[DISAPPOINTED] Scalix/Xandros Customer Service

[lelandv]

My apologies in advance for the harsh tone of this posting, but I'm running out of options here.

There are certainly a large number of "positives" concerning Scalix which were of course hgih on the list of requirements when we decided on our solution.

We decided Scalix was the way to go... so we tried to contact Scalix via their website with a view to making a purchase... 2 weeks later, after a couple of follow up emails... NO RESPONSE.

We purchased the product via a reseller and had the full license key etc., up and running within 36 hours... GREAT. This purchase included "Technical Support Credits"...

First tech support issue (concerning LDAP) was adequately handled, though it did take a couple of days.

Second tech support issue (concerning case-sensitivity of user identification causing integration issues with other platforms) was met with a response more along the lines of "not really on the roadmap, besides KERBEROS requires it.." -- of course KERBEROS might require it, but some of the other access methods do not (in fact using IMAP or POP3 to the scalix server, the case of the user string is not relevant) -- but anything else that uses LDAP or some other PAM method with Scalix as the authenticating server, then the username is case sensitive. -- OK -- we found a work-around for this problem by forcing the username strings to all lower case at the time of account creation... Took nearly 10 days to get a response from the support team on this one though.

BUG report submitted 3 weeks ago, where shared "resourses" do not show the name of the resource in the web interface... in the mailbox list view you see:

Code: Select all

Mailbox -
  Inbox
  Calendar


[i]The resource name should appear after the 'Mailbox -' as it does for delegated mailboxes.

And in the calendar view, even worse -- you see:

Code: Select all

 null's Calendar


rather than 'Resource's Calender' as you would see for delegated calendars.

The problem here is evident -- if there are multiple shared resources available to people, they have no way of knowing WHICH resource it is (unless they're astute enough to right-click while in the mailbox view and look at the properties...)

This bug is becoming critical for us, and we have had NUMEROUS complaints about it already. We submitted the bug via the bug reporting site, and it's been sitting in "unverified" for the past nearly 3 weeks with no activity.

Finally, we have tried on no less than 3 occasions over the past six weeks to contact someone at Scalix/Xandros on a marketing/sales/strategy query, and after SIX WEEKS nobody has bothered responding to our inquiries.

Having paid good money for this solution, I am more than just a little disappointed with the quality of service from Scalix/Xandros.

Would someone at Xandros care to answer their mails or take some initiative to improve service to their paying customers please?

L.

[Dean]

Good Afternoon lelandv

I am very sorry to hear your experience with Scalix has not been stellar, to say the least.

I will apologize for some of the delay in support getting back to you. We should have responded quicker.

As for your request to speak to someone in Sales about your other issues, I have sent a message to a Sales rep who covers your geographic location.

I will also send you a message separately to see if I can address some of your other comments regarding the bug logging process.

Regards
Dean

[lelandv]

thank you Dean... for the sales rep, given the nature of the inquiry, I think it might be more along the lines of your sales and/or marketing director that we would want to discuss the proposal with.

Look forward to hearing from you on the other items soon.

L.

[lelandv]

I will also send you a message separately to see if I can address some of your other comments regarding the bug logging process.

Haven't heard from you though...

[florian]

I'll leave it with Dean to further comment on timeliness of support responses and also verify why you still haven't gotten a personal response from the sales team. I agree that this is unacceptable and I'll do some chasing internally as this is really not how things should work.

I may want to comment myself on two items.

1. The topic of case-sensitive usernames. Historically, Scalix has not had the concept of a separate login name at all. Instead, you could - and still can - use various types of user identification for login; these are:

- lastname (if it's unique)
- firstname lastname (so-called personal name)
- display name (which in many cases is the same as previous, but some people use other forms)
- any internet address or SMTP alias of the user.

Now, none of these is case-sensitive and should work fine everywhere, all the time, i.e. SWA, Outlook, etc - except for login to SAC as the administrator.

In addition to all these possibilities, there is a field called the "Authentication ID" in the user record, often considered a "login name". This, however, wasn't originally designed to be used as a login name, but rather as a "key" to connect to backend authentication systems such as LDAP or Kerberos. The form of this AuthId depends on the authentication system in use, and Kerberos or Active Directory requires it to be in the form of username@REALM and this is highly case sensitive, so the field in the directory is built to preserve case.

