Scalix Forums

Folks,

In the more than 3 years now at Scalix (and actually 13+ with the technology behind it... ), yesterday marked a major milestone for me. We upgraded our internal servers to the current 11.3 development build as part of our dogfooding (as in "we do eat our own dog food") process. This enabled CalDAV on my production account and I can access my calendar using iCal.app on my leopardized (for the Windows folks: running the latest Mac OS/X 10.5) MacBook Pro now. The days of no-offline-server-calendaring using SWA only are finally over for die hard Mac lovers like me! I use and like SWA a lot, but I need something I can take with me when I'm offline as well.

This is Mission Accomplished and my thanks go to our Dev team who made it happen!

We're planning to release 11.3 in the second week of December, if all the QA testing and dogfooding goes well. In addition to CalDAV support, we'll see SWA load time and usability improvements, support for Outlook 2007 and secure Outlook connectivity over SSL without the use of a VPN.

All of this will also be available in the free Scalix Community Edition, and that includes the CalDAV support as described above.

This is not for granted. As with every new feature we discussed whether it should be available for everyone or for the commercial editions only. With us being a company with well over a hundred people on our payroll now between Xandros and Scalix, we have to keep a good balance.

My opinion on CalDAV in particular, however, was very clear - with it being the most important advance in open standards in our field, it should really be made available as broadly as possible, to fuel development of a better heterogeneous ecosystem of client and server calendaring applications.

So ... Scalix 11.3 will increase functionality for Community Edition significantly.

With this being said, it's about time to talk about one other change that we're making with Scalix 11.3. This time it's one that I'm sure will create some noise here and raise some discussion: We're reducing the number of free premium users in Community Edition from 25 down to 10. At the same time, for those requiring more than 10 premium users, we're introducing a new commercial product, SBE-20, which is Small Business Edition with 20 premium users as a start, at a lower price point.

Now, to be very, very clear right from the start: This is not a result of the Xandros acquisition or us going more commercial and turning away from our free offerings. We had planned this step at Scalix well before the two companies came together and I stood just as firmly behind the decision as I do now. IMHO, there is good logic behind it, which I'd like to explain a bit.

I'll need to go back in history a bit. When we first introduced Scalix Community Edition (CE) more than two years ago, Premium Users were called Enterprise Users (to make it clear that they are actually associated with the Enterprise product), CE was defined to be a free eMail and calendaring system for personal and small business use, with unlimited Community Users (which was the old name for Standard Users) and everything was clear and well-defined.

At the time we decided to include 5 Enterprise Users with CE, basically as a trial pack, so that CE users could test the functionality and potentially make the decision to purchase the commercial version. As everyone knows, CE was an immediate and major success - we quickly hit 5- and 6-digit download numbers.

However, this brought a side effect with it that we didn't fully anticipate - we had a lot of interest from customers that were smaller than we had expected given the enterprise heritage of our product. Dissatisfied with Exchange and other offerings, they were looking for a commercial grade email system, typically in the 10 to 20 user range and were willing to pay for it. At the time our entry-level package started at 25 Enterprise Edition user licenses, which was too much for them and simply could not compete with solutions such as Microsoft's Small Business server. We also faced another problem: We couldn't drive the price down for these customers for one simple reason - these were the Scalix 9.4 days and the product was really hard to install and get running. At the time, 90% of the questions I received and answered were questions related to installation and setup problems. A commercial product would have had to include some level of installation support and we would not have been able to manage that for a large number of small business customers at the time.

So we had tons of small and medium-size commercial companies that wanted to use our product, but couldn't really serve them - and that was a bad situation (although a nice problem to have one could think...). For this very reason, we decided to increase the number of free Enterprise Users in CE to 25 - simply to allow those folks to use the product and to get them going. A while later, we changed "Enterprise Users" to "Premium Users" to decouple user type and product edition and avoid confusion. The "Trial Pack" had become our (free) low-end product offering. Everything worked out well and our user base increased.

