Scalix 11.3 is on the way ...

[charon]

from my oint of view a very important feature for reselling scalix in small business environments is an integrated wireless synchronisation solution that is compatible with blackberry, activesync and syncml clients.

[ivo_toshev]

And...

1. Transperant and easy managed migration tool. Can you believe than 2 years later i still cannot move all of the old Exchange 5.5 users to Scalix ? Because their mailboxes are more than 5 GB large and any workaround migration will take place more than 12 hous for a single mailbox?? The other problem here is that the migrated mailbox will be 10GBs ( because of another one old, old scalix problem with a store )

About the licensing model and 10 against 25 premium users in Comunity edition:

In fact i was surprised when Scalix dedcided almost 2 years ago to give 25 premium users in CE. But 10 is too small. IMHO - 12 or 15 is OK.

What i want to see about 11.3 is WHAT IS NEW AND WHAT IS FIXED ?
Are there any performance fixes for Outlook connector ? SWA ( i already understood in posts -there is)? What else... ?

And one last thing:

CAN WE SEE THE SCALIX DEV ROADMAP ?
Really ?! - We ( especialy contracted customers ) need to know what is planned in the near future !

[florian]

Well, opening another port on the firewall is easy, however we are in a situation where most of our employees are permanently based at a customer's site, or travels a lot. Due to network security issues where they work, connections are not allowed to non-approved ports, they have to be specifically requested, approved, etc., which takes time and effort. The only ports we can guarantee will be open are 80/443 and 22. In that case doing a port translation or port mirror makes things doable without all the politics involved.

Wow, now I am really surprised. If this was my corporate network, the one thing I would *never* allow outbound if I was to block anything is ssh, as with ssh, using SOCKS-proxy support and others, you'll get ANY protocol out of (and through reverse-tunnel actually into the building). when you have ssh, your firewall is dead.

I once got out of the network with any protocol I liked in the corporate net of one of the 20 largest IT vendors in the world usiing SOCKS-over-ssh-over-http-tunnelling through their proxy, so... with this everything is possible!

Anyway, good for you and you should be able to tunnel this, I'm quite sure.

Florian.

[florian]

from my oint of view a very important feature for reselling scalix in small business environments is an integrated wireless synchronisation solution that is compatible with blackberry, activesync and syncml clients.

We'll have Active Sync in late Q1/early Q2 2008 with 11.4, and looking into other options.

When you had Active Sync, what devices would you need SyncML for?

Florian.

[florian]

1. Transperant and easy managed migration tool. Can you believe than 2 years later i still cannot move all of the old Exchange 5.5 users to Scalix ? Because their mailboxes are more than 5 GB large and any workaround migration will take place more than 12 hous for a single mailbox?? The other problem here is that the migrated mailbox will be 10GBs ( because of another one old, old scalix problem with a store )

The IMAP APPEND diskspace issue was supposed to be resolved in 11.3, however, we unfortunately had to slip this to 11.4, because the work was only 85% done at our cutoff date and we couldn't make it without postponing 11.3 until after christmas - and staying to the time plan was more important to us than the feature. Next promise of mine on this thread - will be in 11.4.

In fact i was surprised when Scalix dedcided almost 2 years ago to give 25 premium users in CE. But 10 is too small. IMHO - 12 or 15 is OK.

Some wanted 5, some wanted 8, now I read 12 or 15, so I think 10 is a good compromise on a global scale. Guess we should leave it that way.

What i want to see about 11.3 is WHAT IS NEW AND WHAT IS FIXED ?
Are there any performance fixes for Outlook connector ? SWA ( i already understood in posts -there is)? What else... ?

As always, we have our bugtracking open to the public - go to https://bugzilla.scalix.com and look for entries marked RESOLVED/FIXED or CLOSED/FIXED, with target = Mapleleaf - which is our development codename.

Currently, this list is 177 items long, at least the version that I see - i don't think I want to repeat the contents here (you might not see a couple of them as we have marked some bugs internal that were linked to customer escalations and have customer data in them)

CAN WE SEE THE SCALIX DEV ROADMAP ?

