Goodbye Scalix

[joako]

Your product has great potential. The lack of documentation and the odd issues caused when we disturb the delicate balance of the 50 components that Scalix is made up from were not tolerable.

Neither was the flakiness of the Outlook connector and SWA and the lack of native encryption support.

We were using Scalix on a limited basis for some approx 20 users for almost a year. Everyone loved it but us who were the administrators.

We've moved on to a hosted Zimbra solution. So far I'd say theres something odd about it. Why do Zimbra and Scalix feel so familiar its like someone ripped off the UI of the other all the configuration menus, administrator panel, etc.

But at the same time I am very pleased, perhaps half of that is that I no longer have to administer a server from hell with 0 support.... we ran the Scalix upgrader for example and the upgrader itself messed up the configuration files. I changed the IP address of the server and SAC, Mobile access and two other minor things just broke for no reason. The list goes on.

I loaded Zimbra webmail for the first time and I was surprised it doesn't take two minutes. No random SOAP27 messages.

Oh and the biggest thing. There is native support for sync with Windows Mobile.

I hope you guys get your act together. I've been recommending Scalix for quite some time despite its shortfalls.

[florian]

Well, good luck then and fare well.

I'll dare to assume that each and every system has it's good and bad sides, and having moved over to another will probably give you that experience as well. I usually don't talk about the downsides of competitors and I won't start it today (Just considered giving you one example, but wanted to try it first by going to Zimbra's hosted demo, however, the server was down).

Comparing a hosted paid-for and a free (with 20 users, assume you were on Community Edition) from an Admin perspective is not fully fair, but I'll leave it at that.

Have a good day,
Florian.

[joako]

We spent over 6 months trying to sort out the administration issues and quite frankly with the provided documentation that is impossible.

When we contacted Scalix I was told something would be done... like you are going to put in a trouble ticket or something or have a technican call me back. Well after about a week of waiting I got a call from a man in Canada who wanted to charge us $2000 to fix the issues in our evaluation. I said no and keep on looking for a solution but to this day have yet to find it.

I have read every piece of documentation I still do not fully understand how Scalix works. I have no clue what is even stored in the SQL database? What is it? User metadata? emails? Administrator stuff? settings? I still don't understand the over 20 configuration files or the delivate balance of over 10 services, addons for Apache, etc, etc, etc.

I still have yet to find your online knowlegebase either.

Yes there are shortcomings in Zimbra it seems but it has native wireless support. With Scalix we were required to install a Windows server for mobile sync. For that we would just use Exchange when you add the Windows server license and the RHEL or SLES license (because 1) support for old openSuSE and Fedora is is dropped very soon and 2) no official CentOS support) Exchange is a little cheaper... and they have a knowlegebase where I can find answers to all the issues that will come up

Oh and about hosted vs in house... where are the hosted Scalix providers I'ld like to use one to compare the Zimbra experience maybe all my Scalix issues were caused by the server???? Where is your webpage with authorised hosting providers?

[florian]

When we contacted Scalix I was told something would be done... like you are going to put in a trouble ticket or something or have a technican call me back. Well after about a week of waiting I got a call from a man in Canada who wanted to charge us $2000 to fix the issues in our evaluation. I said no and keep on looking for a solution but to this day have yet to find it.

I find it really strange that one of our resellers are asking for this kind of money for presales support, so I would still like to know who this was and what exactly you asked for. On the message that you sent to us, is that the one from end of July that you re-forwarded just now and copied me on? Rich should have responded to you, the only thing here is to apologize - as you might remember, right in July we had been acquired by Xandros and we were going through some organisational headaches, it might have happened that a ball or three were dropped.

I have read every piece of documentation I still do not fully understand how Scalix works. I have no clue what is even stored in the SQL database? What is it? User metadata? emails? Administrator stuff? settings? I still don't understand the over 20 configuration files or the delivate balance of over 10 services, addons for Apache, etc, etc, etc.

