wish list/enhancements/features request/suggestions

[jaime.pinto]

Here is a brief "wish list" for upcoming releases. It's in order of priority according to *our* needs. Hopefuly it will be inline with the majority of other scalix customers as well.

0) Fix the bugs! Always the first priority.

1) SmartCache on OL2003 that works. Otherwise no SmartCache at all, as long as it doesn't get in the way of proper functioning of OL2003 client. A checkbox to turn SmartCache ON/OFF on the fly *after* the scalix profile creation (even if effective only next time OL2003 is started).

2) Over-the-air sync with BlackBerry/WinMob (email/calendar/contacts/notes):
Option a) Fix the NotifyLink hosted services integration with Scalix
Option b) workout a scheme with Funambol (or some other developer) to have a *linux based in-house* server (not Windows like NotifyLink) to do that job. As long as it is integrated and supported by Scalix.

3) Anti-virus/anti-spam Plugin integrated/managed from within SAC. Give the user some level of control via SWA. Alternatively, 3rd party integration with some other linux developer or dedicated appliance (Ex.: PerfectMail). Whatever Scalix can support "officially" and will do the job effectivelly.

4) SAC Backup/recover of users folders. Administrator must be able to browse the mailboxes from all users, on the server and the backup, and manage the recover process. User may have some level of control as well via SWA.

5) SWA shared calendar multi-users display (side-by-side, overlay, etc). Improvement of the display on the invitee list.

6) Evolution connector for ubuntu dapper/feisty (and redhat) that works, without bugs in the calendar or the naming convention when they start with numbers.

7) Connector for Thunderbird on windows/linux/macs. Help out and colaborate with anybody that wants to work on that initiative.

8.) OL2007 connector support

9) In general, connectors that fall back on the IMAP functionality by default, when users on the server are switched from Premium to Standard user (just drop MAPI) and vice-versa.

10) integrate as many of the om***** administration/command-line tasks into SAC.


Jaime

[florian]

0) Fix the bugs! Always the first priority.

Do you have any specific bugs that you are worried about?

1) SmartCache on OL2003 that works. Otherwise no SmartCache at all, as long as it doesn't get in the way of proper functioning of OL2003 client. A checkbox to turn SmartCache ON/OFF on the fly *after* the scalix profile creation (even if effective only next time OL2003 is started).

What exactly does not work in SmartCache for you?

2) Over-the-air sync with BlackBerry/WinMob (email/calendar/contacts/notes):
Option a) Fix the NotifyLink hosted services integration with Scalix
Option b) workout a scheme with Funambol (or some other developer) to have a *linux based in-house* server (not Windows like NotifyLink) to do that job. As long as it is integrated and supported by Scalix.

We are working on both.

3) Anti-virus/anti-spam Plugin integrated/managed from within SAC. Give the user some level of control via SWA. Alternatively, 3rd party integration with some other linux developer or dedicated appliance (Ex.: PerfectMail). Whatever Scalix can support "officially" and will do the job effectivelly.

- We are working on that. What level of control would you like to see for the end user?

-3rd-party appliances and services typically work very well with Scalix provided that they act as SMTP relays. What specifically would you want in that space?

4) SAC Backup/recover of users folders. Administrator must be able to browse the mailboxes from all users, on the server and the backup, and manage the recover process. User may have some level of control as well via SWA.

- What specific level of control would you want to see for the end user? For a UI-driven solution for Scalix backup and restore, have you looked at SEP Sesam and their Scalix Plugin with Single Object recovery support?

5) SWA shared calendar multi-users display (side-by-side, overlay, etc). Improvement of the display on the invitee list.

- Makes sense. Has been requested a number of times. for the side-by-side and the overlay. What exactly would you like to see improved with the invitee list?

6) Evolution connector for ubuntu dapper/feisty (and redhat) that works, without bugs in the calendar or the naming convention when they start with numbers.

What specific bugs and problems are you talking about? Are you sure they are Connector bugs or could they be Evolution bugs as well? Especially versions of Evolution up until Evo 2.6 are known to be extremely buggy.

