Scalix 11.3

[napoleon41]

I spoke with one of Scalix's resellers, and learned some interesting details about plans. I briefly looked through the forum, and found nothing to confirm them, and I hate going on hearsay, so . . . .

1.) Does 11.3 indeed solve the SWA slowness issues

2.) Is the community licensing going to only include 10 premium users instead of 25

3.) What other changes have been made (in-line images in SWA? more tools in the SAC for jobs only accessable by commandline before? a richer set of plug-ins?)

I am particularly hoping that the community version's licensing is not going to chage as this will pretty much end my relationship with Scalix personally, and my prevent the beta wave at the hospital where I work (schedule next month) as there will not be enough Outlook connectors to give my poweruser group a show at what Scalix can do.

As this is supposidly going to his the 10th of this month, and I always like to open my present early, I couldn't help but ask away.

Thanks!

[florian]

Napoleon,

thanks for your message and interest in Scalix.

Quite obviously, we're always looking at how to move the our product forward and, as with any release, 11.3 will come with a number of changes. The list of things is, however, not final yet and therefore I'm surprised why any of our partners would communicate this before we have communicated anything official to them - which, for the changes in 11.3, hasn't been done yet. We're planning on a partner webcast this coming week - and that will be the first round of communication about that product release. The presentation slides for this are not finished yet and indeed I'm meeting with a couple people this coming Monday to finalize.

Therefore, if I may ask, could you possibly provide me with the name of the reseller that you talked to? I'll want to make sure that they attend this upcoming webcast so that they are completely up to date with what we're coming up with.

As I've stated before on the forum, Scalix 11.3 will have a number of additional features, key ones being CalDAV support, Outlook-over-SSL functionality and support for Outlook 2007, plus some more. SWA will get it's share - next to a number of issues that were fixed in this release it will have more flexible handling of additional LDAP directories and address books, better localization support for the spell checker and some usability enhancements. It will also be less picky with the browsers you may run it on, now allowing you to use SWA on all Gecko-based browsers, not only Firefox 2. Couple of things are being worked on, final list t.b.d. Performance improvements are always on the agenda - we're currently looking into documenting all best practices for tuning Tomcat, Postgres and the SWA configuration for optimum performance - turns out that this has quite a big impact. We've also significantly reduced the load times for the login window and the initial screen; while this will be included in 11.3 for everyone, commercial customers with active Support Contracts using Small Business and Enterprise Edition can get a patch for SWA 11.2 from Scalix Support today. All-in-all, 11.3 will provide significant value to all users of Scalix, including those on Community Edition.

We've indeed decided to make some adjustments to the licensing, after almost a year of discussion around this and getting a significant amount of feedback from partners, customers and community users alike. This started well before Scalix was acquired by Xandros and I've been personally driving this forward ever since. I can confirm that reducing the number of free premium users in Community Edition is part of the plan. We have not taken the decision lightly and I'd like to talk about this some more soon and in the larger context of describing the added value of 11.3 across all editions of the product.

Stay tuned. By the way, we're planning to release 11.3 in early/mid December, so nothing from our side is planned for the 10th of this month.

As a side remark, I cannot see how any change in community edition licensing would ever affect a pilot within an organisational context. For testing purposes, it is possible to get a 60 day, 25 user license key for Enterprise Edition right off the website. If you need more users or an extended evaluation period, please contact our sales team and we'll be happy to help.

Hope this helps,
cheers,
Florian.

[napoleon41]

Good to know about the eval. I guess, having used the community edition for my family, I had not considered contacting Scalix directly for an evaluation copy . . . .

Mid December . . . that's a long time to hold off my project . . . I look forward to seeing the final list. Maybe we could talk you into posting the slide online after next week?

I believe I'll follow up with the sales rep myself. Like I said, I rarely trust word of mouth. Thanks for the update!

[kfleming]

Would the reduction of users in the Community edition apply to existing users? We're running 23 users on the Community edition, with plans to move to Small Business edition when we need to. All I know is if I give my boss the option of paying Scalix money because they are forcing us versus migrating to something else, he will be so offended we will have to move to something else

[jaime.pinto]

I don't understand your logic!
Who is "forcing" you to upgrade to 11.3?

[florian]

So the community edition license you're currently running Scalix under for 11.2 and before is perpetual, that means you can keep running this version forever. You can also install new systems with that version.

If we decide to reduce the number of premium users, that would become effective starting with a certain release, e.g. 11.3; that means should you want to upgrade to this release, you would either have to be below the new number of users or move to a commercial version - this would be if you wanted to use the new features in that version.

So, yes, you'd probably need to go commercial if you wanted to upgrade, but no, noone would force this onto you and you could also choose freely when you would do it....

More soon,
Florian.

[kfleming]

That's good, except that the things that will be fixed in 11.3 are what's keeping Scalix afloat for us at the moment. Thanks for making this public, and I'll wait for anything else you can say before deciding what to do.

[kanderson]

What do you need in 11.3?

I'm assuming it's support for 2007. If that's the case, just run the 11.3 connector against the 11.2 server.

Now, having said that, I suspect you'll find that Scalix isn't overly expensive, and that there's good value when you do pay for it. With that many users, you're right on the line anyway, so in a fairly reasonable timeline, you'll want Small Business anyway.

Kev.

[florian]

Kevin....

Please don't advise our users to use the product in unsupported configurations (i.e. newer MAPI client against older servers).

Also, strictly speaking, using any 11.3 software would be covered by the 11.3 license agreement, so client or server, would be subject to license conditions as set in the 11.3 EULA, so actually you would only - on paper - be licensed to use it inline with that agreement - so if the limit on the number of users changes, that would be true for the number of outlook connectors you can use of a particular or future version......

Sorry to be trying to precise here, but that's legal stuff and my lawyers.... you get the story.

- Florian.

[kfleming]

That's fine, we were mostly looking for CalDAV support anyway. Outlook 2007 isn't an issue for us at all, we would prefer it to be more reliable than to introduce more features.

[davidz]

we would prefer it to be more reliable than to introduce more features.

It's unfortunate that this is a commonly overlooked fact about software development. I would also much rather wait longer for some random feature if that gave me more stability/optimization.

--David

[florian]

Next to the philosophical part of this discussion, how would you think we rate on this throughout the 11.x series, i.e. in terms of stabiliization since 11.0.0, which didn't have the quality we wanted it to have?

Since I've finally taken over product management in full, this has basically be my only true priority.

Thx,
Florian.

[graemef]

Napoleon,
We've also significantly reduced the load times for the login window and the initial screen; while this will be included in 11.3 for everyone, commercial customers with active Support Contracts using Small Business and Enterprise Edition can get a patch for SWA 11.2 from Scalix Support today. All-in-all, 11.3 will provide significant value to all users of Scalix, including those on Community Edition.

Hi There,
How do we get access to this patch ?
Cheers
Graeme

[florian]

Quoting myself...

commercial customers with active Support Contracts using Small Business and Enterprise Edition can get a patch for SWA 11.2 from Scalix Support today

... so...
- if you are a commercial customer using either Scalix SBE or EE
- if you have an active yearly support contract or a positive support incident balance

please contact Scalix Tech Support by email and they will provide you with the patch.

Florian.

[graemef]

That's fair enough, but after having been through the forums, check the support links from the main site, including the section "support resources" and reading the FAQ, I still don't find anything on how to contact technical support. I am probably missing something, but any help would be appreciated.