Hello Robert, Several good points and no easy resolutions for them.
We have new management for this product line and we're making up for lost time, over the past year, and it's going to take a major release and some of 2006 to get back on pace with where we want to be (and where our customers expect us to be). We want to keep you business. For right now, I'd recommend continue using the current WebMail until the new one has full win/mac support in a minor release coming in 2006. Customers having been asking for new web messaging templates, Denial of Service Attack support, a full blown Web Administration interface (allowing remote management from anywhere) and small items like renaming users and we want to get these out to market asap, and the painful tradeoff is now Mac web mail support. This doesn't help the Mac users, at all, but the new Outlook-ish Web Mail is a direct response to the #1 most requested change from our customers. It has lots of new features that many customers have been asking for (and Ipswitch employees too!) and we wanted that released asap. After a several month beta and internal deployment at Ipswitch, it's weeks from being released. We fully expect to deliver Mac compliant IMail web templates in 1H, 06. Bye for now, kg -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Robert E. Spivack Sent: Saturday, November 05, 2005 2:31 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [IMail Forum] IMail 2006 WebMail w/o Mac For us, the problem is that the current version of Imail WebMail DOES work from a Mac. So if we were to upgrade to the new Imail and WebMail, the lack of Mac support is a "broken feature" for our existing customers. We have clients that own both Macs and PCs. Telling them they can't use the same new GUI on both isn't acceptable to them. For a brand new product that is not an upgrade to an existing product/customer base, it is certainly reasonable development plan to address the biggest audience first and add secondary platform support in a follow-up release. But for a product upgrade, Marketing 101 says you MUST NEVER break a feature or drop a feature that already exists except under extreme circumstances. Unfortunately, companies keep relearning this rule the hard way by inflicting not-ready upgrades on their customers because of revenue or competitive pressures. At worst, features can be "deprecated" in a release but not dropped until the next one. I.E., vendor announces intention to drop feature "X" but includes it in one more release giving customers clear direction that the feature will be dropped in the future and they should start planning for that. That's a lot more graceful than introducing an upgrade that is "new and improved" but doesn't have all the functionality of the earlier version because of scheduling/timing pressures. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Kevin Gillis Sent: Saturday, November 05, 2005 6:19 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [IMail Forum] IMail 2006 WebMail w/o Mac Hello Darin, Your comments are very accurate. As much as we have standards based browsers, the standards have not fully delivered across all browsers (there are now 4-5 browsers on just windows that most IT folks would have heard of - IE, FF, Moz, NS, Opera) and definitely not across all platforms including the main ones used on the Mac (Safari, older IE). Expect for this to be even more straining with the emergence of the 7 year old AJAX (XMLHttpRequest) which first appeared in IE 5 which is now getting much more play due to Google's use of it in Google Maps and Google GMail. Here's a report from June 05 showing that 1 in 10 sites in the UK don't work correctly on anything but Win IE. "One in 10 UK websites fail to work properly on the open source Firefox web browser, a study shows." http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4115806.stm But that's no excuse for Ipswitch it just means it will take a little longer to get that cross browser and cross platform/OS support. We are striving for cross browser within Windows with this release and then adding Mac shortly thereafter. We know mac users are very prevalent in the ISP/EDU space and it's just a matter of time-to-market that we are releasing IMail 2006 within a month and then adding Mac support thereafter in 2006. Bye for now, kg -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Darin Cox Sent: Saturday, November 05, 2005 8:43 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [IMail Forum] IMail 2006 WebMail w/o Mac >First of all, I can not understand, how a web programmer is able to create html/css/dhmtl/js-code that is not mac-compatible. Because the browser rendering engines are significantly different. While Safari is bsed on Mozilla and will most likely work, IE for Mac is _very_ different from IE for Windows...especially in CSS layouts. Not having a Mac, I've found it extremely difficult to design for Mac audiences using newer layout methods, and have generally had to revert to table layouts to avoid CSS inconsistencies that would cause rendering on IE for Mac to fail miserably.... but again Safari may work fine. > Secondly, our isp customers and imail customers are living in a mixed world. This means: wintel's and mac's. Yes, but most development shops are Windows-only based. I've run into several third party web apps that could not tell me whether their products worked on a Mac because they didn't have equipment to develop or test with. We'll be buying a Mac sometime soon to better test web apps for that audience. > Today I sold a IMail subscription to an college having 4000 accounts, containing a few hundreds IMac's. Do I run in troubles now? See if it doesn't work fine in Safari. Darin. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Martin Schaible" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "IMail Forum" <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, November 04, 2005 8:15 PM Subject: [IMail Forum] IMail 2006 WebMail w/o Mac Hi, Did i understand the postings correctly, that the new webmail of IMail 2006 does not work on Mac's? I really hope, this is wrong. First of all, i can not understand, how a web programmer is able to create html/css/dhmtl/js-code that is not mac-compatible. Secondly, our isp customers and imail customers are living in a mixed world. This means: wintel's and mac's. Without mac support, the customers won't move to imail 2006 at all. Today i sold a imal subscription to an college having 4000 accounts, containing a few hundreds IMac's. Do i run in troubles now? If this is really true, i would re-scedule the release date of Imail until this issue is solved. Would anybody from ipswitch confirm this issue, or better say: "It's a nasty halloween joke"?? -- Mit freundlichen Grüssen -------------------------------------------- Merlin Consulting Martin Schaible Bahnhofstrasse 27 CH-8702 Zollikon Phone: +41 44 391 30 00 Fax: +41 44 391 32 49 Mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] URL: http://www.merlinconsulting.ch Support: http://support.merlinconsulting.ch GPS: N47 20.235 E8 34.226 -------------------------------------------- News - Neue Produkte: .:. NOD32 Antivirus System .:. BlueDragon .:. Kiwi Syslog Monitor .:. Paessler GmbH .:. 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