Publishing a roadmap to everyone is not easy, as you don't want to make too many proposals to your competitors, especially if you work in a company that has a lot of long-standing market insight as we do. Also, we needed to integrate the Scalix and Xandros roadmaps.

As I said above, ActiveSync is on the list and some other things. We'll be sharing some part of the roadmap publicly, after 11.3 is released. I'm working on the documentation. We'll share some things only under NDA, so please get in touch with your Scalix sales representative. This is, to be clear, not to do things in the hiding, but just to keep some surprises along the way for our competitors. And I think next year will bring a number of those. I'm working on a compelling story every day.

Florian.

Really ?! - We ( especialy contracted customers ) need to know what is planned in the near future !

Silly question - why is it more important to know what's going on for contracted customers?

[charon]

from my oint of view a very important feature for reselling scalix in small business environments is an integrated wireless synchronisation solution that is compatible with blackberry, activesync and syncml clients.

We'll have Active Sync in late Q1/early Q2 2008 with 11.4, and looking into other options.

When you had Active Sync, what devices would you need SyncML for?

Florian.

activeSync is not syncml compatible and many systems use syncml.

not only devices but for example CRM software.

[florian]

That's interesting - can you name a specific CRM system that supports SyncML? (Sorry, I might have been confused as you mentioned Wireless in the context)

Florian.

[charon]

i did not want to get too deep into it, but there are several snycML ( funambol) connectors like:

SugarCRM
vTiger
opentaps (http://www.opentaps.org/)

i know that zimbra, kolab and open-xchange support syncML

SyncML is the industry standard for synchronization with mobile devices.

the other fact is that funambol let's you connect nearly any device to the funambol server.

[florian]

Yes, they do.

We've looked into working with Funambol, and actually there is an open source project that connects Funambol to Scalix - see this forum for details. However their level of functionality is more focused on consumer applications and devices and while they also provide support for Windows Mobile and similar devices, you'll need to install a connector, and, as much as I hate to say it because I personally very much like open standards, at this point, the proprietary AS protocol provides for much better data fidelity and much less issues with deployment because you don't have to install a connector, especially with the higher end smartphones.

So I currently see SyncML mostly as a solution for contact synchronisation and some calendaring on low-end phone devices like the RAZR or similar that don't have feature-rich sync clients or OSs. Those are not the devices our users and customers typically want to use with Scalix.

I sincerely hope that as SyncML evolves and products like Funambol (and I know the Funambol team very well and very much appreciate their work!), we'll see those open standards take over from Blackberry/BES, ActiveSync and the likes, but realistically, this hasn't happened yet and our customers need truely workable solutions.

As for App2App synchronisation, like between Scalix and Sugar, I don't think putting a sync server in the middle will actually be a good idea here - in that area our strategy is rather based on open-standards based online access to data through WebDAV, CalDAV or web services APIs - after all, servers don't really need to sync with other servers as they are both thought to be continously available and synchronisation has it's biggest benefits in mobile/offline situations. Scalix 11.3 ships with extensive DAV access and we'll continue to work in making this offering broader for truely open server2server and client2server APIs.

Hope this makes sense,
Florian.

[charon]

this makes sense to me.

how about blackberry support? many people want an blackberry whatever you say to them about the technical background.

[florian]

Yes, they do.

We do support Blackberry devices currently through the 3rd-party NotifyLink for Scalix product, www.notifycorp.com. This seems the best non-RIM solution for Blackberry on the market today.

Neither ActiveSync nor Funambol won't help for the Blackberry - the Blackberry connector for Funambol is early alpha stage with very limited functionality and does not satisfy the requirements of a typical user.

The only "true" solution, given that Blackberry is such a closed and proprietary system, will be to get going with RIM to have the BES connected to Scalix. While we can't really call Mission Accomplished on this one, we keep working on making this happen, in one of various possible ways. I can't really speak to that right now, but we'll have something to say sometime next year. Until then (and possibly beyond, because it has it's own set of advantages), our recommendation is to go with the NotifyLink solution.

Florian.

Florian.

[bbryan]

.
We do support Blackberry devices currently through the 3rd-party NotifyLink for Scalix product.