However, times changed and those users and customers asked us to provide a commercial product for them anyway, together with support packages and possibly some add-on features previously only available in enterprise product. By that time - speaking Scalix 10 now - we had improved the installer. Setup and configuration were now doable for everyone and support requests around installation had dropped rapidly. Finally we were able to introduce Small Business Edition (SBE), combining the best of both worlds and providing for a powerful, flexible, feature-rich and fully supported email and calendaring server product targetted at smaller companies with no use for the full gamut of multi-server features. We also added a license key system that enabled customers to switch between editions on the fly, without reinstalling, or even restarting the Scalix server.

With all this in place, the 25 Premium user licenses included in CE didn't really make sense any more and we decided to change it again. Our resellers were also very much in favor of that change, not so much because of additional revenue, but rather for a clearer statement on what we consider commercial use and what should be for the community and free. Clarity on that point leads to all kinds of thoughts around commercial support and services.

Again, to be very, very clear here - and I am speaking from experience: A 20-user commercial organisation has a strong set of requirements for their email and calendaring system, including good availability, SLAs when support is needed, need for migration help and more, so going it is the right thing to do for us, our partners and eventually our customers as well.

We postponed the introduction of this several times since last year - all the hard work to get Scalix 11 out of the door and get it fully stable was certainly a major part of it, as was providing for continuity during the transition period when we were joining the Xandros family. Thankfully, those turbulent times are over now.

Now, with all the new features coming in 11.3, especially CalDAV support, is the right time; we're giving away lots of new stuff and taking some away - again keeping the balance. The only other thing we're changing is moving the archiving interface out of CE and into SBE and EE only, which is essentially preparation for deeper archiving integration to come in 2008.

So this is it, period. No further change on this planned anytime soon, and I think this new setup makes sense. I'm happy to answer any questions about what this means, here are the ones I'd have expected to see, but I assume there'll be a few more - I look forward to hear from you.

Mini Q&A

Q: Does this mean I have to buy Scalix SBE or Scalix EE if I want to continue using the product with more than 10 Premium Users?
A: No; All Scalix licenses are perpetual and that includes the Community Edition license. Tthis means that you'll be able to use all versions of Scalix up to 11.2 forever with 25 premium and unlimited standard users. Only when you upgrade to 11.3 or later, will you be limited. The installer will not allow you to upgrade if you have more than 10 users defined. You'll either have to convert some of the user accounts to standard users or get a commercial license.

Q: If I want to go commercial, do I have to buy the Scalix SBE product with 50 Premium Users?
A: This is one possibility. However, we're also introducing SBE-20 with 20 Premium Users at a lower price point for 11.3. For people already using CE, we'll also have a special promotion in which you can get a 25-User SBE license for the price of SBE-20, i.e. we'll be giving away those 5 extra users for a limited time.

Q: Are you planning to remove Scalix Community Edition completely or change the current license?
A: No, with the exception of the above. We are committed to keep offering CE as the world's best, most powerful free email and calendaring system. We'll continue to add further functionality to it in balance with our commercial versions. We'll also continue to offer incident-based support to small business users running CE in commercial production environments. We'll continue to allow CE to be used in any context, with the exception of paid-for hosted services, as before.

Again, looking forward to your questions and comments, hope this helps,
Florian

in my opinion the restriction to 10 premium users in the ce seems, well, ok. in my experience companies with more than 10 employees ARE willing to pay for software, that is often mission-critical to them.

i can only fully agree with you that caldav is THE most important feature many of us have waited for (besides outlook 2007 compatibility). just to be sure santa claus will bring all the long awaited features: will swa finally support tasks?

jo

Jo,

thanks for your positive feedback - even though it's just one point opinion, this surely helps when you make such moves.

On the SWA front, unfortunately tasks are not there yet and will possibly take until mid next year. For 11.3, we have improved stability and performance and done minor useability enhancements, such as how to access the address book and signature handling for forwards and replies.

