Topic: Sme is dead

[Jason Judge]

I think Mitel have just one business model: you become a fully trained, paid-up member of their sales team and sell the units full time. That is the only way they will accept your money (in the UK, at least) or supply their services to you.

It is a very hands-off approach, and not a model that makes any sense to a small consultancy business who sell the occasional units to clients as part of a broader service.

If Mitel had been a bit more flexible, and not just tried to push high-volume sales, they may have had much more support from their users. Now, Mitel have certainly given a lot to the project - so I am not bitter or complaining - just disappointed that they didn't listen to the smaller company, because it is Mitel who have now lost out.

-- JJ

[Arne]

I wonder what does this "death" of the sme server really meen ? Will it be dead as a open source project and then live on bether than ever as a business project, or will it be dead both as business project and open source project. "Something" tells me that it will not be dead at all, and that it will live on more and bether than ever as a business project while the open souce project will be "dead".  Is it like that ? Anybody who knows ?

[Mats Karlsson]

Funny I had exactly the same experience and my bussiness idea was keept "On hold".

So I had signed up to contribute to the development and are looking forward to a prosperous Open Source project that will match and succsed the RedHat EmailServer Project at sourceforge.


Lets rock.

Mats

[christian burnat]

How do we contribute to the new project,   and how do we support the folks willing to make it happening for us?

For one, I would have no hesitations putting my hand in my pocket for the few boxes I have deployed so far...  And the boxes I hope to deploy in the future -if updates keep rolling out, and things remain stable and secure.

Lets face it, a Win2k server's licence costs $AU1,000+ (Australian dollars) for a few users.  E-smith leaves it for dead anytimes, and cost "nothing" so to speak - except a few dollars here and there to Dungog (how lucky we are really) and a fast learning curve.... And above all,  Its intuitive, reliable, ethical to boot, and great fun as a bonus!.

The bottom of the line is, it was too good to be true.  Similar considerations apply to RH when I think of it.  Here I am with a fully supported version 9 box, complete with updates 2 or 3 times a week, for the cost of a few dollars.   Compare this to what MS would charge for what turns out an inferior product...

It is high time we face the music, and explore how we can salvage this little gem.  E-Smith cannot die. There has to be a middle ground between the price asked by Mitel for the full supported version and the cost of a hand written CD at your local Linux shop.  

How do we go about it?
What is a fair contribution?

cb

[%sig%]

[Jason]

I also tried to purchase a SME server from Mitel.  I went to their site and was directed to a reseller in NC.

After several attempts, the reseller eventually called me back.  I told him what I was looking for and he said he'd never heard of SME or MAS6000 or anything involving a Mitel mail/gateway/workgroup server.  He said he would look it up and call me back.

When he called again, he told me that he found out what the product was, but that he would not be carrying it.  The Mitel site offered no other vendors in my area to provide their products.

We are a large business with over 4000 total employees, of which perhaps only 200 would need/want email, but we could have afforded several thousand dollars for a server.  Instead, we simply deployed SME 5.5 and RAV which has served our purposes beautifully.

I suspect it's quite hard for Mitel to make money on SME when they don't provide a way for people to buy their products or services.