Scalix 11.3 is on the way ...

[florian]

jaime - thanks and merry christmas.

[nestor]

Hi Florian,

I am a little bit disappointed because of the postponement as I have just installed centos 5.1 in expactation of Scalix 11.3. But your reasons are convincing.

Is Centos 5.1 already supported for Scalix 11.2, or is 11.2 at least installable right out of the box under Centos 5.1? That would make my (holi)day.

Best regards,
Nestor

All,

With feedback from development, we've decided yesterday to move the release of Scalix 11.3 into early next year, presumably 2nd week of January.

Florian.

[Mikev]

Hi

Yes Scalix 11.2 support RHEL5 out of the box. CentOS is supported in the normal way.... by editing the /etc/redhat-release file

Mike

[ls-al]

Hi
...CentOS is supported in the normal way.... by editing the /etc/redhat-release file

this is not necessary anymore:

Code: Select all

Usage: scalix-installer [--cli] [--debug] [--rpmdir=rpm-dir] [--logdir=log-dir] [--instance=inst-name] [--hostname=hostname] [--override-release=id] [--show-release-ids] [--version]
Scalix Installer - cleaning up...
Scalix Installer - done.
# ./scalix-installer --show-release-ids

Scalix Installer - extracting archive, please wait...
Scalix Installer - starting version 11.2.0.52...
Scalix Installer - using Python 2.3.4 (/usr/bin/python).
rhel4, rhel5, sles10, rhel3, f7, sles9, suse102
Scalix Installer - cleaning up...
Scalix Installer - done.


[florian]

both correct... two additions:

...CentOS is supported in the normal way.... by editing the /etc/redhat-release file

Please do not mixup "supported" (which is a statement that we, as a company, have tested on that platform and are willing to help people with our support team if they run into problems) with "installable on".

Scalix has *always* been installable on CentOS, in different, yet fundamentally simple ways, we've never so far supported it. We will start supporting it, first for evaluation/community use in 11.3, for full commercial use with *all* available support options, in 11.4. This is a big step.

this is not necessary anymore:

So Dirk is correct about this one, since Scalix 11.1 you can simply get the installer to believe that a platform is another one with this option, i.e. for CentOS 5 you would use

Code: Select all

scalix-installer --override-release=rhel5

This is - as per above - at your own risk, but for CentOS 5 (and 4) it is known to work without problems. With 11.3, this won't be necessary anymore as part of support is that the installer automatically detects the OS version and uses the correct packages.

Hope this fully clarifies things,
Florian.

[adhodgson]

Hi,

Further to this, I use CentOS 5.1 in our DR environment with Scalix 11.2.

Andrew.

[florian]

Just to confirm that (a) Yes, this is known to work well, (b) you're still a Bad Person (TM) as you're running Scalix in an officially unsupported environment and our support team *may* reject requests to help you on that system. (though they normally don't execute that).

Florian.

[seany]

So do we have an ETA for this release or are there some last-minute showstoppers? It'd be nice to know whether i'll get some testing in before Christmas!

Sean

[florian]

You will not, unfortunately.

Please read through this thread, it has the current status about 10 posts above yours!

Florian.

[seany]

You will not, unfortunately.

Please read through this thread, it has the current status about 10 posts above yours!

Florian.

Ah, that completely escaped me, apologies.

We have literally just (i.e. yesterday) bought a 310 user license predicated on there being a 11.3 version (for caldav) to test, before our eventual rollout in around 3 months.

Now I appreciate there are very good reasons for this delay and I support them, but I had cleared time this week to do some caldav / thunderbird testing. If this functionality is complete, is it possible to have access to a beta version?

Thanks,

Sean

[florian]

Hi Sean,

unfortunately, this is not possible. Managing a beta (i.e. create a gold package, do some final basic QA on that, put it up for download for 7 different platforms, create Beta release notes, create a feedback process and review - and without the above, it's not really worth it for us at all) is simply too much of an effort to manage, especially with the holiday season coming up - we need to focus all our resources to get the final stuff ironed out and get to an internal RC-type version that we can then submit to QA for signoff. Some of these poor folks will have to work between christmas and new year anyway (most of development in our company is shutdown that time of year) to get it done.

CalDAV functionality is complete as planned for this first release. Note that in our testing, we found quite a number of strange behaviour and unsatisfactory performance for CalDAV operations (too many reloads, very little caching, etc.), for Sunbird and Lightning clients. We are taking part in interoperability events and will work with the Mozilla community to move this forward, however, from my perspective both these clients are "alpha" quality. The only commercial-grade CalDAV client available today seems to be Apple's iCal.app.

