ActiveSync in 11.4

[PaulHerron]

O.k. this is a little 'off-topic' but, somewhat relevant from a human resource/upgrade perspective...

I understand that Scalix Server had to be tweaked to accommodate ActiveSync hence, the need for Scalix 11.4.4. But what are some of the features and/or bug fixes planned for Scalix 11.5 and what is the expected timing of that release relative to Scalix 11.4.4? I.e. if I'm not desperate for ActiveSync in my production environment, will I save a lot of effort by waiting a little bit for the 11.5 release?

I recognize that the answer to this question will come with a lot of caveats as I'm sure that there is a lot to be resolved between now and then.

And by the way, thank you Florian and the rest of the dev team for all of your efforts on AS. I think that most of us recognize that you are doing your darndest to get this product out and would like nothing better than for it to be behind you.

[florian]

11.5 will be mid-year, i.e. currently looking at early Q3 timeframe or so.

Please note, however, that 11.4.4 will have numerous bugfixes and minor improvements (more than 200, actually) to the Scalix 11.4.4 product, besides and on top of providing what's needed to support ActiveSync. One example area is calendaring interoperability between SWA, Outlook and CalDAV, another is SWA and Messaging Services performance and overhead, a 3rd one being Outlook connector stability on Vista, Vista/64 as well as compatibility with Windows Desktop Search. No real new features, just a better Scalix product.

Keep in mind that 11.5 will bring along additional features and change, so it's a real release, with all the goods and the bads that come about it.

Furthermore, we're changing our release strategy a little bit with 11.4/11.5 - we'll always have 2 releases under full maintenance, so even when 11.5 is already out, we'll still be publishing "Service Packs" for 11.4 with customer/support-driven bugfixes, i.e. there will be 11.4.5, 11.4.6 and later when 11.5.0 already ships. This will continue until the one after 11.5 is out, presumably 12.0, when then maintenance shifts to 11.5 and 12.0.

Hope this makes sense - so IMHO those of you who haven't upgraded to 11.4.3 so far should do so, and once 11.4.4 comes out, one should check the release notes and see if any relevant area is affected/improved, and then do the upgrade asap. Those patch-type upgrades are usually easy and quick to do (well, I actually upgrade one of our internal production servers every other day with nightly builds for "dogfooding" purposes, so I think I know what I'm talking about!)

- Florian

[konman]

Florian! You back from Ottawa? How did it all go?
Cheers,
KonMan.

[florian]

We had a couple drinks on getting to RC on Friday ... fingers crossed and now all up to QA testing....

Florian (now from Frankfurt!)

[lykense]

Can we get a status on the testing of ActiveSync 11.4 I have a group of Iphones I would like to start using with this.


Thanks,
Eric

[rlshepard]

We had a couple drinks on getting to RC on Friday ... fingers crossed and now all up to QA testing....

Florian (now from Frankfurt!)

soooooo.... Just wondering, any news?

[florian]

converging, but couple issues found and fixed. we're at the 4th or so RC right now. With all stars aligning, should be next week, but this is still based on "current knowledge" and projections.

You will know when it happens..

Florian.

[konman]

Florian,

A wandering thought ..... did you do testing with Ver.3.0 of the iPhone 3G (S) software?

K.

[florian]

Smoke testing, yes. They don't seem to have changed much on the protocol side - still mostly v2.5 of the EAS protocol, i.e. with some limitations with regards to HTML mail. End user functionality seems to have improved, e.g. you can now create meeting invites with participants, which wasn't available in iPhone 2.x. The initial testing didn't show any problems and was conducted with iPhone 3.0b4.

Cheers,
Florian

[kcsc]

Hello Florian,
I am glad to hear that AS is almost ready! I would like to get a jump on it, do you already have an idea of how it will be priced; block sizes, cost, etc.

[florian]

Hi,

as pricing and packaging is sometimes dependent on the market you are in, we generally don't discuss these issues on the forum. Please see http://www.scalix.com/enterprise/products/howtobuy.php and contact us or one of our resellers for details.

Tx,
Florian

P.S. I have received QA signoff for Scalix 11.4.4 and AS 1.0.0, so right now it's only a matter of pushing it out. Tomorrow or Thursday, depending on how things go with the website update, etc.

[billb3]

hallelujah!

[sg]

P.S. I have received QA signoff for Scalix 11.4.4 and AS 1.0.0, so right now it's only a matter of pushing it out. Tomorrow or Thursday, depending on how things go with the website update, etc.

great news...

[eproducts]

Hi,

is there any chance to use ActiveSync in the Community Edition? Maybe in the next release?
We have right now a lot of iPhones and the iPhone does not support IMAPIDLE. So ActiveSync is the only way to receive our mails just in time and not with a delay of 15 min.

Cheers,
T

[florian]

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.