When this field was introduced it was decided to also make it available as an additional form of login name. Due to the inner workings of the directory code in use here, it would have been very awkward to preserve the case-insensitive nature of matching up with this field, so the result is what you see. Workarounds are to either use other forms of the login name (as per above) or structure the contents of this field so that it works for you.

I acknowledge that to have a completely independent login name (which has nothing to do with this backend authentication string) is desirable, however from a product perspective it's not a bug, but a feature enhancement request. This is being tracked as [URL}https://bugzilla.scalix.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7581[/URL]. It has been reviewed various times and is considered too complex and disrupting to be implemented in a minor Scalix update; furthermore, in Scalix 12 we will change the way we integrate with external directories in a pretty comprehensive way - there will be no more sync but instead we'll actually work directly with external LDAP-based directories and AD. As part of this, the directory schema will be redesigned and part of that will be the cleanup of login name methods.

So I don't know where the statement that it's not on a roadmap comes from (and you may want to give me a hint here), but it's certainly not true although it won't happen in the next 6 months or so.


2. Thanks for posting a bug report (at this point assuming there is a product issue, although this is still to be confirmed) about the resource name display issue. It's helpful for us to see these external reports coming directly into our Bugzilla system. We take all these reports seriously and process them according to our rules. You should note, however, that anything logged on Bugzilla is treated as a "Community Bug Report" and there is no specific SLA on responses to this. We usually try to reproduce the issue in our QA department as quickly as possible and then either close-off or confirm the issue; further investigation and scheduling in development usually follows. The time it takes for this "as quickly as possible" however depends very much on the QA workload and for the QA team, all activity related to product releases or commercial customers take priority. In the last 2 months, the QA team has been constantly busy with work on the Scalix 11.4.3 patch release - which is due in early January -, testing of Scalix ActiveSync, which we really want to get out asap as it's already quite a bit behind schedule and also certification work on a number of commercial customer patches and hotfixes. Therefore, there were simply no QA cycles to work on the confirmation queue and even with our pretty large QA team working in two locations in Canada and India we have to take those priority decisions.

If the issue is important to you as a commercial customer, you should always create a support ticket in addition to the bug reports. Support tickets have SLAs associated with them and, if the issue in question, has user impact, support can decide to escalate things into development and even come up with patches and hotfixes.

If you have done this and the support case has not been processed to you satisfaction, please let me know the ticket numbers and I will look into this as well,

Anyway, apologies for us not living up to your expectations and we'll see what we can do.

Merry Christmas,
Florian.

[Dean]

Haven't heard from you though...

it's in the Mail Sorry...

[lelandv]

Received, thanks Dean.

Just replying to you...

Regards,

Leland

[kimvette2]

My apologies in advance for the harsh tone of this posting, but I'm running out of options here.

There are certainly a large number of "positives" concerning Scalix which were of course hgih on the list of requirements when we decided on our solution.

We decided Scalix was the way to go... so we tried to contact Scalix via their website with a view to making a purchase... 2 weeks later, after a couple of follow up emails... NO RESPONSE.

I'm disappointed in Scalix to the point where I won't recommend it to anyone on slashdot or anywhere else that the question "are there exchange alternatives" comes up. We are on the community edition; with a userbase of four users (well we have six user accounts defined but two go unused) it does not make sense to go with the small business or enterprise edition. When we started using scalix support for the community edition was available on a per-incident basis.

Well we finally needed the support. I contacted Scalix to find out about purchasing an incident only to find you now have to purchase "points" and the minimum purchase is 50 points, which amounts to five support incidents. When I mentioned that was a bit much, I just need the one incident, Wayne (the sales rep I spoke with) said "Well, you've been using free software for a while, haven't you? Isn't it time to buy the enterprise edition?"

You know, up to that moment I had intended to purchase the enterprise edition when our use would justify it (going beyond 25 users - well, 10 in the new version) but after that kind of response, I'm going to be moving to Zimbra or maybe SuSE Linux Enterprise Server rather than purchase scalix.

My mail server has been down for a week - and Scalix support is abysmal nowadays, both with their "points" model and with this messageboard. Did this downturn take place the moment Xandros acquired them? Did they make so much on their stock that they now don't care about their customers or potential customers, to the point where they can afford to alienate loyal users and inspire them to encourage folks seeking to punt exchange to examine Zimbra or other solutions rather than Scalix?