If we continue with our roadmap as currently planned, SWA will first receive a major calendaring update in early 2008, including overlay calendars and better group calendaring - taking all customer input in, this is high up the list. Tasks will also be based on different backend support, again very DAV-centric and are currently on the roadmap for mid-2008. I know that this is one painpoint (although people seem to have pretty binary opinions about it, either don't care at all or be very passionate) that has been dragging on for too long, but I still hope those of you (and us) using SWA frequently will appreciate the order of things once they see what we are coming up with!

Again, thanks,
Florian.

I think Florian knows my opinions

My wishlist is:

1) OL 2007 support
2) Faster SWA
3) Wireless syncing
4) Encrypted MAPI support (SSL, or preferably HTTPS to evade port blocking while at a client's site).

From this announcement, 1 is done, and 2 is at least partly addressed, so I am a happy boy The rest I am sure will come when it is ready.

As to the reduction on CE, I have heard about this quite a while back now, and have thought about it a lot in the meantime. It doesn't take anything away from the home user (I have a CE installation for personal mail), and the small business user needs the advanced functions (like Recovery Folders, probably more as time goes on) anyway, so that will be a better deal for them. And with the new SBE-20 it is now possible for them to buy it.

Just don't reduce it any further, I think. 10 is a good number, however 5 may be too small for the typical hobbiest person. Again, time will tell what happens here.

Strange, no "Edit" button today. I meant to add that 4) is mostly addressed as well. HTTPS will be a good thing, but at least we can offer SSL from the server-side now.

Yeah....great.....so I've spent the last couple of months convincing one of my customers to deep-six Exchange.....they happen to have 15 users in desperate need of the full client.
Their market prospects considering, I expect them to grow to 25+ users within one year (making them a full paying and most likely a very happy Scalix customer).
Now I'm back at square-one.....and expect to have Exchange make my life miserable for long time to come (Exchange is locked up with M$ SBS with max. 75 clients.....)
I do understand your move (well, sort off...)....my customer does not.

A well founded argument and a good product can be powerful tools.
You would be back at square-one if scalix was back to version 11.0.0
Are you sure they wouldn't pay happy for the 25 license promotion right up front?

Most customers complain about prices, that's their job, and some do it very well. But most customers have a very good sense of cost/benefit to them, and surprisingly enough, often times that is higher than what we think!

If their dissatisfaction with Exchange is building up they will ditch it, regardless of scalix.

Martin,

I also fail to see your point here, really. You will have plenty of options:

1. You can continue to use perfectly stable Scalix 11.2 for up to 25 users for free, forever. Noone can or will take that away from you.

2. If this is testing or evaluation, you can get a 60 day eval license key for SBE or EE anytime. If you need more than 25 users (which is the size of the dfault key), please contact our sales dept and they will be happy to provide you with whatever number you require for a couple of months for your pilot.

3. If you "have to" buy something for your client, it sounds like SBE will suffice for them for good - SBE-50 is USD 1000,00, that's about USD 20 per user, and way less than you would pay for a 25 user SBS from Microsoft. As simple as that..

So no offense here, but especially for cases like yours I see very little of a problem with our move - am I missing something? By all means, from my perspective, this is all but square one....

Florian.

Hi Florian,

I must admit I do understand the reasons why you will drop the 25 free premium users down to 10 BUT the time you will do this... more than just a reason for a major headache on my side. I know such major license adjustments are possible and may happen all the time without further notes. In other words, you (Scalix) have the absolute rights to do so but consider the time you do this. There are some annoying issues left, not lack of features but bugs, I would not call scalix to be as stable as theyself say it is but that's a marketing issue, no real problem for me there. But changing the license model which WILL have a real big impact for the users between minor releases without further notice or time to react. I know, you may say no one is forced to jump to release 11.3 but otherwise they will stick with some very annoying issues forever without jumping to newer releases and for sites using more than 10 users without paying money (and most annoying annual fees).
I know a commercial company like Scalix needs to pay attention to their shareholder value but changing the license model to rise the income (sorry, but it is nothing more than this) at this time is very disappointing!
In short words, is it really necessary to change this in between minor releases? Doesn't this sound like a change one should apply in a major release?

greets
Michael

no edit button?


should be


greets
Michael

Michael,

sorry, can't really agree here.... couple points:

- There are major releases, minor releases and patch releases. The first couple releases this year have been patch release (11.0.1 through 11.0.4) and we absolutely made sure that everyone who was on 11.0.0 could use these as we really wanted to get rid of the most common issues that appeared with our customers. Maybe you also should be aware that we ourselves are probably one of our most demanding customers, as we use our product - one of the advantages of being an email company - we really and truely eat our own dogfood. I wasn't happy with the quality of the initial Scali x 11 releases myself, however, since 11.0.4, I've personally had very little serious trouble and I jump between all possible kinds of clients all the time. For me, 11.2 and 11.3, and now 11.3 have truely been what they've been named for, releases that add functionality and capability or change platform support; some bugs were fixed as well, but would I be ok to use 11.0.4 today - surely I would. We originally wanted to make the license change at the 11.1 point, then postponed it for two further minor releases - I think that's a fair game.

There are some annoying issues left, not lack of features but bugs, I would not call scalix to be as stable as theyself say it is but that's a marketing issue, no real problem for me there.

Can you get more specific here? Again, as I said, I'm pretty happy with what 11.2 provided to me. There are some issues left, in particular in specific markets such as Japan, but by in large there are very few big points left, according to my tracking.

But changing the license model which WILL have a real big impact for the users between minor releases without further notice or time to react. I know, you may say no one is forced to jump to release 11.3 but otherwise they will stick with some very annoying issues forever without jumping to newer releases and for sites using more than 10 users without paying money (and most annoying annual fees).

- Again, please name the issues that you believe we should fix for free for all users.

- There is no such thing as "annual fees" for any Scalix version, ever - all our licenses are perpetual, the only thing you pay for is software subscription, i.e. continued access to all new minor and major releases going forward, i.e. instead of buying future versions of the software you pay 20% per year of upgrade insurace. As we've released at least 3 versions per year since Scalix started, this will give you another 15 new versions of the product until you've paid the original license price again; fair deal, IMHO.

I know a commercial company like Scalix needs to pay attention to their shareholder value but changing the license model to rise the income (sorry, but it is nothing more than this) at this time is very disappointing!

Sorry, but that's simply not true; we don't believe we'll be raising our income based on the change, at least not in a very relevant way; it would take a lot of commercial 20-user customers to keep a company our size afloat - it's certainly our overall customer base, including some larger enterprise accounts that make the difference here, as is the case for most software companies.

We've simply seen a good number of cases where the balance between free and commercial, especially when it comes to additional services like support, etc., doesn't play out as well; actually, especially in small business space this is more true for our reseller partners than ourselves - and all of them we've talked to have blessed the change so far. Again, the theory is that a company or other kind of commercial organisation running an email system for 20 users or so requiring groupware functionality is a serious operation with serious availability and support requirements and should be treated as such - this is much easier with a commercial license in place.

I firmly believe that, with the new offering, we simply provide the world's best and strongest free email and groupware solution; given the new features, we'll be expanding that role and there are many new things to come for commercial and free users - always keep in mind that we provide pretty rich functionality even for standard users, and they are gaining capabilities with every version we publish.

In short words, is it really necessary to change this in between minor releases? Doesn't this sound like a change one should apply in a major release?

In short words, yes - this also has to do with our overall release strategy; I do agree that Scalix 11 was too disruptive, partially because we put too much change in various areas in a single release. Snce then, our strategy has changed and minor releases are our main vehicle to bring careful, incremental change to our userbase, in a system of continous improvement, so the next major one will most likely be out no earlier than a year from now.

Given the change in 11.3 and subsequently 11.4, we could have made it a major release, by the way, but decided against it, for many reasons - as explained above.

Again, very ready to discuss the case you're making in more detail - but by in large I think we're very much on the right track and again, I can assure you that the reasons for moving in that direction are quite different from what you suspect and name......

Cheers, looking forward,
Florian.

I have to say I'm disappointed to see this change is "additude" toward the CE. This in the eyes of myself and possibly many others just shows that. This "company" like mays others who pretend to the in favor of a open source idea really aren't.

