Scalix bought by Xandros

My spies tell me there's big changes afoot in San Mateo (and smaller changes in Reading).

Despite the strength of the underlying technology (HP OpenMail, yes I'm biased), Scalix didn't seem to be making its numbers. From the reports of "13 engineers and sales support staff" I imagine that a number of people got made redundant recently.

Xandros and Scalix have been working together for a while now, so I suppose this acquisition makes as much sense as any.

Presumably Scalix now can't get sued by Microsoft for violating Exchange patents? ;-)

Bill Gates Evangelizes Small Teams

In 1989, Bill Gates gave a talk to Computer Science Club of the University of Waterloo. It's recently been made downloadble. An at-times-fascinating listen, he makes this interesting -- yet ironic -- point.

Small teams are good. Organizing software development in small teams keeps your business focussed, efficient, and nimble. In my experience, Bill is right on. All the best and most productive dev teams I've worked on (and with) were between two and four people.

What a shame Microsoft today doesn't practice what Bill preached 18 years ago.

Update: Christophe de Dinechin makes a similar point. HP Integrity VM? Isn't that what used to be called HP Virtual Vault? Wow, small world. Anyone remember OpenMail Anywhere?

Confused About MAPI/RPC, the "Outlook-Exchange Transport Protocol"?

As David and I wrote earlier, Microsoft is now licensing the Outlook-Exchange Transport Protocol. I'm seeing a few people out there confuse this with MAPI. It's not, it's actually something related but different.

You see, MAPI isn't a protocol, it's an API. A protocol is "bits on the wire". An API is a programmatic interface (e.g. the calls implemented by a DLL or shared library).

The protocol is often known as MAPI/RPC (i.e. a remote-procedure-call encapsulation of MAPI -- although it's not as simple as that). Microsoft now has an official name for MAPI/RPC and now are licensing it.

Vendors using MAPI/RPC include:

• PostPath reverse-engineered it to create a Linux-based Exchange replacement
  
• Cemaphore licensed it to create a disaster recovery product
  

In OpenMail and Samsung Contact, we developed a MAPI service provider -- what some people call an "Outlook plugin". This basically translates the API calls made by Outlook into some other API (e.g. OpenMail's UAL or some standard like IMAP). OK, that's an over-simplification, but let's ignore that for now. Scalix continues with this OpenMail-inherited architecture, albeit much-enhanced.

Other vendors created an ugly hack that synchronized its server mail store with an Outlook personal store (PST) file. They'd run a task that would try to keep track of changes in one store and reflect them in the other. (Emphasis on the try, 'cos it didn't always work terrifically well ;-)