Elliot Noss of Tucows delivered an interesting Keynote Presentation at ISPCON in Chicago. I have seen this posted on a few of my friends blogs so I decided to take a listen, it’s a great perspective…
If Mozilla can get together a product that is as effective as outlook and has the ability to sync with Plaxo, LinkedIn, and my Palm Treo Smartphone, I will completely migrate my 20 years worth of Business Data, 2500+ contacts, etc. to Thunderbird 3 when it is complete and out of Beta! Microsoft, this will essentially severe our ties forever!
Mozilla Messaging Starts Up Operations
New open source organization kicks off development of Thunderbird 3
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. - February 19, 2008 - Mozilla Messaging, the new mail focused subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, today announced that it has begun operations.
The initial focus for Mozilla Messaging is the development of Thunderbird 3, which will deliver significant improvements, notably integrated calendaring, better search and enhancements to the overall user experience. Thunderbird is a free, open source email application that is used by millions of people around the world and is built using the same open source development model as the award-winning Mozilla Firefox Web browser.
Mozilla Messaging has staffed a small product development team who will work as part of a community of contributors from around the world.
“We’re excited to renew the focus of our open source community on the future of Thunderbird,” said David Ascher, CEO, Mozilla Messaging. “Every one of us is committed to building a great email product that people will love to use and that serves as the foundation for choice in a critical area of Internet software.”
Mozilla Messaging is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. The board of directors consists of David Ascher, CEO, Mozilla Messaging; Christopher Beard, VP and General Manager, Mozilla Labs; and Marten Mickos, CEO of open source database vendor MySQL AB.
“Thunderbird email is a vital part of the Mozilla project which brings freedom to hundreds of millions of internet users worldwide,” said Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL AB. “By joining the board of Mozilla Messaging, I hope to help the world communicate better.”
For more information, please see the FAQ and the following blog post from David Ascher:
- FAQ: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/press/mozilla-2008-02-19-faq.html
- David Ascher’s blog post: http://ascher.ca/blog/2008/02/19/mozilla-messaging/
Mozilla Messaging Starts Up Operations
I ran across a blog entry on smallbiztechnology.com that referenced two companies that we (Pleth Networks, LLC) have worked with in the past and still have a current working relationship with, Maltrust and BlueTie.
Both of these companies offer an awesome alternative to hosting your own email in-house or on your web-hosting server. If you have ever considered outsourcing your email solutions to a third party provder, please contact us and let us discuss a couple of popular options with you. Here’s an excerpt from their post:
If you are still using your own email server, in your office, to service your email needs, you are doing a dis-service to yourself and your company, unless you have VERY specific reasons for doing so.
Outsourcing your email to one of the many email service providers on the marketd is the way to go. You don’t have to worry about managing hard disk space, upgrading software or security - you can focus on your business.
One of the long time leaders in this space, webmail.us was purchased by the ultimate customer focused web host Rackspace in October. It’s recently changed its name from webmail.us to Mailtrust.
In addition to the new company brand, Mailtrust announced the addition of Microsoft Exchange Hosting to its product portfolio. With the addition of Microsoft Exchange to Mailtrust’s flagship Noteworthy email hosting service, customers now have a choice of platforms depending on their size, functionality and budgetary needs.
You can get recommendations from other email service providers from your local technology consultant and also check out BlueTie which has a very robust and feature rich email service.
This is something that my business partners and I realized a few years ago that prompted us to offer our Pleth Premium Email product as an Email Outsourcing Solution. Since that time premium email solutions have grown into one of our most requested products.
Source: Email As a Service: Much Bettter Than Hosting Email On YOUR Server
As some of you may already know, my company offers a premium email solution that is extremely popular with small business and enterprise clients. I have blogged about Pleth’s premium email solutions from time to time here on this blog as well. About a month or so ago I was contacted by Drew Robb, a freelance writer for computer world, processor, and a few other tech publications to answer a few questions in regards to email uptime. I just checked processor.com’s website today and found that the article has been published, it’s a great piece and I thought that I would post it here as well as a link to the actual article: Processor Editorial Article - Ensure Email Uptime
Keeping up with email can be time-consuming and tedious. Spam takes the joy out of it. Its abuse in organizations leads to a constant bombardment of irrelevance that tends to bury worthwhile messages.
But while we may have a hard time living with it, we definitely can’t live without it in today’s business world. According to a new study by Osterman Research, email is rated as the most important tool in getting work done in small to medium-sized enterprises, well ahead of the mobile phone, desktop phone, and instant messaging.
That survey showed the average user sends and receives about 140 emails per workday. Employees estimated that email accounts for close to 80% of their total information transmission. Unfortunately, more than half of SMEs suffer from regular email outages and slowdowns. To make matters worse, it’s the user community that tends to notice first and bring the matter to the attention of IT.
“In the absence of good monitoring solutions, there really isn’t any other way to tell if email is down than by relying on users or an IT staffer noticing that email throughput has dropped to zero, a server is no longer operating, etc.” says Michael Osterman, an analyst at Osterman Research.
A variety of monitoring tools are available to help SMEs keep an eye on email uptime. According to Osterman, SMEs should look for monitoring products that address three aspects of downtime: detection, troubleshooting, and remediation.