In your own words :

we had a lot of interest from customers that were smaller than we had expected given the enterprise heritage of our product. Dissatisfied with Exchange and other offerings, they were looking for a commercial grade email system, typically in the 10 to 20 user range and were willing to pay for it.

And now you's have decided to lower the max free "premium users" to the bottom baseline of people to are interested in your product and are willing to pay for it. In other words, your just trying to scrap every last time out of any one yous can. And while I'm all for people making money and creating stability in their company. I don't be leave in misleading people or straight out lie'ing to them about ones core beleafes.

Heres how I come to this "thought" process.
1. Your company makes the 1 thing the open source community lacks an outlook connector.
2. Your company also makes a good OWA alternative. But these are a dime a dozen in the open source world.

So really your only way to try to get peoples attention is with the connector. And with a giving away something like 25 free outlook connections. Yous have gotten the attention yous wanted. Which means yous are probably feeling very secure and confident (and the merger/acquisition didn't hurt either). And your now looking to bring all those extra companies under your "commercial" umbrella. And while probably right not all those "new" / suckered in companies not really adding up to much in the way of having to buy new "CALS". Yous don't really care about those, what yous are really after is the going support contracts.

And so while I can understand the reasoning for the changes (as I see them). I thinks it's total BS that yous are trying to pull it off was anything more then things set into motion sometime ago.

And how do yous except people to trust your company after this, sure yous say things like:

So this is it, period. No further change on this planned anytime soon

But what does that really prove, you've never once even hinted at this fact. But instead hind it amonkest your selfs and then just drop it like a bomb on all of us. And while yous say sure you can still with 11.2 forever that will never change and maybe we can. It has issue. Hens the introduction of 11.3+. Sure it has new features (like the CalDAV which i can imagine was only given the CE edition to help lessen the blow of the reduced "CALS") but I'll bet it also has ALOT of bug fixes as well. Which will be unavalible with out upgrading and again reducing the "premium" free "CALS".

So again I must say I this extremely hearting so say the lest. I know my self and company can not stand behind a product and or company that is as deceitful as this one shows to be. Money does make the world go around, theres not reason to hide to. But there every reason to be truthful with your community and followers.

Side note, I came across some of these idea after call around to companies who are looking at, have or are using scalix. And I've come to find that your "biggest" clients really only use about 100 "premium" but have allot of "standard" users. So again I can understand this the reasoning for this change. Just wish yous could have been more up front about out it and not made it out to look like yous had no choice.

Nomad,

please re-read my original post in this thread. One of the things I tried to make very clear is that this is anything but a change in attitude. I've been with the company from almost the very beginning - Scalix started off as a purely commercial software company with no community and open source involvement at all and we've taken many steps to actually become more open, through Community Edition, some of the Open Source work we've done, putting our bug tracking and release planning in the open, providing a solid level of support on this forum and much more.

Community Edition was never meant to be centered around the Outlook Connector and premium user CALs in the first place. To re-iterate, the first version of it, Scalix 9.4, that we published only had 5 Premium Users (named Enterprise Users at the time, to make it more clear!), which were meant to be a trial pack for the commercial product's functionality. The change to make this number 25 was based on thoughts very different from the original reasons to create CE - again, see the above.

Even if you take Premium Users away completely, there is plenty of value in the Scalix product:
- Top-of-the-line AJAX-based email clients on the market (I agree there is more than one now, there really wasn't when we started, but I believe we hold up pretty nicely still, I disagree that there are many that match us in functionality and useability); this can be used by standard users as well, in unlimited number
- integrated solution with AJAX-based administration console
- solid support for open-standards based clients (IMAP including IDLE support and other optional features and now DAV/CalDAV)
- open source connectors available for Evolution and Kontact
- support for store access through REST APIs, based on open data formats like ical
- powerful server-side routing, character set processing and rules engine
- filesystem based message store with single-copy storage architecture
- directory integration for user management and authentication with any LDAP-based directory and Kerberos backends
- full-text indexing and search based on Apache Lucene technology
- simple upgrade path to commercial versions through license key - single code base
- incident-based commercial support available should you want it

... and a lot of devil-in-the-details items more ...

