Scalix 11.3

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florian
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Postby florian » Sun Nov 11, 2007 7:21 pm

... send an email to support ---attt--- scalix --dott-- com ...

Didn't you receive information about this when you purchased support?

Florian.
Florian von Kurnatowski, Die Harder!

graemef
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Postby graemef » Sun Nov 11, 2007 7:22 pm

Thanks for that, possibly did, but that was several years ago now.
Cheers for the help.

simba
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Postby simba » Mon Nov 12, 2007 6:14 am

Short question: Will there be supported Debian Packages for the commercial Scalix solutions in scalix 11.3?

Currently we're using Scalix 11.1 as the CE version with 25 free premium users.
As i read these will be limited to about 10 free premium users.

So we are thinking about a commercial solution, but based on Debian or Ubuntu.

greets
simba :D

florian
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Postby florian » Mon Nov 12, 2007 6:18 am

Hi Simba,

unfortunately, this will not be the case as of 11.3. The main reason is that we don't have an automated and supportable installation on debian. There is some hope, though, we're working on restructuring the installation and make it more integrated with the packaging system. Once this is done, debian or ubuntu support is doable and I'm very interested to make that happen.

Until then, however, your only choices for debian-based Scalix with the commercial versions are OEM products from Xandros (Xandros Server 2.0) and Univention (Univention UCS), which are available from the respective vendors (in the case of Xandros that's, of course, our own mother company).

Florian.
Florian von Kurnatowski, Die Harder!

graemef
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Postby graemef » Tue Nov 13, 2007 1:37 am

florian wrote:... send an email to support ---attt--- scalix --dott-- com ...

Didn't you receive information about this when you purchased support?

Florian.


I contacted support, but was told that I did not have an open case. After talking to my reseller it turns out the SWA patch is not considered a patch, rather a hotfix. Therefore even though we have a valid subscription we cannot get access to it unless we have an open support issue it will fix.
This seems like a weird policy, but I guess we have to live with it until the 11.3 release. Unless I log slow SWA access as a case :-)
Cheers
Graeme

florian
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Postby florian » Tue Nov 13, 2007 1:58 am

Hi Graeme,

not really weird.... you have a valid software subscription, which entitles you to use all new versions and updates of Scalix, as they are released. This would include major and minor releases as well as patch releases, basically everything that happens in the first three version number components (i.e. as of today, 12.x would be considered the next major, 11.3 the next minor or 11.2.1 the next patch release).

It would actually also cover general hotfixes, which we rarely publish, basically only in case of security issues - believe it's more than a year that we did the last one of those.

In every case something is released for you, you'll be notificed by email as well.

Given that we normally do 3 releases per year, this offers good value for the subscription. This year we've actually done more releaes, as we wanted to resolve a couple of Scalix 11 issues as quickly as possible - with 11.0.1, 11.0.2, 11.0.3, 11.0.4, 11.1 and 11.2 you already received 6 minor and patch releases and with 11.3 planned for December you'll receive one more - the latter 3 also providing new functionality. We're planning for 3 releases, 2 minor and 1 major, next year - if some of our plans materialize, Scalix will look a verydifferent product at the end of 2008. Stay tuned.

However, there is also a 2nd dimension to our offerings, and that's support. We offer support in two flavours, one is incident-based (buy a certain number of incidents, valid for a year) and called standard support, the second is yearly (with a cap of incidents and other addon services like training, system checkup) and is called premium support. Either way, with purchasing incidents or a yearly contract, you create what we call an active support contract. The main purpose of this is obviously that you can log a case with Scalix Tech Support as needed and we'll help you getting back on your feet within your SLA.

