Problems with Firefox3 under MacOS-X

[bezio]

Hi.

Some users experience some strange issue using ff3/mac10.5:
The right-click (control-click) won't work within SWA!

Has anybody the same problem? Can anybody tell me what we can do (besides using ff2 as long as safari isn't supported...)?

Thx,
Ingo

[florian]

I think you description is not fully accurate. Ctrl-Click, i.e. holding the Ctrl-key and klicking with the left (or single) mouse button certainly works, which right-click doesn't.

Covered in https://bugzilla.scalix.com/show_bug.cgi?id=17617

FF/Mac uses a different Event processing model compared to other platforms and we'll need to accomodate specifically for this platform. This is scheduled to happen in 11.5, which, btw., will also support Safari as an additional browser.

Florian

[bezio]

Thank you, Florian.
Is there a schedule for the 11.5?

If I use the term "user" I normally mean a customer. The customer I'm talking about is not very satisfied with the solution and I have the thougts that they will give back the licenses within a month.

Ingo.

Edit: I read the bugzilla entry and I won't classify that as [improvement]. I would say, this is a bug, because some function (e.g. setting permissions on public folders) need that popup.

[florian]

11.5 is scheduled for Q2.

However you call it won't matter too much - you could also report this as a bug to Mozilla, given that the browser gives us two different event types for two actions that are considered semantically equivalent by the OS it runs on, i.e. a true right-click and a Ctrl-Click. This doesn't apply the same way for FF running on Linux or Windows where such alternative user actions are actually mapped to the same software event. Therefore it's a FF-on-Mac-oddity that Mozilla hasn't addressed so far and the improvement from our side would be that we build a work-around in the code that makes this functional.

I'm a Mac user btw, so I am personally affected by the issue, however with clean judgement it certainly doesn't make the cut for an emergency patch, so is part of normal maint work we phase in with future releases.

As for your customer's situation, I would like to understand what issues they are facing with the product as I find it hard to believe that their dissatisfaction, if there is any, is caused by this very and narrow issue.

Cheers,
Florian

[bezio]

Thank you, Florian!

As I slept another night over I agree with you. I was just "flashed" by the customer.

Ingo.

[florian]

Thanks. And don't get me wrong - it's not that we're not willing to help a customer or accelerate things where really needed; if this is more urgent than obvious what needs to happen is that a support case needs to be opened (i.e. customer should have commercial support entitlement and subscription) and if support cannot find a satisfactory solution, e.g. a configuration-level workaround, there is a possibility to see if we can escalate the issue and provide a hotfix or so - after evaluation in development whether such a resolution is feasible, all things considered.

Hope this makes sense; I also think that if you spread the news that 11.5 will have Safari support, this may be another interesting element for the customer given he seems to be a Mac shop. I'm personally looking forward to that one as Safari is much faster! (Well, to be honest, I'm using it already at times as we're running a test server internally that uses bleeding edge development code and it's indeed already up and running...)

Cheers,
Florian

[bezio]

I'm looking forward to see the 11.5 out soon - with hope of amendment in mind.

The announcement of the safari-support has had some impact on their decision to not leave us right now.
But there are some more points on the list that influence them. There are various problems (e.g. as long as SWA won't work completely for them we tried to set up mail.app, ical.app and the adressbook as alternate frontends, but iCal seems not to have any connection to the adressbook of scalix, so if they want to invite each other they must type the email-Adress manually; occasionally I have to sxmboxexp, omdelu, omaddu, sxmboximp their accounts because of some hang-ups; ...)

We considered to buy the support-pack proposed by our sales-contact. But the fact that the entitlement will expire after one year is some kind of show-stopper.
I am sure that we found some bugs and we're not able to offical report them without the support-pack. So the points would silently decay after a year...

Ah, I've forgotten to mention: we're using the Hosted Edition of scalix, so we do pay a monthly fee per user.
We thought to have some 100s within one year. But for now we stopped any active offerings of scalix with I think 70 premium users an some more standard users.

So long,
Ingo

[florian]

Couple points....

1. On the Support side - we cannot realistically sell open-ended entitlements; next to fundamentally being a kind of "insurance" from a business model perspective, keep in mind that this is also a type of "voucher" from a accounting perspective and the bookkeeping on the balance sheet if they would be good forever - or even just for longer than a year - are somewhat problematic. You may be able to discuss with our sales department if they are able to give you a quote for a subscription that includes some support per year.

2. Obviously if a support issue is found to be a bug, you won't get charged any support points and can re-use them for another situation. Again looking at the expiry, keep in mind that we're working through the issue anyway in Tech Support, investigating. And if something is found to be a severe bug affecting you badly, the fact that you have (a) a valid support entitlement and (b) a valid subscription allows the support agent to open an Escalation on your behalf, which may result in a hotfix being prepared for you. So I really don't want to discuss this from a cost perspective, but I think all-in-all you get a pretty good general value out of Scalix' services offerings.

3. On the Mac side - it's a difficult beast. I do use a Mac (or actually several of them) and with my 7 GB+ mailbox, Mail.app works very, very fine, stable and performant for me with Scalix 11.4.3, no mailbox reorg required in a long time.. iCal is a mixed user experience, partially because it's still improving. I've had direct chat's with the product's developers @Apple and they acknowledge that the product and it's CalDAV support has some issues on their side as well, although it's improving. The non-auto-completion of the addresses is probably the most severe limitation, this, however is by in large outside our control. Apple chose *NOT* to use their own Directory Services LDAP switch API and/or Address Book access API as for Mail, but as soon as you run iCal.app against a CalDAV server, it silently believes that it's talking to Apple's own Calendar Server, then furthermore assumes it is connected to Apple's Open Directory, and then relies on a very proprietary and not fully documented private LDAP schema to do it's lookups. So until this changes from their side (and rumor is that they are planning to do so, however will never formally commit!), the only way to support his would be to fully reverse-engineer and emulate their schema, and that's not really our plan and concept of implementing "Open Standards". Please write them a letter as well what you think about that part. The more they read it, the more they may actually listen, eventually.

Just my thoughts....
Flo.