Postby florian » Thu May 19, 2011 3:43 am
Sideband,
while I can personally understand your frustration, first of all, please be aware that I am not full time with Scalix anymore, and I haven't been for more than 1,5 years. Therefore, it is not "my" company and I will not make any official statement on Xandros/Scalix behalf. I am still consulting with them for part of my time, so I am also bound by NDAs in terms of disclosing internal information.
My statement on Outlook 2010 functionality was simply based out of personal knowledge and experience, so that people do not really continue trying with the 11.4.6 connector, as there is no point.
When we did the planning on Scalix 11.5, the release contents were still my responsibility. For that reason, I think I am entitled to say that I disagree with your statement that 11.5 is not a big release. My thinking on release numbering - and that was still reflected in the 11.5 planning - is that major releases (e.g. 12.0) would change architecture, be somewhat harder to upgrade and require substantial planning for the upgrade. For Scalix, things that would bring it in that direction would be the replacement of the aged internal directory system with online, non-replicated use of an external LDAP directory, a re-architecture of the message store data file layout in order to better accomodate performance needs, and supporting Outlook without a connector using the OEP protocol, server-side. 11.5 is a minor release, yet it is a full release. This one was designed to bring architectural changes and new functionality in SWA including Tasks, significant changes in mail routing, archiving and message processing as well as modified platform support for servers, browsers and clients and finally a re-designed SAC architecture and API. I believe a fuller list has been published by me on the forum in the past. This is large, however, upgrading from 11.4.x to 11.5 would still be a simple in-place-upgrade with no major planning required, similar to what Scalix has delivered in the past, therefore making it a minor, not a major release from a numbering point of view. A lot of the work in preparing these items has been done already, and the task before release would be to finish that. OL2K10 support would be one of these items. When 11.5 is released, there will really not be a major reason to stick with 11.4.6. OL2K10 support for 11.4 will not see the light of the day, it would be against the development structure, we had decided - and I was the one pushing hard for this decision - to make a.b.X-releases "patch-releases" only, with bug fixes, and NO changes in fundamental platform support, so that customers have long-term investment protection and know what they are getting to.
Again, I cannot and will not comment on development status of the release, reasons for delays or new targetted release dates, please contact Xandros directly if you need an update on that.
Best,
Florian.
Florian von Kurnatowski, Die Harder!