7) Connector for Thunderbird on windows/linux/macs. Help out and colaborate with anybody that wants to work on that initiative.

What functionality beyond IMAP and LDAP address lookup would the connector provide?

8.) OL2007 connector support

we are working on that.

9) In general, connectors that fall back on the IMAP functionality by default, when users on the server are switched from Premium to Standard user (just drop MAPI) and vice-versa.

What purpose would that have? Why would outlook need a connector to access Scalix server via IMAP - it can do that out of the box?

10) integrate as many of the om***** administration/command-line tasks into SAC.

Can you name admin use cases and functionality in order of priority that you would like to see integrated in SAC?

Cheers,
Florian.



Jaime

[swordfish]

Quote:
10) integrate as many of the om***** administration/command-line tasks into SAC.


Can you name admin use cases and functionality in order of priority that you would like to see integrated in SAC?

Cheers,
Florian

Hi Florian,

The very first thing to be intergrated into SAC should be ability for the sxadmin to be able to assign right to other user of an existing user folders - calendar/tasks/etc. This is quiet difficult to be done via the command line.

Secondly, I see quiet a lot of topics about corruption of postgress cache, users' server based rules, etc. There should be a functionality to resolve these issues via the SAC interface.

[florian]

Swordfish,

you picked a coule of particularly problematic examples...

The very first thing to be intergrated into SAC should be ability for the sxadmin to be able to assign right to other user of an existing user folders - calendar/tasks/etc. This is quiet difficult to be done via the command line.

Currently, there is no official way from either the command line or any admin GUI to modify user folder content or access rights; however, both can be done from within Outlook and partially using SWA. What particular use-case/real-world scenario are you thinking of, i.e. really name the business scenario.

Secondly, I see quiet a lot of topics about corruption of postgress cache, users' server based rules, etc. There should be a functionality to resolve these issues via the SAC interface.

Well, one thing I can see us doing would be message store consistency checks (i.e. a wrapper around the omscan command) as message store corruption can happen for a variety of reasons, including client crashes and some other things. However, some of the items that you seem to be referring to are simply bugs in the product. Not sure if we should really invest time into building workarounds for bugs into an admin GUI instead of rather fixing the underlying problem....

Cheers,
Florian.

[swordfish]

Swordfish,

you picked a coule of particularly problematic examples...

Quote:
The very first thing to be intergrated into SAC should be ability for the sxadmin to be able to assign right to other user of an existing user folders - calendar/tasks/etc. This is quiet difficult to be done via the command line.


Currently, there is no official way from either the command line or any admin GUI to modify user folder content or access rights; however, both can be done from within Outlook and partially using SWA. What particular use-case/real-world scenario are you thinking of, i.e. really name the business scenario.

Many users and especially top executives (the ones deciding to go for Scalix or not) expect the admin to be able to assign rights and I had many cases where there are overseas and just send emails asking for someone else to have access to their calendars, tasks, etc. They act as too busy to assign such rights themselfs and they are quiet surprised to find out that it's not easy for the admin to do this. Currently, I also couldn't find an easy way of doing this via the command line but I thought that it just wasn't explained properly in the documentation. Luckily, I have everyone's passwords and in those situations I configure my own Outlook as them, sync and change rights to folders. However some of those users have very large mailboxes and it take very long time to sync and update permissions.

Quote:
Secondly, I see quiet a lot of topics about corruption of postgress cache, users' server based rules, etc. There should be a functionality to resolve these issues via the SAC interface.


Well, one thing I can see us doing would be message store consistency checks (i.e. a wrapper around the omscan command) as message store corruption can happen for a variety of reasons, including client crashes and some other things. However, some of the items that you seem to be referring to are simply bugs in the product. Not sure if we should really invest time into building workarounds for bugs into an admin GUI instead of rather fixing the underlying problem....

omscan is enough easy and well explained how to run from command line. Of course in a longer term it'll be nice to be incorporated in the SAC interface or even better, incorporate the whole ommaintain script with scheduling, etc. but in my opinion that is not urgent for now.

