I wanted to buy Scalix.

[john@priam]

I know this is not the best place to ask this..

But I'm trying to contact your Sales Dept to spend money with you guys.

I have emailed all the contact emails on the sales part of the site.

Can some-one let me know what we have to do BUY scalix with a valid support contract.. its very frustrating that i have to do this to buy the product and I hope your support dept is a heck of lot better than your sales dept.

John

[florian]

John,

please send me a personal message with your contact details or email me at <myfirstname> -att- scalix dott com and i will make sure someone gets back to you.

Florian.

[john@priam]

Sorry,. At our management meeting yesterday, it was decided to go full steam ahead with Zimbra. even though on the face of it your looks the better product.

regards


John

[florian]

Well, good luck with it; hope your user's won't mind the web clients user experience and sluggishness or the Outlook connector mailbox size limitation of 2GB....

Cheers,
Florian.

[jbiggs]

Actually looks like Zimbra fixed the the Outlook limitation earlier this year in version 4.0.2

http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5738

[florian]

interesting - the bug didn't look clear too me, but it seems that they have indeed removed that limit; however, note that the connector still relies on a sync algorithm that first needs to download the mailbox and copy it to the client - a restriction for roaming profiles and similar.

Scalix and Exchange actually provide full Primary Store MAPI implementations where the mailbox is normally stored on the server only; local Caching is only used when offline working is a desired feature....

Florian.

[dougp23]

Florian,

you and the rest of scalix are seriously missing the point.

The point is, you MIGHT have a better product, but getting a hold of you people is impossible. I mean, come on, someone wants to BUY your product, and the only way to do this is to apparently stumble into the forums, post the notice that I WaNT TO BUY, and wait for someone (YOU) to say "PM Me, and We can get this going". Pathetic. Come on, you can't even do a PayPal "BuyNow" link on the site?? I can buy Joomla extensions from developers on the web for less than 10$, and they have a link right there on their site to buy it. You guys are going to lose to Zimbra and others if you don't figure out how to market, imho.

[florian]

Well, I think there are two parts....

First, it starts with a product and if you don't have one that's competitive, nothing will rescue you. I absolutely believe in that.

Second, you are completely right; the last couple weeks might have been an extra merge based on the changes we went through, but Scalix wasn't really good at efficient offline and online business in the past and I would totally buy into that. I wouldn't jump into and pull those people to talk to me if I wasn't aware of the fact.

This is one of the big pieces of good news about the acquisition; Xandros has historically had a different business model, including a good number of consumer products with larger volume. Therefore, the sales apparatus and structures are much more efficient and Scalix will become part of it very soon. Therefore, you'll be able to buy all our products online with electronic payment and I hope this will resolve at least part of the issue.

Cheers,
Florian.

[dougp23]

You are a gentleman, Florian, and I apologize for the tone of my post. I hope it goes well with the new company. I would HOPE that the MS/Xandros deal would, at a minimum, make Outlook and Scalix operate real smooth....

[florian]

Doug - no problem.

I think we see a good number of indications that the acquisition is beneficial for customers, partners, ourselves and community alike. I"m looking forward showing off some of the results.....

Cheers,
Florian.

[seankoshy]

Aside from purchase issues with Scalix there are a few issues holding me back(and I'm sure a few others).

I prefer Scalix's interface ... BUT Zimbra can segment the address book without running separate instances (and if I need to do that I much purchase the enterprise edition), and Zimbra's backup / restore is point and click - without the system having to go off-line.

As well, version 5 is said to have BES support. I've read numerous posts but have never ready about anyone having actual luck with OTA syncing. Even though BES is expensive and requires a windows system, it is fully supported and doesn't have a proprietary interface. More than just cost, I would like to offer clients a seemless solution that competes with exchange.

It feels like people are picking Zimbra not because of its interface, but because of certain features it offers. Please convince me to purchase Scalix - I really do want to !

[florian]

Zimbra was very originally targeted at the xSP market, so obviously the address book segmentation feature was there from the very beginning; interest in running Scalix in a service provider environment has been growing and we will be providing address book segmentation in Scalix 11.2, later this quarter; not that this indeed will not be available in all editions, it is a licensed feature as it is linked to the xSP environment.

Scalix can be backed up online, both as a full-backup (using LVM snapshots and then filesystem backup) and user-level export. We currently do not provide point-and-click, however, Scalix works wiell with all backup product vendors offering. One notable is SEP's Sesam product where you can do point and click backup and brick-level (that is: single object) restore using SEP's point&click UI. They are a German company but IMHO do a great job of simplifying backup, I'll see them at their summer party next Saturday.

For Wireless, as you know our standard offering is NotifyLink; the key reason I like Notify is that it's multi-client, i.e. the same wireless server can support Windows Mobile, Palm and Blackberry device clients - this very well fits with Scalix' own clients of choice strategy. The main disadvantage is, as you say, that a device client needs to be installed. We are working on alternatives to this and the agreement between our new owner and Microsoft might help us getting to something very interesting here. As to Z's BES rumours, they've been around for a while; afaict so far, this is not work sponsored by RIM, so it seems they are trying to get their by reverse engineering the Exchange/BES interface - hardly a solution I would roll out in production as it wouldn't be very stable over version changes and the legal situation about such an implementation is somewhat fragile as well. Full BES support - with RIM's buy-in - is obviously one of the targets for any 'alternative' email vendor and it's something all of us continue to look at and we hope to be able to provide such solutions in the foreseeable future.

The choice of Scalix vs. Zimbra ultimately depends on your needs; my feel is that for most corporate or enterprise environments, Scalix is the more mature, stable and better choice - if you look at the list of reference accounts, this becomes easily clear. Contact us for more information and also very competitive commercial offerings.

Cheers,
Florian.

[seankoshy]

I'm very happy to learn that 11.2 will have a segmented address book. I've read about SEP SESAM and it did look promising. I must say that I do appreciate your fact based information, and how much work you put into these forums.

Thanks,

Sean

[joako]

How can Scalix be the most mature with error messages such as "See doc XYZ" yes it said to see "DOC XYZ" in some error messages.

How can Scalix be the most mature with no documentation on how it works? No KB to look up error messages.

And we call Scalix and ask for help you send us to some company in Canada that wants to charge us $2000 to get it working? We have our own administrator you just need to tell him how your software works.

IMO Scalix is very fragile.

[florian]

How can Scalix be the most mature with error messages such as "See doc XYZ" yes it said to see "DOC XYZ" in some error messages.

This was an oversight in a early version of Scalix 11 and has been fixed in 11.1 or 11.2, so you won't see that message with current software.

How can Scalix be the most mature with no documentation on how it works? No KB to look up error messages.

Which specific error message are you talking about?

And we call Scalix and ask for help you send us to some company in Canada that wants to charge us $2000 to get it working? We have our own administrator you just need to tell him how your software works.

What exact type of help did you request?

IMO Scalix is very fragile.

Sorry, but if one makes statements/accusations like that (especially in wording as above), one should please also include the meat and the actual content of the problem and we'll look into it and will solve it.

I've seen both completely useless and undocumented error messages in products published by Microsoft (which is the world's largest software company?) and have had much larger quotes for very little from people dealing with other products.

I'm very willing to look into what problems you have and see if they can ge resolved in a professional and reasonable way, but please let's stick with hard facts first, and not contribute to global warming by spreading FUD.

Cheers,
Florian.