run an application that complex.

In terms of specific development Scalix is doing for the iPhone, our primary focus is on ActiveSync, which we test with the device - including myself. We may consider offering other client options in the future, however a full-mode SWA is not likely to be one of them as wireless devices are used in situations (offline, etc.) where browser-based email clients are of limited use and it's not a direction that we're currently seeing big demand for.

Florian.

[tuxx-home.at]

OK, thanks for the heads up, I wasn't aware of the mobile mail interface, looks really great for basic e-mailing needs, but actually, I already have IMAPs configured on the iPhone so the e-mails are not my problem.

I'm just looking for a way to check the calendar on the Scalix server using the iPhone. The problem is, that the secretary puts in appointments in the calendar at the office and we need to be able to see the appointments (I'm not talking about a real sync here, because I already know that this isn't possible easily currently), I'm just looking for a way to occasionally check my appointments on the iPhone.

Is there any way currently to do this?

[florian]

what currently works is to run the iCal client on a Mac OS/X desktop, connect this to the Scalix server using CalDAV, then sync to the iPhone using iTunes.

Unfortunately, iTunes sync does not currently work on Windows platforms, as there is some incompatibility between the iTunes and Scalix Outlook plugins; there is a bug for this somewhere and we'll look at it for a future release.

Apart from that, Scalix ActiveSync, which is in the works, will feature wireless calendar synchronization over the air and will support the iPhone.

At this point, there is no schedule to integrate calendaring into the Mobile Web Client, however it is something we may consider doing in the future.

Florian

[tuxx-home.at]

I'm aware of the CalDAV sync thing, but this solution doesn't work for me, because the customer's employees are on the road with just the iPhone.

Currently, the secretary sends them e-mails with the appointment details, which works OK but is bad for keeping an overview about what needs to be done for the rest of the day, etc.

I think we'll have to wait for Scalix ActiveSync then, whenever that'll be released