And now you's have decided to lower the max free "premium users" to the bottom baseline of people to are interested in your product and are willing to pay for it. In other words, your just trying to scrap every last time out of any one yous can. And while I'm all for people making money and creating stability in their company. I don't be leave in misleading people or straight out lie'ing to them about ones core beleafes.

Now, you misinterpret me. The ones that I am talking about were really willing to pay for it, because they wanted to get a couple of things that you only really get when you pay - commercial-grade support with guaranteed SLAs, upgrade protection and an ecosystem to support it. The only problem was that, at the time, our entry price level was too high for most of them - it was based on Enterprise Edition and the baseline was about USD 1800 for the first year for 25 users, which was way too high for these folks. We've cut this entry-level price to almost half and doubled the number of users you get for that with the SBE - this is now very competitive. However, we've still received a lot of comments from people with less than 25 users, who are still wanting to pay for the above - and that's why we created the SBE-20 product at another, again lower entry-level price level.

1. Your company makes the 1 thing the open source community lacks an outlook connector.

Well, if the Outlook Connector was the only piece of value to our product, why then do about 25% of even our commercial customer base, including a customer with nearly 10000 premium users, not use it at all and run everything on SWA and open-standards-based clients?

2. Your company also makes a good OWA alternative. But these are a dime a dozen in the open source world.

I know of about 5 AJAX-based webmail clients that come anywhere near to what we're doing. Out of those, 2 are completely commercial and don't provide a free solution at all and one of the other 3, one is a clone/fork of one of the others. Preferences vary, but there are people who choose SWA over either.

So really your only way to try to get peoples attention is with the connector. And with a giving away something like 25 free outlook connections. Yous have gotten the attention yous wanted. Which means yous are probably feeling very secure and confident (and the merger/acquisition didn't hurt either). And your now looking to bring all those extra companies under your "commercial" umbrella.

I do believe that we'll get a couple new commercial customers; however, I don't think that this happens because we've made community edition smaller, but because we have a more attractive commercial entry point offering now.

Some statistics I have support this; we did a survey among community edition users last year and one of the questions we asked was what would motivate them to upgrade to a commercial version. Additional number of premium users was a frequent answer, however more frequent were things such as "using community for trial only, want commercial grade soluton", "need commercial support", "looking for additional features like AD integration", "availability of optional wireless solution", etc.

And while probably right not all those "new" / suckered in companies not really adding up to much in the way of having to buy new "CALS". Yous don't really care about those, what yous are really after is the going support contracts.

You can buy a support contract for community edition today, so I don't think that's the point. In fact, one of our largest support customer uses community edition with close to 10K users and pays us a premium support fee for the system. So to move forward with this, we wouldn't have needed to change any of the licensing.

And so while I can understand the reasoning for the changes (as I see them). I thinks it's total BS that yous are trying to pull it off was anything more then things set into motion sometime ago.

Sorry, I don't understand this sentence.

And how do yous except people to trust your company after this, sure yous say things like:

So this is it, period. No further change on this planned anytime soon

But what does that really prove, you've never once even hinted at this fact. But instead hind it amonkest your selfs and then just drop it like a bomb on all of us. And while yous say sure you can still with 11.2 forever that will never change and maybe we can. It has issue. Hens the introduction of 11.3+. Sure it has new features (like the CalDAV which i can imagine was only given the CE edition to help lessen the blow of the reduced "CALS") but I'll bet it also has ALOT of bug fixes as well. Which will be unavalible with out upgrading and again reducing the "premium" free "CALS".

Sorry, this is one I simply have to take personal. Honestly, when I wrote this, I didn't care too much about the level of trust people here on the forum would have in the company, what I did care about was the level of trust they would have in my statement. As you see from my number of posts - I am still the top contributor here, not sure if "Scalix Support" has a higher absolute number but that account is used by multiple people - most long-term followers of Scalix have been in touch with me at some point in the past, so I'm certainly part of the company's public face. And I do care about telling the truth and my working assumption is that most people who know me trust me with my statements. So at least you have a name that you can put the blame on.

