ActiveSync in 11.4

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florian
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Postby florian » Wed Nov 05, 2008 1:18 am

Believe me, when you have to manage a project through some delays and other things, it's no less frustrating than for those on the user's side; every software guy wants their stuff out and ready for use. I think I've said enough in this and other threads already, but again I'll repeat that we're working very hard to get this out as quickly as possible, although we've gotten a bit more careful now in making timed statements what that means.

As for the rest, once it is available for sale, the order and fulfillment process should not be complex as you describe. If you have any trouble or concerns with this, please contact our sales department directly and we shall sort something out with your reseller to accelerate this.

Cheers,
Florian.
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IDtheTarget

Postby IDtheTarget » Tue Nov 18, 2008 9:43 pm

florian wrote: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...


I must say that I am a bit disappointed by this philosophy. I can understand it, but am disappointed. I don't make much money, I'm afraid, working for a law-enforcement agency. I simply cannot afford your SBE for my family of five, just to get the ability to sync calendars with my wife on our iPhones. Not "don't want to", but "can't".

I've been using Red Hat Linux since version 5.2 for my personal servers (and CentOS for personal use since it came out), and it was my experience that directly influenced my boss to switch our data center to Linux as opposed to Microsoft. It was our switch from Microsoft that required us to switch to another, linux-based email system. So it was my ability to use free or inexpensive software that enabled your income. ;)

To be perfectly honest, what I use at home is what our agency starts using in the data center. What I can afford at home influences what we use there. We purchase RHEL 5 for the data center because I can use CentOS 5 at home.

I would be perfectly happy to purchase the ActiveSync for the Community Edition of your server, and not get any "official" support but what I can get via Google or on the community forum. I don't have the $1,000 US for a server to sync calendars for two people, that's the kind of thing that Microsoft does.

Please reconsider a business model that supports those of us techies who are supporting our families, and whose decisions influence adoption by their employers.

Thank you

florian
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Postby florian » Wed Nov 19, 2008 4:19 am

ID,

thanks for your message. On the personal level, both your preference for our technology and your commitment to and preference for alternative solutions in both your personal and work lives is much appreciated. I do believe in the power of the community - one of the reasons I spend quite a bit of time reading and responding in this forum - and the concept of sharing, and free and open collaboration in the spirit of the open source and free software movements. I don't agree with all the parts, but fundamentally I believe it's a very democratic and pluralistic setup and it is essential to maintain alternatives and prevent the world from being faced by a single-vendor controlled monopoly, which wouldn't really benefit anyone and in the long run not even that specific company; where there is no competition, there is no progress. It's simply another version of "Change" :-)

Unfortunately, however, at this point there is very little room to move when it comes to our commercial arrangements around these products. We're committed to maintain community edition as a free product, however due to the licensing agreements involved in ActiveSync, we cannot offer even a minimal version of this for free (Otherwise, I think 1-2 users would be fine). Given we'll sell the add-on for relatively cheap, we won't be able to offer it outside a commercial Scalix version - the transaction size would be too small for us and it would lose us money on every transaction - we have customer's in more than 50 countries and a large network of channel partners in distribution and resellers, and the agreements in place with these folks structure the deals. Offering software commercially without any support is not legal in many countries, e.g. in Europe.

Making offers that lose us money is something we cannot do - I won't get that past my bosses, for obvious reasons - and it would also affect our ability to make these free offerings at all, given the quite significant team of people involved in the creation of these products.

Again, I'm very sorry not to be able to help here and I would hope that there are still opportunities for you to use and promote Scalix technology in the future. The above hopefully makes sense to you as well.

Best,
Florian.
Florian von Kurnatowski, Die Harder!

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Postby PaulHerron » Thu Nov 20, 2008 12:36 am

IDtheTarget wrote:
I must say that I am a bit disappointed by this philosophy. I can understand it, but am disappointed. I don't make much money, I'm afraid, working for a law-enforcement agency. I simply cannot afford your SBE for my family of five, just to get the ability to sync calendars with my wife on our iPhones. Not "don't want to", but "can't".

...

Please reconsider a business model that supports those of us techies who are supporting our families, and whose decisions influence adoption by their employers.

Thank you


I can certainly appreciate your concerns, ID. I had thought that I might suggest using an outside service such as Plaxo to provide the ability to sync calendars, tasks and contacts however, at this time, they offer that capability only for Windows Mobile devices. Perhaps they will come-up with a widget for the iPhone sometime soon but, until that time, that's not a viable option (though you could probably come up with a roundabout way of wireless synchronization using a combination of free Plaxo and Gmail).

That said, a service such as Plaxo charges $50/year per user for this service. If you look at the cost of a Scalix SBS-20 server license (I paid about $650 US for mine from a Scalix reseller), you recoup your cost in about 6-1/2 years. Now that doesn't factor in the cost of the ActiveSync server license but, if what we glean from the posts in this forum are close to true, you're looking at a eight-year amortization schedule if measured on ActiveSync alone.