I second what charon said, we would like to see more support for wireless synchronization. We are testing contact/event synchronization of blackberries using syncje with some success. Unfortunately to sync with Scalix we have to use the Funambol plugin for Outlook. In a future version it would be nice if Scalix could sync directly with funambol.

I haven't looked at the open source funambol/Scalix connector recently, last I checked it was in alpha and nobody was actively working on it.

We tried Notifylink but their tech support still didn't have it communicating with Scalix after two months of phone calls and remote sessions so I gave up on it.

Thanks!

[dougp23]

I will just chip in my 2 cents.

I am still on the 11.0 series, seeing some very minor issues. I have to stop dragging my feet and move to 11.2

I like Scalix, think it's a great product. (In fact, I am about to become a reseller of it!!) I think the 10 license structure is fair. I was blown away with 25, but at just $995 for 50 users, that's pretty hard to beat.

Just keep fixing those gremlins in the code, and PLEASE (you know this is my biggest gripe) make tech support reachable (via phone or chat or something, but something more responsive than email).

Carry on!

[the2nd]

because i like the open way scalix goes and think that they care about what their users/resellers/customers say, here's my point of view.

first i want to say some words about myself. i'm in linux/oss business since more than 10 years. first as an IT consultant for different service companies and now i run my own small business focused on linux and opensource. my customers are from many different branches and some are very small (5-20 Users) and some are bigger (up to 500 users).

the first time i noticed scalix was in some newsticker. i installed and tested it a lot and was very happy that there is such a great product available for linux. and i also was aware of that it is not completely open source. i had some qualms about that but i thought this will not be a problem because scalix (the company) goes an "open way" and is very reasonable with their pricing. and with the availability of CE and its 25 premium users it was perfect for my smaller customers. i pushed scalix a lot and installed CE and SBE for them. all of them are happy with scalix.

now, after the new CE is limited to 10 users i still think that its a great product and if the SBE 20 will cost about 600 € it think its a fair price. and if my (new) customers are willing to pay that price for scalix i can continue to install it. but i see a problem for my old customers.

if they have more than 10 users they are forced to:
- buy SBE 20
- switch to an other groupware
- stay with 11.2

the last one is not an real option as they'll get no new features (OL2007, CalDAV for Mac etc.), bugs will not be fixed, there may be security problems etc. thats the most nasty problem for me because i told them they dont have to pay for it as long as they have <25 users.


and for my new customers (that i hopefully get ) i have also a problem:

as an independent IT consultant, its now time to search for an alternative to scalix. not because i will stop to offer my small customers a scalix server (or the installation of a scalix CE). but if they have to pay for the software its more likely that they ask for an alternative. and if i cannot offer an alternative its more likely that i loose a project. well, this is not only because CE is now limited to 10 users but it was the trigger

and one other thing to care about is, that if i find a reasonable alternative to scalix and a customer choose it, they are a customer that "normally" would get an scalix CE customer which likely would get an SBE Customer some time. but thats only theoretically and no one knows what the future brings

okay, now some words about scalix and open source. OSS has some important advantages (in most cases) like better bugfixing, more secure and stable, portable etc. but one of the most important (for me) is the freedom one has with OSS. there are no restrictions in use and if it is a big project (like apache, samba, kde, mysql etc.) chances are low that development will discontinue some time. also the direction development goes is not bound to the will of a company or at least some managers (which sometimes have strange ideas ). with OSS it is not possible that one company, or another company that takes it over, will have full control of the software. (dont get me wrong, i dont talk about the xandros deal here. just about the "problem" with closed source in general). and because some important parts of scalix (SWA, Outlook Connector) are not OSS i'm a little afraid of the future. not that much about what xandros/scalix does. but there are some real big players in the groupware segment.....


however, i'm still happy that there is such a great product available for linux and look forward to offer scalix to my customers.

regards
heiko

PS. i hope everything is understandable because my english is not that good if it comes to non-technical stuff

[florian]

I second what charon said, we would like to see more support for wireless synchronization.

Bbryan,

are you using Blackberry only or also any other devices where Active Sync support will help you?

Florian.