Xandros Revs Scalix Messaging with 11.3 Release

Published: January 8, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last summer, commercial Linux distributor Xandros got into the application business when it acquired Scalix, a startup company that had created a set of groupware software based on Hewlett-Packard's OpenMail product that Scalix eventually was able to take open source. Today, that software is updated with an 11.3 release, which includes three enhancements that will make the Scalix mail and groupware server that much more appealing to customers who want to make the shift away from Exchange and other mail servers but who do not want to give up their Outlook clients.

The first enhancement that Xandros is putting into Scalix 11.3 is support for Outlook 2007 email and calendar clients. Outlook 2007 is the latest implementation of Outlook from Microsoft and the one that is available for both Windows XP, which is several years old and which dominates the Windows desktop installed base at this point, and Windows Vista, which has been out for almost a year and which is gaining a head of steam in the desktop and laptop market these days. Demand for Outlook 2007 has not been huge, however. "Customers have not been pushing for this in a big way," explains Danny Essner, director of product marketing for the Scalix product at Xandros, "but it is starting to show up in the requests for proposal." It is good to be timed to market. The Scalix server already supports Outlook 2000, Outlook XP, and Outlook 2003, and has its own Ajax-developed Scalix Web client, too. The thing about the Scalix server is that it has a native MAPI interface that does exactly what Exchange does, and therefore none of these Outlook clients even know they are not talking to an Exchange Server running on Windows, but rather to a Scalix server running on Linux.

The updated Scalix 11.3 also has been tweaked so Outlook clients can reach back into their mail servers, no matter where they are in the world, without the need to log into a virtual private network first that is in turn arbitrating traffic from the Web into the mail and calendar servers. With Scalix 11.3, any supported Outlook client can log into Scalix provided that they have a link back to the Scalix server over the Internet (or an intranet) that is equipped with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) data encryption. This SSL connectivity feature required so tweaking in the Scalix server as well as in the Outlook connector that Scalix implemented way back when with its initial product. "Many customers do not want to set up a VPN, and this is especially true of small and medium businesses," says Essner.

Scalix 11.3, which is available today, also has one other new feature: support for the emerging CalDAV calendaring software interface, which is supported by the iCal calendar in Apple Computer's MacOS X operating system and the software inside of its iPhone as well; CalDAV is also the supported format for the open source Mozilla Sunbird calendar client. The update also better supports storing data in Asian character sets and has a number of tweaks to the Scalix Web client to improve its performance.

Scalix 11.3 is certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and 10, and Xandros' own Xandros Server 2.X implementation of Debian Linux. Customers can run Scalix 11.3 on openSUSE and Fedora development distributions as well as on the CentOS 4 or 5 variant of Red Hat's Linux. Essner says that CentOS support will be official sometime in the future with either Scalix 11.4 or 11.5, and adds that CentOS support is being driven by the service providers who prefer CentOS because it is a lot less expensive than RHEL is from Red Hat. The service provider business is important to Xandros, which is why it would be willing to push an alternative Linux with the Scalix software. Back in October 2007, Scalix 11.2 was launched to allow multi-tenant, secure email servers without necessitating server virtualization at a layer in the software stack lower than Scalix itself. This is particularly appealing to allow companies with lots of Exchange servers to consolidate them onto a much lower number of Scalix servers, and because they are frugal, service providers love CentOS.

While Scalix is operated as an independent subsidiary of Xandros, the Scalix operations were nonetheless moved from San Mateo, California, to New York City in the wake of the July 2007 acquisition of Scalix by Xandros. Xandros bought Scalix in the wake of inking a deal to bundle its Linux with the Scalix messaging and calendar server, which was launched in May 2007. The current version of this bundle, which is aimed at SMBs with fairly simple networks and a low number of users, is based on Xandros Server 2.1 and Scalix 11.2. Within the next few weeks, the bundle will be updated with Scalix 11.3, according to Essner, but there is not a firm date on this as yet.

The Scalix server is available as a free, open source product with basic POP/IMAP email serving and calendaring functions, called Community Edition and using the standard client. The full package, which includes the Scalix Web client and the full multi-server, multi-tenant, and calendaring support, is called Enterprise Edition, which comes with the so-called premium client licenses that cost $60 a pop. The extra goodies that make Scalix worth paying for--the MAPI server and the Web client--are not open sourced. Scalix has nearly 700 commercial customers and has had over 140,000 downloads of its open source variant.

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