For Spicebird 0.7 we are planning an extension for bloggers with the following idea:

Things are moving ahead steadily towards Spicebird Beta 0.7. We will have all the features listed in our Roadmap, except basic email tabs. We had to shift email tabs to the next version to ensure we can work on more stable tabs implementation. We are planning to release 0.7 by mid of June, 2008. The deadlines are as usual tight and require us to spend marathon hours at work. Though that can be an excuse for not many updates from us, we will try to keep posting as & when we have some time.

Joining a startup is like entering into a long-term relationship. You have to do a lot of study about the company and the people running it. Compatibility plays a very important role when you want to be a part of a small team running a company. You also have to understand and discuss the objectives & future plans (mission & vision) of the company with the founders. When you get the picture of the company's growth, you should be able to figure out where you can add value. Knowing this is crucial to have a successful relationship.

To list a few advantages of joining a startup, you can be a part of a highly talented and motivated people, get your hands on bleeding edge technology, get involved in various activities and grow along with company. When the company is small, the hierarchy is flat and the process is democratic. This provides a dynamic environment where you can voice your opinions and discuss things directly with the implementors.

Most of you would have already seen the IM that we had in the 0.4 release and a lot of feedback did reach us.  There were thoughts on improving the windows, the integration and requests to support more IM protocols (Yahoo, MSN, AIM, ICQ and more).  We did brain-storm a lot on how to solve these issues, and here is the new Telepathy based recipe we came up with.  We are still experimenting and are not really sure how this experiment would end up, specially for Windows.

Its been more than three weeks since we released the first public beta of Spicebird. So, what have we done since then and what has changed in our priorities and roadmap?

The short answer is - Yes! thats a promise.

The Spicebird source code is released under the same license terms as the Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird source code. We did that not as an obligation, but to make sure that all our work can go upstream without much trouble with the licenses.

Spicebird would be an open source project in it's true sense. The community will be involved in decision making and in the development of this project. We welcome contributions from the user and developer community in the form of feedback, bug reports and patches.

A big thank you to everyone who tried Spicebird. It's been a week and Spicebird Beta 0.4 was downloaded more than 10000 times from www.spicebird.com.

We did get a lot of feedback from the community - criticism, pats and feature requests. We will try our best to incorporate all you suggestions into the next releases (or hopefully in the updates). If you still have something to say, do mail me at prasad@synovel.com.

We are working towards making our SVN and the bugzilla available to everyone and keep watching this space for an announcement about it.

So, here it is. Spicebird - on its maiden flight. After nearly an year of effort we finally got our act together to release the nascent version of Synovel's free and open source collaboration suite. The released version 0.4 contains well integrated tools of collaboration viz. email, contacts, calendaring and instant messaging.

Spicebird has a long road ahead to become a comprehensive communications suite. We seek contributions from the community towards acheiving this in the form of ideas, suggestions, bug reports and source code.

Get Spicebird!

The past couple of weeks have been really exciting time for Synovel.
The kind of response we have been witnessing ever since we posted a
video of our 0.3 alpha version - has been overwhelming. The responses
include suggestions for improvement, volunteering for contribution,
apart from applauds and appreciation.

But with the applauds also comes a responsibility. Responsibility to
deliver to the expectations of the open source community of
developers and users. We at Synovel are aware of this responsibility
and are working full throttle towards releasing what ever we have now,
very soon.

Your suggestions and contributions will keep us motivated and will be of immense help in evolving Spicebird into a comprehensive collaboration platform. Keep your suggestions pouring in.

David Ascher recently mentioned Spicebird in his blog and suddenly we started finding articles and discussions about it at various places on the web. Feels good, but I thought its time we speak about it and set the expectations right.

What is Spicebird?

Spicebird is an open-source platform for collaboration. To start with, we integrated e-mail, calendar and instant messaging into one suite. The features available on the website are for Version 1.0, but we do have plans to release intermediate versions (one of which will be available really soon. Our roadmap and anonymous access to SVN will accompany the release)