Cool, so does that mean reading between the lines that esmith will continue to be a handicapped product with little updates, no real growth and that Mitel wouldn't like a chunk of easily attainable revenue ? I only ask because I have 135 paying commercial resellers who all sell product and all of them would have looked at an ESmith product but who think the average Mitel reseller is a joke. The message is so lost
Remote teleworker solutions and PABX solutions are a totally different market to the network server market and there is a market that needs addressing.
But if all these features are in MAS for a seriously silly price (and it is silly - do some market comparisons) then releasing a GPL product with CHARGEABLE maintained modules would be nice and would more than pay for itself. It actually would outperform MAS sales. That isn't a bad thing and just proves a busted model. Maybe something for you to suggest to the sales prevention team.
I spoke to three Mitel resellers all affable, nice and polite, all clueless. All of them. Not a clue. Couldnt have told me anything about the product and then wanted to sell me services on top of them that I clearly didnt need.
Now there is demand and when this thread started I had no intention of doing anything. I was a happy ESmith user but as this thread has continued its become clear that almost sweet FA is being backported into ESmith. I'm sure every SME user is grateful to Mitel for supporting hosting and dev costs - thats a given. However if the only thing thats made it into the UI in TWO years is portforwarding which can be added in under 8 minutes then thats laughable.
I have identified a tech company I can get my fund managers to acquire and I've even talked to two perl coders this morning willing to go to work full time on an alternative solution. I know I can beat the MAS into a cocked hat and after reading your response which I am grateful for it seems that says 6.0 is 5.3 + new kernel and almost nothing else - not even a chargeable update module or feature pack.
Revenue missed.... Big time.
I know overnight I got 43 emails from people on this list who wanted to know what I could do. My wife presumed I was retired but maybe there is a gap for me to fill.
Dick