Florian

[seany]

Hi Sean,

unfortunately, this is not possible. Managing a beta (i.e. create a gold package, do some final basic QA on that, put it up for download for 7 different platforms, create Beta release notes, create a feedback process and review - and without the above, it's not really worth it for us at all) is simply too much of an effort to manage, especially with the holiday season coming up - we need to focus all our resources to get the final stuff ironed out and get to an internal RC-type version that we can then submit to QA for signoff. Some of these poor folks will have to work between christmas and new year anyway (most of development in our company is shutdown that time of year) to get it done.

CalDAV functionality is complete as planned for this first release. Note that in our testing, we found quite a number of strange behaviour and unsatisfactory performance for CalDAV operations (too many reloads, very little caching, etc.), for Sunbird and Lightning clients. We are taking part in interoperability events and will work with the Mozilla community to move this forward, however, from my perspective both these clients are "alpha" quality. The only commercial-grade CalDAV client available today seems to be Apple's iCal.app.

Florian

That's okay.

Regarding the alpha quality of caldav support though - it's good you're working with Mozilla as Lightning/Thunderbird is our preferred client. But do you regard the problems as serious? I'm not too worried about the extra server load as we've possibly overspecced our servers anyway for the initial rollout, but if there are integrity and reliability issues i'd like to know about them.

Thanks again

Sean

[florian]

Depends on what you call serious. Is the functionality provided through these clients useful: absolutely. Does it match up with richness in functionality or quality with what SWA and Outlook provide with Scalix today: no way, and the delta is pretty large - especially when it comes to group calendaring functions.

CalDAV is a bit of a chicken-and-egg-problem. I firmly and totally believe in it. However, it seems to be a little in the shape that IMAP was in right after it first came out. I migrated back and forth between POP and IMAP about 5 times until, actually several years later in that case, IMAP was useable enough between available clients and servers for me to work. I tried again and again, because the functionality provided was just SO desirable over POP, I moved back again and again, because it just wasn't reliable enough.

Open Standards are a tricky thing. Many partners are involved, specs sometimes need interpretation and testing and calendaring is a complex subject, not only on the protocol level, but with the standard (ical) data format itself, especially when it comes to more complex use cases like time zones, recurring appointments and what else.

I guess you'll simply have to try. Will things break (i.e. stop working sometimes) when using these clients with Scalix? Yes, they absolutely will - the clients have issues (just check Mozilla bugzilla for details) and I'm quite sure that our server component is not completely flawless as well in V1; I'm missing a couple functionality bits with iCal.app (Mac user here), because Apple chose to go way beyond the current RFC (no wonder, the guy who wrote the RFC works for them... ) and build on top of future extensions to he CalDAV spec that we don't support yet. Again, is it useful? I think it is, very much so - but it'll need some time and another release or two to mature and same holds true for the clients as well.

Now, if we don't start using it soon across the board, we'll never know and it won't improve - that's the other thing, open standards only get better and more mature with use - as the parties involved (especially on the Open Source sides) don't have dedicated QA resource and/or full control of client AND server to go around issues.

I'm sure, CalDAV won't take as long as IMAP - times are just faster now!

Florian.

[Derek]

I apologize if this has been asked and answered already, but I don't have the time to read through 6 pages to check.

Is SmartCache going to be more stable in the new release?

[florian]

Well, the way the question is asked, I don't think there is an answer. You would have to point to concrete bug numbers in Bugzilla and/or support case tickets with problem descriptions for me to respond to if we have been able to recreate problems and make changes to address them.

We've been fixing known and understood issues with Scalix Connect for Outlook and SmartCache in every release of the 11.x series and the feedback I receive through our support team is that with every release people have been reporting less problems; the release notes document which concrete issues have been fixed.

The same is true for 11.3, I believe we've fixed two good hands full of issues with Scalix Connect for Outlook, so if that is what you would call "more stable", then the answer is presumably yes.

I might want to add that from a big-picture perspective, 11.3 for Outlook is more a feature release than just a patch - as said before, we've added both support for Outlook 2007 to this version as well as support for Outlook over SSL without a VPN.

The current planning for 11.4 is to go for a number of structural improvements to SmartCache, such as better logging, clearer status indication on the tray icon, etc., and also possibly for reconciliation features, so that when your cache ever gets corrupted (through program or machine crash for example), you can repair it without having to recreate your profile, which is a concern a number of customers have had in the past.

So, yes, the way with this as with everything is forward - but I guess that was clear from the beginning?

Hope this helps,
Florian.