I just recently tried to read documentation to find out how Sharepoint (Microsoft) works exactly and all I found was pretty much marketing blah-blah. Yup. Big system. complex. The Postgres database is used as a header/metadata cache for SWA and Messaging Services, as such it's content are not terribly important, they will just speed up certain operations. We are working on some further architectural documentation. We also offer training classes for those who really want to dive in deep.

I still have yet to find your online knowlegebase either.

All our online resources are linked from this page - http://www.scalix.com/community/ - including the online knowledgebase.

Yes there are shortcomings in Zimbra it seems but it has native wireless support. With Scalix we were required to install a Windows server for mobile sync.

Scalix will be offering native wireless support in Scalix 11.4, coming in early Q2/2008. Unlike Zimbra, who to the best of my knowledge use a reverse-engineered solution, we have a license agreement with Microsoft in place that allows us to offer native ActiveSync support for Windows Mobile and other Smartphone devices (including such from Nokia, SonyEricsson and Motorola).

For that we would just use Exchange when you add the Windows server license and the RHEL or SLES license (because 1) support for old openSuSE and Fedora is is dropped very soon and 2) no official CentOS support) Exchange is a little cheaper... and they have a knowlegebase where I can find answers to all the issues that will come up

Exchange seems to be cheaper, but given that you also need a active directory infrastructure, don't really have a choice of open-source-based anti-spam and anti-virus and most likely will need Exchange Enterprise edition because of the advanced features, it will most likely be more expensive on the licensing cost side. The fact that you must use 64 bit hardware is an issue for some people as well, so is the fact that you will probably need a multi-server architecture if you want to use webmail and wireless securely.

Oh and about hosted vs in house... where are the hosted Scalix providers I'ld like to use one to compare the Zimbra experience maybe all my Scalix issues were caused by the server???? Where is your webpage with authorised hosting providers?

I assume we'll have such a list soon. We've only recently enabled Scalix from a licensing perspective to be used in xSP environments. Initial interest has been strong and a number of providers are ramping up to provide hosted Scalix services.

Florian

[joako]

UPDATE: Day 4.

Scalix calls it SOAP27.

Zimbra calls it

msg - Csfe service error
code - NETWORK_ERROR
method - ZmCsfeCommand.prototype.invoke
detail - Empty HTTP response

[joako]

UPDATE: Day 5

Once loaded Scalix SWA is certainly feeling more responsive than Zimbra.

[mikevl]

That is great

There are MANy features within Scalix that are very subtle. some of these features make Scalix an Enterprise class product capable of sustaining 24x7x365 operation which ios what Scalix was designed to do. This is inspite of events such as bad sectors on hard disks etc etc. From a look at some other messaging products including the one you have mentioned they/it would not be capable of sustaining some of the very key features that Scalix has been built from the ground up to achieve.

If you want to run products sisde by side and compare client features Scalix will still win. When you look at the background server technology Scalix has NO competitors. You will need to allocate about 1 - 2 years to side by side comparisons to fully investigate all possible parameters.

Most of the IT companies that have implemented Scalix in our country have misconfigured Scalix for a variety of reasons. In the main missing some very key points. This makes their installation suboptimal and their impression of Scalix less than what both we and the client would expect. But they know no difference.

Best of luck with your side by side evaluation

Mike

[albatroz]

Nice to see you are recovering your speed (starting to run) after the Xandros purchase.

The problem I see in the email hosting market that this market has become
very competitive. Not only is Zimbra the competition to beat, there
are also several companies that now are offering very attractive
MS Exchange solutions. And I haven't mention Google apps, that can
provide a similar solution with a very big disk space (5gb) and
other goodies for $50/year per mailbox.

[florian]

interesting talk.

I do agree that the market we're in is a very, very, very interesting place, otherwise I'd personally not have been able to hold out for so long. I also agree that it's very competitive, however, I really wouldn't enjoy being in a space where that's not the case. We'll do our best to put together a package that is relevant to people and raises the bar - I'm not ready yet to talk about some of our plans for next year, but what we're looking at is absolutely designed to highlight some of the benefits of our mature architecture, which is one of the things I personally believe in.

Anyway, for those of you who try both, let me know how it goes.....

Florian.