“If it takes 15 minutes for the IT department to detect a problem, relying on users to find the problem, and one minute for the monitoring system to detect and alert IT (via email, IM, mobile phone, etc.), that saves 14 minutes per incident,” he says. “Assuming one downtime incident per month, the monitoring system would save two hours, 48 minutes of downtime each year. If a downtime occurs on a weekend, the detection/alert process can take a lot longer.”
Osterman recommends that companies in the SME category that rely on the near real-time nature of email invest in a monitoring system. For those organizations that don’t depend on email so heavily, particularly for transaction processing and the like, he believes that monitoring is not as critical.
99.999%Blah Blah
One problem that SMEs will face when they go to select an email monitoring or recovery solution is that just about every vendor will promise 99.999% uptime. But how many can actually deliver it?
“So many providers today can’t deliver 99.99% uptime because they aren’t completely utilizing technologies like virtualization or clustering,” says Cotton Rohrscheib, a partner and co-founder of Pleth Networks (www.pleth.com). “I think that in a lot of cases by offering this 99.99% uptime guarantee, service providers are more or less mimicking their competition.”
Rohrscheib feels that 99.9% uptime or more has become a buzzphrase that everybody utilizes to promote their services. However, the products may not live up to the marketing hype. As well as a failure to harness virtualization and clustering technologies, he feels that cost is probably a major factor in this. Additionally, he cites the learning curve for virtualization, which can limit its widespread deployment.
So IT administrators should question anyone offering 99.9% or more email uptime on several fronts: how exactly this is guaranteed in logical terms that encompass the technologies involved; how that guarantee is to be measured and monitored; and what the consequences are if it isn’t met in terms of SLAs (service-level agreements).
Business Continuity Safeguards
But monitoring email, server architecture, and SLAs are only part of the email uptime equation. Another vital aspect is business continuity. While disaster recovery deals with recovering after a failure, business continuity is all about staying up and keeping systems functioning despite a major failure.
The last thing you want, with email in particular, is to have to recover systems from backup tapes or even from disk. No matter how good the disaster recovery system, downtime is inevitable. By deploying business continuity appliances, however, email applications such as Exchange can survive an act of God or a server crash without going down.
“The best strategy SME IT managers can employ is not to improve email uptime but rather to solve or bring an end to email downtime [due] to planned and unplanned outages,” says Andréa Skov, vice president of marketing at Teneros (www.teneros.com). “A simple plug-and-go appliance provides instant failover for continuous email delivery for both planned and unplanned downtime, so end users never experience email downtime even in the midst of an Exchange outage.”
by Drew Robb
Best Tip: Go Low-End For Greater Uptime
Common logic tells you that the way to ensure higher uptime is by deploying higher-end equipment. But in some cases, that may not be the best way to go. Some companies are adopting a high-availability architecture based upon large numbers of commodity servers. The basic theory is that server failures are common and will happen from time to time. By arranging servers in pairs or clusters and building failure detection into the network, uptime can be better managed compared to a few high-end systems.
“In the past, we have tried the more traditional, high-availability design approach: high-end servers with high-end disk subsystems,” says Cotton Rohrscheib, a partner and co-founder of Pleth Networks (www.pleth.com). “The mean time between failures was only somewhat better than commodity hardware, although the high-end server hardware was many times more expensive. For the same cost, key services are now spread across large numbers of commodity servers in single-purpose clusters. Our experience has shown this greatly reduces the risk that any service might become unavailable to our customers, in turn giving our clients a higher likelihood of uptime in their email services and less likelihood of downtime.”
I was just reading on WHIR.com this morning about SmarterTools release of SmarterMail 5.x. SmarterTools SmarterMail product is a lot like our Premium Email Solutions in that it offers a competitive product to Microsoft’s Exchange Server.
Why would I post a note about one of our competitors on my blog you might ask? Well, my business partners and I, had the opportunity to sit down and spend a lot of time with Tim Uzzanti and Jeff Hardy of SmarterTools this past year in Chicago and kind of go over the broad landscape of premium email solutions and I have to admit I really liked these guys. They seem to have an awesome product as well, we did a few previews of their product before finally partnering with another firm to release our premium email solutions. I walked away from our preview of SmarterTools with a great impression. It’s nice to see the alternatives to Microsoft Exchange showing so much promise and innovation. Keep up the good work guys and I look forward to possibly sitting down and catching up this year in Chicago again.
Source: Web Host Industry News | SmarterTools Offers SmarterMail 5.x
As you might remember I blogged a while back about Pleth’s Premium Email Solution and our all-new Microsoft Outlook Calendar Sync application. I have been using it on a daily basis and absolutely loving life. This is something that I have seen as a necessity for a while partly because I am a power Outlook user from way back! Google has lacked this ability until now. I just stumbled across this today while browsing so forgive me if this is old news to you, but Google now has a download available on their site that will allow for synchronization between your Google Calendar and your Outlook Calendar, here’s the scoop….
Google Calendar Sync allows you to sync events between Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook Calendar. You’ll be able to determine the direction of information flow, as well as the sync frequency. Staying on top of your Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook Calendar events has never been easier!
Keep in mind that it’s not possible to sync events on secondary calendars at this time. Google Calendar Sync will only sync events from your primary Google Calendar and your default Microsoft Outlook calendar
Source: Google Calendar Sync: Getting Started