ActiveSync in 11.4

[Jaap_van_Ekris]

Hi Florian,

allow me to introduce myself first, so you know where I'm comming from. My name is Jaap van Ekris, I'm a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for Windows Mobile devices. I support a couple of large communities on a more-or-less continous basis. I also give companies advice (do not sell!) about mobile solutions.

First I have to say I must congratualate you for building such a complete product. It really is top-of-the bill (and I know, because I am comparing all open source groupware solutions compatible with Windows Mobile).

unfortunately the answer is no; one thing is that the license we have from Microsoft is something we have to pay for as well and we are offering the product at a pretty competitive pricing with very little profit on our side actually. We decided to go this way to be able to offer our customers a legally sound solution that is not reverse-engineered and also as full-featured as possible, based on the official specs from them.

Strong point, and I applaud you for this. The reverse engineering road is dangerous and full of holes. A route best not taken when providing a commercial product that people depend on for their business.

Furthermore, please also - as a community user - understand that we have to continue offering some features for the commercial versions only as this is what we ultimately need to survive as a business.

True, in the end the people have to eat and you should make a cut somewhere to give people an incentive to start paying you guys some money.

We do believe, however, that making a cut with ActiveSync is logical and makes sense - most wireless devices would do mobile email over simple IMAP, which is free. Someone who really needs the additional features of ActiveSync, such as Push Email, wireless real-time calendar and contact synchronisation and system directory access is most likely someone who uses this for work or in a business.

Here we disagree.

In my experience as a community leader for a huge board, one of the most prominent questions is how to share calendering information with the rest of the family. Basically men want to get rid of the annoying "where are you now, and at what time are you going to get home?" kind of questions. I realize that I have a slightly biased view because on communities you do tend to find the tech-savy people, but there certainly is a need.

Syncing OTA (not pushing) especially Calendar info (but also tasks and contacts) is something home users really find interesting because it reduces the strain on information exchange with the home-front. OTA sync is an important step here for two reasons:

• people want to be able to sync remotely, when things change on the road
• people really start to resent having to fire up their laptop just be able to sync when they get home. They will fire up the PDA and connect it to their own home-network, but firing up a laptop after a long day is something people start to resent.

I think it is fair that such a person should pay us something, and given that the smallest packaging of Scalix is a Small Business Edition for 20 Users, that, together with ActiveSync, will sell for less than $1000 end user list price, I would feel it's reasonable.

Here we agree partially,

I always see Community Editions of products as a stepping-stone for the SOHO user. Small companies normally start really small without any money and slowly grow. Trick is to offer that kind of companies a good product at a extremely sharp price and then grow along with these companies as they start growing (slowly taking small pieces of money from them).

Please note that "sharp price" for the product does not imply "free as in beer" . I think that offering OTA Activesync at a bit higher price (margin has to go somewhere). To me it sounds reasonable to ask a bit more per sync-seat when using a community edition with a maximum of 10 users. After that they have to make a jump to the SBE-edition anyway.

For your info, I used OpenGroupware before this and I had to buy licences for my Outlook connector (€150 for a product that does not allow syncing) as well as for a decent SyncML engine (Funabol is really a lousy product, so I had to pay Synthesis €150 as well) and decent SyncML clients (€60 in total). I realize that this is a bit skewed because it time it was a "small investment" to finally get it right, but it does show that I (and probably others) are willing to invest something in order to solve their problem.

I think that if you removed high-end features (like PUSH-e-mail and system directory access) and added a bit to the price, you can still keep trigger small companies into jumping towards SBE, while providing a very basic CE.

If this is too expensive for you, you may want to look out for hosted Scalix altogether, which more and more hosting providers start offering. This is especially true as with rising energy cost, just running a full-fledged server machine on your own becomes expensive, especially when you add the cost to administer and maintain.....

Hosted solutions have two major drawbacks for me personally:

• many small companies (like lawyers and notaries for example) are not allowed to use hosted solutions: they deal with mergers and aquisitions of companies, making e-mail and meeting-requests extremely sensitive information. but also courrt lawyers face the same problem. A friend of mine runs a small company installing/maintaining MS SBS for this kind of companies, and he earns a pretty decent living out of that sweetspot.
• Open source also means open to integration. When it is hosted I can't integrate it into other solutions easily. To me personally, as a home user, I'd like to integrate it with Freevo so my wife can see on the HTPC interface what meetings I have (calling me where I am is easier that turning on a laptop...).

