Well.... - the short answer to your last question is a simple No!
Going a little bit further:
1. Depending on your size and complexity of environment, Scalix will be the way more stable and flexible solution compared with OX. We do support all kinds of flexible multi-server deployments, have a single-view store (OX makes a somewhat artifical difference between eMail and anything else) and a broad and relevant clients-of-choice story, while with OX the only true client to be used would be the web client; the user experience with the Outlook OXtender typically speaks for itself.
2. Adding anything to 11.3 at this point is a no-starter; we are heading for release within the next two weeks and have code frozen about three weeks ago; the last month of a release is typically testing and last-second fixing of really critical bugs. Besides being very, very difficult and big from a scope/amount of work perspective, it's simply impossible to throw in architectural changes/features late in the process.
3. Doing the infoStore, IMHO, is moving in the wrong direction, because it's storing the wrong kind of information in the wrong place. Already today, 60% of corporate knowledge is stored inside a company's email system. At the same time, 80% of the size of a email system message store is taken by attachments and files, resulting in long backup times and huge storage system requirements for an application that first and foremost is supposed to provide highly available access to communication. There are much better systems on the market for storing these data items, such as fileservers in the simple case and enterprise content management systems provided versioned file and information store in more complex scenarios. To overload a messaging/calendaring/groupware system with
storing information like this in it's internal store is clearly moving in the wrong direction.
This comes down to what role such a system
should have; IMHO, it's the role of an organisational information hub, managing information and channelling access to it, even for information not owned or controlled by the system. What this means is that a system in that role, such as Scalix, should actually use backend systems in various ways and make it accessible, which is quite what we are working on as part of our longer-term vision and strategy.
So - will we do an infoStore
inside our system? Most likely not. Will we try to provide a better solution to the problem at hand? I think so - and it should become visible throughout various releases in 2008 and beyond. Stay tuned.
Cheers,
Florian.