Once in a while we actually offer some benefit to our customers with active support contracts, to increase the value of having one of those around, beyond what the normal subscription offers. One way to do that is to offer early access to product improvements that are non-critical. This is the perfect example - the patch package (not a release as per the above definition, the change is from SWA - and only SWA - 11.2.0.52 to 11.2.0.58) - does not fix any critical or non-critical bugs - it only improves load time for login and initial windows. The change is available for all customers under subscription in 11.3, the ones with active support agreements can get early access to the build as an extra goodie. If it had been a critial issue that we wanted to resolve as early as possible, you can rest assured that we would have published it to the whole group of customers under subscription.

This is really a case by case decision, and in this case one that I took myself. I hope the policy as described above makes sense to you, even if you're not the most positively affected by it.

Cheers,
Florian.

P.S. By the way, just to be clear, *if* you have a support agreement in place and request the patch, *no* incident from your balance is subtracted - the fact that a valid contract exists is good enough for this one.
S
Florian von Kurnatowski, Die Harder!

graemef
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Postby graemef » Tue Nov 13, 2007 2:02 am

It doesn't really effect me too much, more a nice to have to stop the end users complaining about the SWA speed. I understand the concept you described, though as far as my experience with software licencing (not extensive) this is the first time I have seen this policy. Generally a per seat subscription entitles you to all updates for the software that are made available.
Anyway, like I say, not a major issue for me and thanks for clearing it up.
Cheers
Graeme

florian
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Postby florian » Tue Nov 13, 2007 2:15 am

Hi Graeme,

not really - I worked with a couple of (large) vendors in the past and they do have patches "on request through support only", which they actually only supply as resolution to a support case. The main difference would be that those would most often not be talked about in public, so you would never know that they exist unless you open a case against the issue or you're so high up the support customer hierarchy that they even provide you with a list of internally known issues proactively - typically for the gold or platinum offerings (with the very latter, you have a well-dressed guy coming to your office with a gold-plated CD in his hands...)

Anyway, this one was also a matter of logistics - given the short timeframe, we were not able to handle a larger scale documentation requests, how-to's for the patch install, etc., so channeling this through support was deemed adequate, especially with Scalix 11.3 just around the corner already. I might have decided differently (and created extra effort on our side) if this had been 6 months out....

Cheers from Germany,
Florian.
Florian von Kurnatowski, Die Harder!

graemef
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Postby graemef » Tue Nov 13, 2007 2:17 am

No worries Florian, thanks for the explaination. Sorry, I just realised I pretty much hijacked a large chunk of this thread. :oops:

florian
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Postby florian » Tue Nov 13, 2007 2:21 am

... given that the topic the thread started with was a lot more difficult to talk about with no announcements in place about 11.3 yet, I'm not really unhappy about it! :-)

.... should start chatting more about the actual release next week, btw., if anybody wonders ...

Florian.
Florian von Kurnatowski, Die Harder!

[Axel]

Fedora 8

Postby [Axel] » Tue Nov 20, 2007 4:54 am

Just another question regarding the new release.

will 11.3 work with Fedora 8, or as 11.2 only with Fedora 7?

THX in advance

[Axel]

florian
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Postby florian » Tue Nov 20, 2007 4:59 am

We'll continue to support F7 and OpenSUSE 10.2 as free Linux platforms; most of our user base prefers not to have to update the OS every time they upgrade Scalix.

We will, however, introduce Community/Evaluation support for CentOS 4 and CentOS 5; these platforms are much better suited for a production mail system then ever-changing Fedora and OpenSUSE.

We'll move on support for Fedora and OpenSUSE to whatever is current then in the release after 11.3 (presumably 11.4, but who knows... :-) )

Florian.
Florian von Kurnatowski, Die Harder!

da
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Scalix 11.3

Postby da » Mon Nov 26, 2007 11:54 pm

Will there be any changes to smartcache in v11.3 (or,even better, in v11.2.1)?

da


da
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Scalix 11.3

Postby da » Tue Nov 27, 2007 1:45 am

Thanks, Florian

I had misunderstood your statement "as of today, 12.x would be considered the next major, 11.3 the next minor or 11.2.1 the next patch release" and thought that 11.2.1 was going to be released in addition to 11.3.

da


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