So I hope you might consider providing a limited (but working) and a bit more expensive version on the market for the community edition. If you would provide the same level of functionality as Exchange 2003 initially had (just providing OTA sync of Calendar, tasks and contacts, no push or any other stuff) I would be happy to pay you €40 a seat (for your info: Synthesis sells its SyncML SOHO SyncML client for €18,- ) because it solves a problem I face on a daily basis.

I know this is a gamble on your side, but it could also mean that you could sell "additional features" to people you normally would not see any money from anyway (i.e. CE-users) and it might harm your real business (SBE licenses). The users you normally wouldn't see is the SOHO of 4 users. Now they would pay you something like €160 for a good functioning product with AS-OTA. By the time they reach 25 users they already payed you €1000 euro for OTA ActiveSync licences. Or you could limit it to 10 users (linking AS OTA to the outlook users) They pay the switch to SBE and you automatically activate the hot features for ActiveSync, you keeping the extra margin. It is still win-win for everybody: they pay you and they get more features, it just grows more gradual. Smarter companies will probably anticipate that they will outgrow their licenses quickly and start with SBE for more functionality and cheaper AS-OTA licences. This basically is what Skyrix does with its outlook connector for about 5 years now, and they still exist .

I do know that if you would sell it as an add-on to the CE-product, it would make Scalix one of the hottest products in the market: a SOHO of 4 users would pay something like €160 for a good functioning product.

Jaap

[florian]

Hi Jaap,

first of all, let me thank you for your kind words - as I understand that you fundamentally like our product - and also for your thoughts on business and use cases for SOHO-style businesses; obviously we think a lot about what our market looks like and how it functions, so it's very helpful to get other's perspectives.

I wouldn't say I disagree with anything you said; and actually even where you said you disagree with me I believe we don't strongly, really, as I purposefully used wording like 'most likely' and 'typically', which opened up a lot of room for those other situations.

We as a company totally believe that business cases for the space below our current entry price exist. The business decision is whether they are truly worthwhile considering.

Two additional points here; first, I still think what we offer is very reasonable already. SBE with 20 Premium Users and 5 ActiveSync users will be €700, with 10 AS users will be €750 and with all 20 being AS-enabled will be €850. The respective per-user prices are €140 at a 5 User level, €75 at a 10 User level and €42,50 at a 20 User level. Beyond that, especially at 50 Users, it gets even cheaper with SBE-50. Now, as a 5-User-Company, would I be willing to pay that price to get all of Scalix' functionality? My own answer is yes, as I've been running a 5-people-company before joining Scalix and we used this and other similarly priced products and it fit well into our cost structure. So I wouldn't want to call it prohibitive.

Second is that I have a bit of a problem with numbers below this entry point; this is less of a personal problem, but rather one of quality. We mostly sell through partners and resellers, which need some margin for their efforts (note that the above prices were end-user list prices) and obviously don't really want to get started below some point. Furthermore, we believe that email is so mission-critical even for small organizations that one should have some coverage if things go sideways. For this reason we include some level of support with the base product, and a first-year update subscription. At least on the support side, the cost to run the support organisation is high and in many cases for the small customers already today is fully covered by the support component calculated into the pricing, therefore it is cross-supported by part of the license sale. If we went below our current entry point, we would either have to give up including support and maintenance completely - which is not even possible in some countries because of warranty laws - or would actually start losing money on customers; now, this is a way of buying oneself into a market, and that's something someone like Microsoft can do - and I believe they do that with the SBS - however, I must and will say that based on our business model, we simply can't. And I really want to keep up the overall product and customer experience which includes for a safety net for everyone who wants to go commercial...

So I hope to have given anyone thinking community a little bit of an inside view of how we we work and how things work for us and how they don't. With this being said, let's close this part of the thread; until official 1.0 release of ActiveSync we will certainly stick with the current decisions on packaging and pricing. Then we'll see how it goes and what kind of requests or typical transactions we see and I can assure you that we'll adapt to what the market needs; if it's different from what we thought, we'll surely see what we can do.

Cheers, good remaining weekend from Canada,
Florian.

P.S. The prices above are our Euro-country € pricing as Jaap was starting the discussion and his name sounds dutch to me; prices in other markets may vary because of exchange rates.