I run a very small business (read just me with the occasional sub-contracted help) and while I am in the start-up phase I haven't paid myself a single penny for the last four years -- so I understand the money issue. A year ago I had a data store error on our Scalix Community Edition from which I wasn't able to recover. I bought SBS-20 right then and immediately applied the support credit for Scalix techs to recover my wife's inbox -- which she also uses for her work. For that recovery alone, $650 was a bargain -- she has spent more than that in the past to recover data from a failed hard drive on her laptop; and didn't get any bonuses like an e-mail server with calendar sharing capabilities and remote web access.

All this to say that I don't think that $650 or $800 is too out-of-line for what we are receiving. As a general contractor, I am constantly educating my clients on the true cost to perform their renovations. Many don't appreciate the time involved to achieve the results they desire. What would you charge for six or twelve hours of your time? Do you think that you could write a e-mail server application like Scalix in that window?

For an iPhone you spend at least $200/ea plus data and cell service packages. So what if its $600/ea instead and then not a penny again? That's, in essence, what we're talking about.

sobitmgr
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Activesyn

Postby sobitmgr » Tue Jan 13, 2009 9:21 pm

So ..... still no activesync support and its mid January 2009. While I appreciate that some time is needed to troubleshoot bugs in any new release it seems that the promise of activesync support in May 2008 may have been ill conceived.

Seems strange since anyone making purchasing decisions on enterprise email software wouldn't even consider an app without push email support ... I know my CEO is losing patience which means that I will be losing Scalix and looking at alternatives (which I should mention have had this functionality for some years).

linuxuser

frustrating

Postby linuxuser » Wed Jan 14, 2009 1:47 pm

YES, ITS REALLY FRUSTRATING !
when we can get activesync REALLY ?? Im tired to calm my customers every week!
Im tired to promise that the release date will be Q1 .. Q2 ..Q3 .. Q4 --> Q1 ..

DEAR Xandros, you have to understand that the resellers and the system houses are the bad guys infront of the clients.

If we cant relize, we loose them.

I PRAY FOR BETTER TIMES !!!!

florian
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Re: frustrating

Postby florian » Thu Jan 15, 2009 10:14 am

linuxuser wrote:DEAR Xandros, you have to understand that the resellers and the system houses are the bad guys infront of the clients.


While I certainly understand that any kind of product ship delay results in frustration for those waiting for it, I don't fully understand the tone of some of these postings. It almost sounds to me as if the posters try to indicate that we're slowing this down or holding anything back regardless or even on purpose; now, if that's what you believe it's quite obviously not true and I won't even comment on such allegations.

There is no conflict in interest here; our goals are the same as yours and for us it is probably even more important to get certain things done than it is for any of the writers; it is certainly more frustrating because every developer and everyone else in our product team wants to see our stuff being put to real-world use; there is no fun in not releasing software!

So - seriously - what's your point, what's the question here and what action is expected?

We're working on this very hard, it's making progress, we've already added more resources to the project than we originally intended to allocate to it, it has cost us more money than planned, we are working through the issues we found in initial testing and it'll come to the point when it's really ready. I won't give any predictions on dates right now as I've been off far too many times with this one, but at least the list of things to be done before it's good to go is getting shorter by the day.

I sincerely hope that those that are the most vocal here have signed up for the beta program with their Scalix sales rep and will be as productive and vocal with their testing and feedback so that we all really benefit from this important step in getting the product into final ship state.

Sorry for the tone, but reading some of this gets to me on a quite personal level, too!

Florian
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Postby Kris » Thu Jan 15, 2009 10:25 am

I would really like to sign up for the beta program. I've many people in the company asking when this will be available, and with the beta program, I can show them that it's really coming.

Because this is really important for our company, I can put a lot of time in testing and giving feedback!

florian
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Postby florian » Thu Jan 15, 2009 10:42 am

Please contact your Scalix sales representative....

Florian
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IDtheTarget

Postby IDtheTarget » Thu Jan 15, 2009 7:13 pm

I guess the reason so many of us are getting frustrated is because we made the decision to purchase based on your company's statement that you had licensed Microsoft's code and gave us a ship date of three quarters ago. Now our management is questioning our judgement based on this decision.

Questions I'm hearing, and unable to answer since your development practices are opaque, are why a company that has licensed Microsoft's technology can't do something that other companies have managed to reverse-engineer.

Do I question your wish to complete the project? No. Do I question your ability to complete the project? Absent some newfound transparency, yes. Sorry, but I've had to deal with vendors unable to meet obligations before.

I am actually lucky. It was my boss that decided to use Scalix instead of Kerio, so it looks like I may get a promotion! ;)

florian
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Postby florian » Fri Jan 16, 2009 3:47 am

First of all, we did not license any code from Microsoft; this comes as a spec, the right to use it, and documentation (which, just to give you an idea, is about 1000 pages). Therefore, the actual code and implementation is all ours and still needs to be done.