And yes you should prioritise to fix the bugs but I don't believe there won't be new bugs and situations causing database cache, rules or other corruptions. In my opinion there should be way to "sanitize" some parts of the users' directories, rule, caches, etc from within SAC.


In general if possible run a report from this forum and from your support calls. Analyse what are the majority of them about and how they were resolved, then based on that see which ones took most of the time or reoccuring most often and start building fuctionality into SAC to reduce the time consuming for those tasks/support calls. I think that is the best way to go in the right direction. Otherwise, there are hundreds of users here and that leads to hundreds of different wishes.

[a.schild]

Hello,

if we may add something to the wish list:

Between position 1-2 add support for the tasks/todo's to the webmail interface.
It's a problem for our MAC users, that they can't use the todo's....

Between position 8-9 support for managing public folders from SAC.

André

[interways2]

I agree, tasks/todo is VERY important for many users!

[shlashdot]

Currently, there is no official way from either the command line or any admin GUI to modify user folder content or access rights; however, both can be done from within Outlook and partially using SWA. What particular use-case/real-world scenario are you thinking of, i.e. really name the business scenario.

Here's the business scenario:

(1) administrator
(>1) users

[florian]

Well, I guessed that part.

Why would the administrator want to set the folder rights for the users (instead of them themselves setting it up in SWA or Outlook) and why wouldn't the admin use any of the email client for such a data excercise?

Florian

[swordfish]

Well, I guessed that part.

Why would the administrator want to set the folder rights for the users (instead of them themselves setting it up in SWA or Outlook) and why wouldn't the admin use any of the email client for such a data excercise?

Florian

Hi Florian,

I think, I explained that before. The users, especially CEO's and the kind don't want/know how to set that up. They expect the administrator to be able to do that. Besides, if they are traveling and just send an email asking to change/add/modify permissions, the administrator don't have access to their Outlook.

[shlashdot]

Why would the administrator want to set the folder rights for the users (instead of them themselves setting it up in SWA or Outlook) and why wouldn't the admin use any of the email client for such a data excercise?

It really is hard to believe you are seriously asking this.

All I can say is, yes, there are some situations where users can manage access rights, but it can hardly be the norm that users should have *full* control over infrastructure and permissions, and administrators have none.

And, it is hard to believe you don't see the problem with an adminstrator needing to use each client machine to administer a groupware solution.

As usual, the best solution is to let the customer decide.

[florian]

I was not indicating that the admin should be using the client machine, but the client tools (i.e. a mail client) to administer folder permissions and data; afaik, this is, e.g., the way it is also handled with Outlook and Exchange where you can set permissions on behalf of your user through outlook, but not with the Exchange admin tool.

Florian.

[a.schild]

afaik, this is, e.g., the way it is also handled with Outlook and Exchange where you can set permissions on behalf of your user through outlook, but not with the Exchange admin tool.
Florian.

But there is no reason to NOT make it better

For us that is not a problem, the way it is actually. There are more important things pending.

Regards

André

[florian]

sure.

All I am saying is that because of this, it's a huge feature - currently there is no code or UI in SAC that can list, access, enumerate folder structures in any mailbox. I'd need to talk to the developers to confirm this, but this is a project that, with all testing, can easily take manmonths of development work, so there are other things with priorities in the way. That was why I am trying to deeply understand what use case currently isn't adequately covered.

Florian.

[davidz]

I would just like to add that we also have problems with this. Well not really problems, it's just an annoying way of having to do it. It's almost the same situation, the boss calls and says "Get Bob access to John's email and calendar." But John is on vacation. So like it was said earlier, we also try to place as little control in the users hands as possible. (They just are not technically able to understand permissions.) So because of situations like this we keep everyones passwords on file. We just log into SWA as the user and set permissions. But an actual "administrative" way of doing this would be awesome, either SAC or CLI.

Like it was said earlier, it's not really an issue, and there are many more important things that need to get worked on, so just my 2 cents.


David