Hi,
1. Is that statement accurate? I use iPhone via IMAP with GMail myself and mail delivery seems pretty immediate to me. I must admit I have never taken any traces.
2. There are no plans to add ActiveSync functionality to Community Edition. First, our ActiveSync implementation is based on specifications licensed from Microsoft for improved compatibility and implementation of future changes and enhancements to the protocol, such as those coming in the V14 version of the protocol that is part of Exchange 2010. As such, a small part of the ActiveSync license fee actually goes to Microsoft, so we simply cannot make this available for free as we have to pay for it ourselves. Secondly, while we are committed to provide very rich functionality in the free community version of the software and we will continue to add to this functionality in future versions, we rely on license revenue from our commercial products to pay for the cost of developing this complex system. The creation of the Scalix product involves more than 50 people inside our organization and we've got bills to pay, too, believe it or not.
Therefore, we will continue to add some functionality only to commercial versions of our software. This is especially true for advanced mobility features such as push Email; I'd dare to say that this is advanced use of the product in a commercial environment, so if your users (assuming this is a company) rely on this for their business needs and you making money, i.e. this is a professional tool for you, I'd think that it's only fair if you give and pay something to the makers and providers of that very tool, right? Further assuming that you're a small business, our pricing of the SBE-20 and SBE-50 products, even together with the ActiveSync option, is highly competitive and offers very good value for money today, plus adds some further features useful in such environments, like Recovery Folders or the Archiving interface.
3. With this being said, we recognize that there is a segment of the market that we don't serve too well, and that's companies, not planning to grow and with less than 10 employees that still require mobility features (i.e. certain types of family and very businesses - no offense taken, I've run this type of business myself in a previous life!). We are discussing internally whether we should be offering a commercial product that is specifically targetted at that market.
On the latter item, I would appreciate some general feedback ... so ... If you are a commercial organization/company using Scalix Community Edition today, how many Premium and Standard Users would you require, how many of those would need to be enabled for ActiveSync, would you need commercial-grade Anti-Spam and/or Anti-Virus functionality, and would you be willing to switch to a commercial Scalix version if we create a package that's just right for you?
Comments, in public or private, much appreciated,
Florian.