[joako]

Update day 11. My Motorola Q is a nifty device. It is thin, has decent battery life and runs Windows mobile. Its about 100mhz faster than the similar GSM phones (T-Mobile Dash & Samsung Blackjack). It runs the Smartphone OS so it works very well for a primary mobile phone. Pocket PC I find to hard to use sometimes e.g.: driving (I should get a new BMW with the bluetooth feature and then it would be moot)

Using Zimbra the mobile connectivity works just like Exchange. There is no additional server on the client. This is great. This is the sort of functionality that Scalix should have. Never used the Scalix mobile solution because it requires a Windows server which is the reason we were looking at Scalix. If we need to maintain Windows servers we might as well use Exchange.

Problem with Zimbra. Ever since I started using it my mobile has been acting strange. Very irresponsive and I need to press answer a few times to answer calls. This is totally unacceptable. The data connection seems to be in use constantly.. problematic because this causes inbound calls to ring for less time and sometimes block outbound calls. Exchange never behaved like this.


Also the Zimbra connector I don;t feel is as robust as Scalix. I tried to import my mailbox, contacts, etc by dragging them from a PST file I had created. The changes did not get copied to the server but instead remained cached on the machine locally as .zdb files. There was a PST migration tool and it gave errors on a large PST files with many nested folders (multiple mailboxes). It worked fine when I split it into individual files per mailbox. After using the import tools all my contacts where duplicated with no way to know which ones were cached and which were on the server. I thought Scalix connector was slow but it just took me almost 3 minutes for 22 new messages to show up in my inbox.

[florian]

Scalix will have an integrated wireless solution based on the ActiveSync protocol in early Q2/2008. Unlike Zimbra, who have reverse engineered the protocol, Scalix has a license agreement with Microsoft in place, this will allow us to implement the protocol 100% correctly and although I can't make the claim (because the work isn't done yet!), our expectation is that it would really work just like Exchange.

The Q is a good device; what works really fine with it is pure IMAP-based access (no calendar/contact sync, just email), our VP engineering used that. Maybe you want to use this as a workaround, together with ActiveSync via USB for cradle synchronisation, until Scalix 11.4, which will have the wireless stuff, becomes available.

The Zimbra Outlook connector is fundamentally based on a sync architecture, the .zdb files are simply renamed .pst files in disguise, with all the issues PSTs come with. There is no "online" mode (like Scalix without SmartCache), where Outlook talks directly to the server. Supporting Outlook is a difficult endeavour - our Outlook connector has about 150 man years of development time to it, constantly adding, between HP and ourselves. There's a lot of sweat in this piece. Therefore it comes as no surprise that a connector that is so much younger has some additional issues with robustness, although I must admit that Zimbra have done a decent job, compared to some other of our competitors. I still believe I can hold up the flag of us being a clear and hardly challenged number 2 on the market for Outlook support ... right after Exchange. We have a license for Microsoft's OETP protocol in our pockets as well, this gives us the ability to create a solution for Outlook that uses no connector at all - we're still evaluating how and when to implement that, but it's something we might be looking into for late next year.

So long,
Florian.

[joako]

Update Day 12

Zimbra doesn't seem to have "shared folders".... at least not with a hosted account. It's not a random installation its the official version for service providers we get our own SAC-like interface that is partitioned only for our company.

[florian]

Is there any plan on how many days your comparison project is going to last? Are you using both systems as production platforms or how do you test?

Florian.

[joako]

We moved about 15 users to scalix including myself. I moved my mailbox and a few others to Zimbra so I am personally using this every day and I depend on it to get my work done. I feel the Scalix and Zimbra webmail are better than OWA. Wireless sync is a must e.g. my coworker lost his smartphone a few weeks back and we lost some important phone numbers due to a lack of wireless sync.. But the behavior of the Zimbra wireless sync is not to my liking. If I didnt have three phones I carry with me I would have stopped using it already. We have another approx 100 users on POP3 email that will eventually be moved somewhere.

[florian]

I promise, although I can't offer it yet, that the Scalix Wireless solution will be more to your liking - this will be one of the highlights of upcoming Scalix 11.4.

Florian.