When comparing this to rev-engineered implementations, the most obvious advantage is that in some relevant places not only you get something to work, but you also understand why it works and what it means, in more completeness. It is less likely to break with future versions or devices that interpret the specs (device vendors work off the same document we have; we ran into quite some surprises while seeing how the iPhone uses it). So while your point is taken, I believe the comparison is truly apples and pears; we have looked carefully at one rev-engineered implementation that is available as open source these days and our finding was that while all the basics were there, it would have quite a way to go to support all the functionality required long-term.

As for dev process transparency - how would that look like? For obvious reasons, we cann ot publish the source code, so line counting is ruled out, so is making all he internal Bugzilla trackers for issues found during the dev process, as this contains coding hints as well. I believe 4 bugs open against the Beta 1 milestone were closed yesterday, and as of this morning, there are 10 to go, of which 2 are MUSTFIX, the other 8 are under review between my product management team and development, some of them will be triaged out. Over the course of the project, incoming and outgoing bug rates weren't always of the kind that makes the PM guy happy, but statistically, at least for a green field project, they weren't all that bad either. Releasing nightly dev builds would be a way, but the overhead is quite large, it costs time to do and manage that and was unlikely to produce useful feedback, esp. given the nature and complexity of the issues found and fixed. So I guess that's about where we are.

I'll take your other comment light-heartedly this time and simply ask myself the same question - do I question the team's ability to complete this? No way ... and I'd certainly play this for highest stakes, so now it's my view of the world "against" yours! :-) Unfair play, though, given I have true insider information this time.

Stay tuned,
Florian
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les
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Postby les » Fri Jan 16, 2009 10:53 am

We are all technicans and understand how difficult it is to implement a feature like this. Of course it takes time and it should be done the right way for maximum compatibility for future upgrades rather than a reverse engineered solution which might break at the next version.

But.....it doesn't matter what we (resellers/technicians/support houses) think, its what our clients and end users want that really matters. And thats where the frustration originates from, IMHO.

If a client wants activesync features and we said it was coming last May they'd be mighty disappointed now at how long its taken and it not even there yet. It doesn't matter to them how many man hours of development is required to implement such a feature or whether its built from the ground up or reverse engineered, they want it and they don't want to wait. Especially when they know that other competing products have the same feature already implemented and working in some way.
If they ask me all i can say is its coming, Scalix are doing it from the ground up in the right way for maximum compatibility, but there's not ETA for a full public release. It might be 6 weeks it might be 6 months.
Then they'll say "its already been 8 months and my mates got exchange and he can do it, or my colleague has Zimbra and he has this feature, why cant we switch?"
And if their impatient on unreasonable about it what can we do? We try to convince them to wait but we have to give them what they want dont we? Otherwise they'll find another company who can and we lose.
Thankfully i haven't had any situations like that, but i'm sure others have and i believe its this type of situation which brings the most frustration seen in the forums.

I am sure that when it is fully implemented that the feature will be worth the wait.
Regards,

Les Stott

shr

Postby shr » Sat Jan 17, 2009 1:05 pm

Our entire team has become cynical with scalix, mainly because of activesync delays, but also because of outlook instability. It is the reason we will definitely switch off scalix in feb, if it does not run, and does not run without problems of stability we have with the scalix-outlook-smartcache sync.

BTW: Florian, this is customer feedback, and none of what I or - as far as I can tell from the posts I have read - others have posted is meant to be personal. It is matter of fact. We all hope you will succeed and wish you the best of success. We just make a huge alarm bell sound.

florian
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Postby florian » Sun Jan 18, 2009 10:13 am

shr,

I don't critical or negative comments, however I quite obviously cannot let statements that really sound like we're doing things that don't work well for customers on purpose - that's plain nonsense.

As for your post, point on ActiveSync taken, on all else, however, It'd be useful if you could be somewhat more concrete, i.e.

- what versions of Scalix, Scalix Connect for Outlook, Windows and Outlook itself are you running?
- what nature are these problems of? Anything you can be specific about?
- it sounds like you're a commercial customer; assume you've reported issues you've run into to Tech Support as well - would you have ticket numbers available so that I can understand what's going on and comment in a more meaningful way?

Tx, great weekend,
Florian.
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Postby billb3 » Tue Jan 27, 2009 12:22 pm

florian wrote:II believe 4 bugs open against the Beta 1 milestone were closed yesterday, and as of this morning, there are 10 to go, of which 2 are MUSTFIX, the other 8 are under review between my product management team and development, some of them will be triaged out.

It has been a few weeks since you posted this...how are we looking now? Any chance beta is released in January?

shr wrote:Our entire team has become cynical with scalix, mainly because of activesync delays, but also because of outlook instability. It is the reason we will definitely switch off scalix in feb, if it does not run, and does not run without problems of stability we have with the scalix-outlook-smartcache sync.

We had some issues with Outlook stability & bugs with 11.4.1 & 11.4.2...but since upgrading to 11.4.3, things have been rock solid. (Job well done Scalix!) Hopefully Activesync will be on par with the quality of 11.4.3 and it will be worth the wait.

Also, shr...I see you only have 3 total posts (all about activesync). Why not post some of your Outlook troubles on the forum for us to help sort out?


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