[florian]

Just a couple of small thoughts here...

The incidents vs. points concept in support didn't really change anything; the reason why it was introduced was so that you were able to use your support entitlement for various types of support, i.e. phone support vs. email support vs. whatever - such things are a lot easier when you have units in which you can trade instead of something that is called 'an incident (of such type)'. It was my proposal and it's been a succesful model.

What we did, however, at the same time was to get away with the single incident purchase. I'm sorry that this hit you, actually we only decided to do so after having noticed that we've had about 3 or so of those sold during the past year, with a much larger number of purchases for the 5-pack (which matches size and prize of the now 50 point pack that map to 5 email incidents, so all unchanged). The main reason for the removal, however, was that we found that all customers who had ever bought a single incident did buy another one, then another one within months of their original purchase, so we concluded that the product was not that useful after all and we got rid of it. We also actually "lost" money on this, given the very small transaction size. The are Scalix partners around, afaik, that provide commercial grade Scalix support in smaller batches for those that need it, and I would trust that they are doing a solid job at it, at least the ones I know.

So while I understand a certain level of personal frustration on your side as you're obviously one of few negatively impacted by this, I'm still surprised the whole model being called abysmal and would like to understand why - is there anything fundamentally wrong with the points model besides the fact that you would prefer to have a smaller minimum purchase size, say 10 or 30 points? Furthermore, what's wrong with the forums? This has always been a voluntary service, as some will know I'm watching this quite closely (although I've had to pull back a little on technical responses from my side, simply because of workload) and I see a very solid (and still growing) number of contributions and responses, both from users and Scalix employees alike - many of the latter is actually done in those folks' spare time. Again, I'd like to understand what is seen as being fundamentally wrong here, it hasn't occurred to me so far, in all honesty.

To the rest - all I can say is that I do care about what's going on and will do so for as long as I work for this company (and possibly beyond? ) and while being with Xandros brought some change (my relatively frequent HQ trips are to Ottawa, Canada now instead of the California Bay Area - check the average temperature readings for the winter months to know what I mean ) I wouldn't think that change in support quality or similar would have been one of them. So any further feedback (on top of what was said before in this thread) appreciated....

Happy New Year,
Florian


P.S. I'll also personally cover for Wayne in sales here; having had a hot dog with him sitting on a sidewalk next to an IKEA store, I'd certainly say he's a good sport and all but arrogant or similar - so I'd hope he'll sometime get the chance to fix this with you!

[BigBirdy]

Although I can also add my own two-cents worth of comments with regards to what has been to date, my most highly promoted and installed Exchange alternative.A GREAT product. However, I continue to see more and more changes in corporate policy, "non-community behavior" as well as "cathedral-like" changes. For instance, I just went to download the community edition again since I removed the source after installing, and now I have to wait for someone to get back to me with the URL's!!!! Look folks, the more you continue to move away from the simple, easy, direct and truly "community" philosophy, the more clients you will lose, especially those that started with you. And the current support model of a minimal number of tickets is also heading in the same direction and IMHO you are beginning to destroy some of the open, community good-will you have worked so hard to develop and foster over the years. I certainly hope, as an end user, promoter, reseller and supporter of Scalix for 6 years or so now, I would hate to have to start looking around for another mail solution where the company is truly committed to the community spirit.

[Valerion]

I have to agree with the comments about the downloads. From a licensed perspective it's always nice to get to the CE packages quickly.

Scenario I've had:

User phones me, tells me his system is dead, no mail in or out. After a while I found out that it's because somehow some of the binaries on the system went missing. And yes, he's lost the install package, and since he can't get to his email can't retrieve the email Scalix sent him. In order to quickly fix that, I would tell him to DL the appropriate CE package, walk him through an install and then schedule some time to make sure the full SBE/EE package is properly installed. Having to either read him the download URL over the phone, ask him to use another email address, or take the time to drive out with my own install package only adds tension to a situation like that, especially with the IT manager likely at that point being shouted at from his own management.

