Scalix Forums

From MadPenguin. Would like to hear any feedback from the Scalix guys.

http://madpenguin.org/cms/index.php/?m= ... 878&page=1

As a Scalix user, I am starting to think he might be right.

If this page wouldnt be filled with links like "Buy this, buy that" I would take this more serious.
After reading the first lines I saw that the author did not understand the product, its history and some other things.
I spent some time to understand who stands behind madpengiun and the role of the author without success. Just have a look at http://www.madpenguin.org/static/about.html ! I tried to google for the authors name and it was not easy to find out that he also writes for osweekly.... (o.k. there is a half-hearted mailto: link in the article, bit this is not what I expect).
I agree to some of the authors arguments, especially to the documentation of the services levels but I also made the experience that selling messaging products is not primary driven by marketing including "google ads". Its more a question of trust into the company and the product.
It would be nice to have a "Scalix hosting edition" (and I still believe that it will come) but with the current product a hosted Scalix box is nothing else but a dedicated server with some special kind of software. This is not what most customers want (speaking for Germany). And this is what I read in this article too. We call it "american ignorance".

If this page wouldn't be filled with links like "Buy this, buy that" I would take this more serious.

Scalix guys, don't be too full of yourselves. I think I posted something to that effect at some point on this forum before. Open any magazine and you'll see "Buy this, buy that" everywhere. That doesn't invalidate the content of their editorials. I think you could take the criticism from them just as seriously as from your own customers.

Now moving on to the substance.

"Um, Where Do I Sign Up? Once you get past the marketing speak, the visitor to the Scalix website is still left wondering where someone is supposed ..."

As a customer, I wondered that as well. viewtopic.php?t=7621#34722
I think this is something that could be fixed in about 4 hours. A 2 hours meeting between your management, marketing as well as the website team. That is the part that takes the longest, but again it only takes 3 people. Then another 2 hours from the website executioner (these 2 hours includes the revisions iterations)

Moving on to more substance:
I also visited the http://www.scalix.com/about/ webpage. What the heck is all that in Overview (the first thing that shows up)? No wonder the guy at the other side can not understand what Scalix does in seconds, and that it's basically and and strictly a software developer, not a service provider. Instead of filling up sausage, why not clean up that page and move the news to the news page. Give in it an overview of the company and their typical customers and that is it, simple. Have you heard of "less is more!"?

"... this brings me to their " partners ." Wow, are these partners making your company look bad. ..."

Now this comment is totally inappropriate and unfair.

On side note, I noticed that in your Careers session you're adversing for several technical positions. That could be a very interesting marketing promoting tool, such as "Scalix is expanding ..." Maybe you could hire somebody in to help Mr. Winokur as well. A this stage the company could benefit a lot by having a stronger Marketing Team.

Jaime

Jaime, did you notice that I am not speaking for Scalix?
I am not directly employed at Scalix and this is my personal opinion to a very strange article.

Sorry Scalix guys.
Sometimes I get a little confused by those Scalix icons on the top left corner.
Jaime

Couple things....

... first, some of the information in the madpenguin article is outdated; e.g. we have cleaned out our partner list and removed some of those that do not highlight the Scalix product in an appropriate way; I don't think they deserve any listing until they do.

... second, quite obviously the author does not really acknowledge the fact that various open source business models exist and didn't seem to understand - or seriously care to understand - ours. Our website tries to reflect the dual licensing the software is under - free for community and paid-for for the enterprise. This is a difficult message to bring over, because very usually neither of the two target audiences is interested in the other side. We tried this - as some other people did - by providing two entry points and perspectives (the two key tabs in the site) and also two big areas available from the start page, labeled community and enterprise. We thought this was an improvement from the previous site (until 12/2006), but it seems we have still failed to make this more understandable (it is a complex message to bring over). Having said that, we're just currently revising the website for a number of reasons and will give this area more thought.

... creating software (and Scalix is a software vendor) and offering Software as a Service are two completely different businesses and we focus on the first. One shouldn't try to do both, that's my firm opinion, especially if there are partners involved who might be interested in the other side of the business and we have such partners. On the hosting side, the product wasn't originally designed to handle this. We have a major initiative on the way to change it and it should see the light of the day in the next couple of months. We expect the number of organisations offering hosted Scalix to go up and should also be able to highlight those we do on the website.

... Marketing is hard and I think you can really never get it right - that's what our marketing people always get to hear and it seems they are used to it. So are everbody else's marketing people. You'll always fail in someone's eyes. Some people think that OSS marketing should be viral - and I see great benefit we get from a really active user community like all of you here. Other think more traditional, i.e. google search words, trade shows, etc.; probably it's a mixture of both. We've changed our strategy and tools over time and seen results of it, some more, some less encouraging. However, I do believe that behind every marketing effort, there should be a good (or even great?) product to start with. Creating and maintaining a product like Scalix is complex and difficult - it is big and has many different facets - we see this in day-to-day development work all the time. I'm a bit disappointed to see the author of the article not spend any serious amount of time looking at the product itself and highlighting it's strengths and weaknesses; in my personal experience, most people interested in OSS and free software actually do and we get good solid real testing and feedback that way.

Anyway, my personal bottom line is that mad penguin came in with a very specific pre-set expectation and wasn't able to find what he was looking for and expressed that. That's completely fair. As said above, we see those things and think about it. Sometimes it's really as easy as two hours worth of work and we can do something to improve, sometimes it isn't - then it becomes part of a larger long-term project. I believe we'll see some important changes over the next couple weeks and months as exciting things are going on here right now. All I can say is - stay tuned.

I sincerely hope we are not as much on the wrong path as the author suggests - and a couple of other sources of feedback and review indicate that that should not be the case; anyway, to be talked about is much better than not to be talked about.

Cheers,
Florian.

P.S. Some disclaimers:

1. even though I do carry a Scalix Employee logo next to my name and do work for Scalix, the statements above reflect my personal opinion and are not coordinated with our Marketing dept. They stand as such, but nothing else.

2. To make sure Dirk (ls-al) is covered - People with a Scalix Star logo here in the forum are distinguished community individuals who, by virtue of long-time membership and good level of activity, have helped out others in a really nice way, so we'd like to recognize them. Dirk also works for Scalix as a contractor in a support function, but uses different forum accounts when switching hads - and I think he does a fine job on making that distinction. All flames to me, please.