Hello,
I am providing some background on my first use of Scalix in hopes it might be informative to Scalix's development. I will make other posts with issues that I have encountered and need assistance with.
I like what I have seen of Scalix via your website and the forums and took a risk with it. I am a one-person IT shop focused on small businesses. I have a client that wanted to get off a pure IMAP solution they had running on Windows, known as Visnetic Mailserver. It worked pretty well except they are die-hard users of MS Outlook. We all know Outlook's IMAP can be rather picky. They became tired of having UIDs get out of sync and having to recreate their account settings in Outlook to resync. Visnetic also had an odd plug-in for synchronizing calendar/contact data but it was not like native Exchange behavior and was somewhat cumbersome.
The client wanted to install MS Exchange. I suggested MS Small Business Server 2003 at the cost of $1500 for the proper licensing or give Scalix a try at no software cost for the community edition. If they liked it and grew they could move up to the Enterprise edition. The client left it up to me and what I thought best. The safe bet would have been SBS but I figured I would save them some money on licensing guesstimating that setup time would be pretty similar. I elected to give Scalix a go. The amount of time to install Scalix with a CentOS 4.2 install was similar (not withstanding hardware/driver issues I encountered) especially in light of not having done it before.
I installed it on an AMD64 3200+ system with 2.5GB RAM and two WD SATA-150 200GB HDs connected to the onboard nvidia SATA adapter. I used linux md-raid to mirror the drives' partitions. I installed the Server edition of CentOS 4.2 which does not include X and various other things. I had to check all the dependencies to add dependencies it was missing. I wish I had taken notes during the install but it went smoothly for the most part.
I delivered the server to the client's office then spent the better part of the next 20 hours there. I had to create all the accounts then import mail from the Visnetic IMAP server using 'imapsync'. It took a couple of attempts as I ended up creating invalid users on Scalix due to an error that I don't remember how I fixed. 'imapsync' (can be found on freshmeat.net) is your friend and did a great job transferring the mail even though it takes an extremely long time even over a LAN (about 9 hours for 8GB worth of email data. IMAP is simply not as fast as file copying.
Some of the user's stations were setup with the Scalix client but upon discovering not being able to address multiple email accounts as distinct entities some of the users had to stay in their IMAP configurations.
My next posts will describe some of the problems that I am seeking solutions to. In summary the SAC and Webmail is slow to load and respond to query, lack of flexible support for multiple addresses on a single account, confusing very similar naming of tools (om?????) with arcane switches.
Ultimately, if Scalix does not meet the client's expectations (set by previous Exchange experience as a user) I will have to migrate them to SBS/Exchange at no charge for my time which will likely be 20+ hours of unpaid work. I would like to avoid that and have confidence in recommending solid alternative to MS Exchange for small businesses going forward. Thank you for this REAL contender in the office groupware/mail server market and I look forward to putting Scalix to good use.
Sincerely,
-felipe