Also, for the community user, the fact that a "Scalix Representative" will get back to you seems to indicate a pending sales call. If I was new to the product I would feel less inclined to try it, and have not evaluated products due to this reason before. The email itself seems to be automatically generated in any event.

[florian]

OK, folks - I have looked into this.

First of all, we changed the technology behind the download primarily because we are moving our website and infrastructure to a different content and data management approach, so that we can do updates quicker and also think about website localizations. One consequence is that the CE "registration" process and download was changed.

I did review the wording on the confirmation page and the resulting download email and I agree that our marketing folks who touched this were a bit to agressive in their copy/paste from the confirmation emails for commercial evaluations, i.e. the wording that a Scalix Rep will get back you is clearly wrong - the process is fully automated and the download email is sent automatically, without any salesperson or anyone else involved. We will change the wording to reflect reality. Apologies for any confusion this has caused.

As for an email-less download - I'm a bit less religious here; I went through a couple of sites of similar companies or even projects and my finding is that quite a number rely on download links sent via email, so I am not sure if that's such a big deal. Valerion's point on email services possibly being down is valid in principle, however I have a hard time believing that that scenario is all that likely - most people who would consider setting up an email system for themselves will personally have more than one email account - I have 5 different accounts, mostly personal, that I use all the time for different purposes, and only two of them are hosted on Scalix (No - NONE of them is running on Exchange or a competing product, just to be clear... ), so I personally wouldn't mind.

I'll still investigate whether it is easily possible for us to also enable a complete email-less download.

On the other discussion about minimum number of support points, by the way... again, this is not something that was designed to turn our backs on the Scalix Community - as you will probably trust I've personally spent so much time in helping to build this that I'd not easily let go of it; I have to, however, face economic reality and - to be able to continue to provide a great free (as in beer in this case!) product, we have to also maintain a sustainable business. We did sell single support incidents at a time, and we got away with it. The reason is that we found that the very first support case we process for any customer is typically a lot more demanding on our resources in support, as we have to find out what the configuration and setup is and document this in our customer database, so if you count in time and material used here and the cost of processing, we're actually losing money here. Now, with all respect to user's and customer's needs, that's not a sustainable business situation. So we were faced with either making this first incident much more expensive than before (i.e. like 50-70% of the price of a 5-pack) or to get away with it; the latter we did because we think that for those customers requiring support under SLA, the 5-pack we offer as an entry point is still pretty good value for money. For those situations where this is oversized, we continue to monitor and see to help users on these forums for free, including some people from our support organisation, and furthermore the community in the meantime has grown large enough so that some self-help is possible as well.

Anyway, hope this makes sense and helps,
Florian

[Valerion]

Thanks Florian. Just wanted to point out all the potential problems before it becomes an issue. My main concern was with the wording, which you've changed.

<EDIT> You are correct about the other point, though. Blame not enough sleep for that one, </EDIT>

[les]

Just regarding the download link......

(risk this being changed now that i have brought it to everyones attention but....)

If you remember the link from the download the first time you go to the site and fill in the form you can continue to use it. This is handy for those who need to download multiple times.

so

http://downloads.scalix.com/.community/ ... -intel.bin

will always get you that version.

When they went to 11.4.2 it became....

http://downloads.scalix.com/.community/ ... -intel.bin

there's a pattern. I assume that 11.4.3 will be....

http://downloads.scalix.com/.community/ ... -intel.bin

of course there are different versions, rhel4, rhel5, suse, just change the filename to suit.

This is not guaranteed to stay as is, but it works at the moment.

[Valerion]

Les,

As of 11.4.3 this no longer works.

Florian,

Can I ask something else? Downloading the Scalix packages via wget is impossible for me right now, as it simply downloads the HTML source. Can you please adjust the download URL's so you don't require a browser for it? Right now I need a proper browser for it. While lynx/elinks will likely work, wget is much more convenient when downloading the package to remote servers.

Not sure what the Enterprise download links look like, as I haven't seen the download packages yet.

Code: Select all

[prompt source]$ wget -c '<URL>'
--10:27:03--  <URL>
           => `<URL>'
Resolving esd1.xandros.com... 64.40.103.187
Connecting to esd1.xandros.com|64.40.103.187|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [text/html]

    [ <=>                                 ] 883           --.--K/s

10:27:04 (105.26 MB/s) - `<URL>' saved [883]