[pcimon]

Florian,

I hate to add to this already long post but I just wanted a final clarification. I was wondering if the scalix server that comes with Xandros standard server is considered enterprise. We want to use Activesync and were wondering if our server qualify or is still considered community even if we bought it included with our server.s,

Thanks,

Pascal

[florian]

Pascal,

Scalix coming with Xandros Server used to be a 5 User Enterprise Edition up until Scalix 11.2. WIth 11.3 and later, we have streamlined this and the version that comes with it is actually community edition. It can be upgraded to Small Business Edition using a license key. Enterprise Edition doesn't really make sense as Scalix on Xandros Server does not support Multiple Instances, Multiple Server Operations or Clustering.

Active Sync will initially be released as an add-on product for Scalix running on Novell and Red Hat operating systems. No decision has been taken on the date of support for ActiveSync on Xandros server, but it won't be with the initial round.

Florian.

[grahamk]

Any word o ActiveSync and when it might be released?

It will allow iPhone users to have some way of sync (currently iphone running 2.0 software cannot sync with scalix.)

[florian]

Final rounds of QA for Beta 1 going on... will be ready when it's ready... Sorry, but it's the kind of work it is. Very tedious.

Florian

[grahamk]

you game enough to give an ETA yet?

[florian]

Nope. Initial users - including myself - have found a number of issues that needed adressing; I"m using it on my iPhone, it's getting better by the day - seriously - but still needs some care and feeding.

Florian.

[frankobald]

Hi Florian,

last week we updated our Scalix-Servers vom 11.3 to 11.4.1u1..
At first let me say that we are very pleased that swa-performance has increased
that much in the new version...
The next weeks we will transfer 400 users vom Outlook Express and Outlook to
the new webinterface. We use two fontendserver for this.
Will ActiveSync run on these servers or on the "core"-scalix-server? We don't
want to open the scalix-server itself to the internet... so running AS on the front-
end-servers would be nice.

At last, if you need beta-testers, we would gladly apply to the testing-programm.
At the moment we use 6 Windows-Mobile and 2 Iphone-Devices.

Greets vom Westfalia

Frank

[florian]

Frank,

the final version of ActiveSync has a flexible deployment model and you will be able to run it either on one or both frontend servers or on the backend or on it's own machine. It's your choice and with your number of users, it shouldn't make any difference, performancewise, so the secure layout of your network can be the key factor.

For the initial beta, it actually needs a machine on it's own.

You can contact our sales team to get registered for the Beta.

Tx,
Florian.

[cheeshead]

If ActiveSync isn't available for community edition, please remove from the community edition product page.....http://www.scalix.com/community/communityedition/news_11.4.php

I've redeployed my server to CentOS just for this reason, and awaiting ActiveSync...based on the product info page, now its not available? Really Mis-Leading!!

Scalix ActiveSync
Connect ActiveSync enabled wireless devices directly to the Scalix server without additional software needed on the device and use them for push Email and wireless calendar and contact synchronization.

Wireless Clients of Choice - ActiveSync support is available on Windows Mobile devices as well as leading smartphones from many vendors, including Nokia, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, Palm and Apple.
Flexible Deployment - The wireless service can be implemented right on the Scalix server or on a separate SWA or dedicated wireless gateway server.
Based on Microsoft Technology - The Scalix ActiveSync wireless solution is based on technology licensed from Microsoft, ensuring best compatibility and investment protection for future versions.
Note: Scalix ActiveSync is currently in closed Beta and will be released in 6-8 weeks

[florian]

The website has been fixed. Thanks for pointing this out, this has been caused by sharing the page between the enterprise and community areas of the website.

Note that the list found at http://www.scalix.com/community/communi ... itions.php should be considered the most accurate for differences and features across various Scalix product editions. This was correct right from the get-go.

Cheers,
Florian.

[billb3]

Scalix 11.4.1 is entering final QA stages as we speak and should be released in the next couple weeks. Scalix ActiveSync 1.0, which will ship as a separate product, should be ready as a public Beta right after that....

All pending the QA folks are happy with product quality, so no firm dates possible.

Florian.

Don't mean to be a pest, but 11.4.1 has come and gone. 11.4.2 is out and 11.4.3 is on the horizon...

Would be greatful if you could give us a status update on Activesync, thanks!

[sobitmgr]

Hi there,

I would also appreciate a release date but I can certainly understand the delay in getting this one out. I would much rather wait for a polished product then have one delivered that is substandard. Just my 2c.

[grahamk]

There once was a release date, and now there's none. No one can sync iphones with Scalix... and no one knows when they will be able to. And once it is released, it'll take my reseller at least a couple of weeks to make contact with Scalix's sales department and sell it to me (from multiple past experiences).

Frustrating, to say the least...