With this being said, once again, while it has been discussed, it was always pretty clear to everyone that CalDAV would be a feature of all editions, includng community - again, as an open standard, anything else doesn't make sense if you want to keep the balance. The decision was certainly taken independent of the license change.

True, there are bugfixes in 11.3, and if there was a decent way of releasing these independently, say, as a 11.2.1 patch, without the licensing change, I would certainly push to do just that - the problem is really one of bandwidth, we can't build, QA-test and certify multiple releases at the same time and the overall train is just running too fast to be able to do that - with Scalix 11.3 coming out in a couple of weeks and 11.4 already on the horizon for late Q1, early Q2 next year, it's crazy enough as it is. And - 11.4 will have a load of new features, most of which, again and without doubt, will benefit all users in all editions of the product, including CE.

The one thing I take from your statement and the one from Michael before it is that possibly we should have tried to communicate these changes more broadly and earlier in the game, so that those shops affected would have had some more time to make their call, either plan to stay at a certain release level or to go commercial. All I can say to my excuse is that a lot of things are going on here in parallel and it's all a matter of bandwidth at some point.

Anyway, this is all extremely interesting and challenging and that's the main reason why I stayed with the company over the acquisition - it's still a lot of fun to drive technology to build a product in one of the most competitive areas of enterprise computing.

Side note, I came across some of these idea after call around to companies who are looking at, have or are using scalix. And I've come to find that your "biggest" clients really only use about 100 "premium" but have allot of "standard" users. So again I can understand this the reasoning for this change. Just wish yous could have been more up front about out it and not made it out to look like yous had no choice.

Well, don't know where your data comes from, but I can have our complete commercial customer list in front of me if I want to. I won't give you all the details from it, but our biggest clients have 4- and 5-digit numbers of premium users with us and usually a very low number of standard users. There are a few where this is reversed, especially in Education. And for those where almost all of the users are standard users - which will remain unrestricted for Community Edition because this is the very heart of the community product - a change in premium users from 25 to 10 shouldn't make any difference, given where their focus is. So I miss the point you're making.

Cheers,
Florian.

Hello Nomad,

I understand your arguments, but I also see the points from scalix.

Actually the 11.2 release is very very stable,
what is on the list of things:

Can be critical:
- Missing Outlook 2007 support
- SWA slow
- Missing SSL/HTTPS support

Almost "nice to have" things
- Some minor problems with the outlook connector (Mostly smartcache)
- No tasks support in SWA


Actually when we descided to move to Scalix, we did a long research for such solutions and we have been aware that there are two parts of the system which are not open:

- SWA interface
- MS Outlook connector

So if we use one of these two components, then we will have to accept the terms scalix makes for them.
I feel like most users don't realy care if it's opensource or not, they say open source, but mean free of charges.
Scalix is opensource (with the two exceptions mentioned), Scalix is free for (very) small companies. Actually we have not seen a completely open source AND free version of a groupware solution who also has a working outlook connector. (Sorry, but here in switzerland the outlook connector is a "Must have")


In the past there existed only licenses for 50+ users (correct me if I'm wrong)), so even if you only needed 26 users, you had to buy 50 users, which just was quite expensive "for one user".
I hope there will be something like "Additional 5 User packs".

Companies needing more than 10 premium users normaly are also able to pay for them. For us the 10 user limit is OK.

Of course a 25 user free (or even 1000 users for free) would be very attractive, but then, how would scalix get it's developers/testers payed to improve and enhance the system ?

Andre,

thanks. As said before, the new entry-level will be a SBE-20 version, then with additional 25 user or 10 user packs (sorry for not making this 5, transaction size would have been too small and too expensive to handle, but I hope the 10 will help you as well).

I believe you're a reseller - correct? The new price list is already available for resellers, it will have these new products and be valid from the 11.3 release onwards. Pricing for existing products is mostly unchanged.

Cheers,
Florian.