ashok's blog

Niru Mehta - former MD - Avaya Global Connect, is set to join the board of Synovel. Mr. Mehta has over 29 years of experience in Telecom at Bell Labs and Avaya. He was the CEO for Avaya (A US based $5B revenue leader in communication solutions) in India for over 11 years. He has led Avaya towards unmatched revenue growth during his tenure and established Avaya as a market leader in Unified Communications space. His efforts have won him numerous awards including CEO of the year by Frost & Sullivan.

Mr. Mehta brings in his vast of experience in enterprise communications space and leadership to help propel Synovel towards its mission.

Every enterprise today knows what open source is all about. They also understand the broader value proportion that is can offer. But, when it comes to adoption of open source products, either free or commercial, the major pull comes from the cost reduction generally associated with it. One important advantage this is generally overlooked is the feasibility and ease of integration with other applications and customization.

Integration and customization, however, is not limited to just open source software. Some proprietary format/protocol based products address the integration aspect by providing web service APIs. Such integration is limited by the extent of access to data/functionality provided by the vendor. With open source and open standards based products on the other hand, there is virtually unlimited scope for integration and customization.

Slowly but surely, the word about Spicebird has caught on and its spreading like wild fire now. The total Spicebird download count (for versions 0.4 and 0.7) crossed a hundred thousand. It stands at 140,780 as on today from Spicebird.com alone.

The Spicebird team thanks and congratulates all the developers, localizers, bloggers and the user community who helped Spicebird achieve this remarkable feat. We will continue to improve Spicebird to make it more feature rich and widely acceptable. Thanks for your patronage.

Release announcement from Spicebird.com :

Spicebird is a collaboration client that provides integrated access to email, contacts, calendaring and instant messaging in a single application. It provides easy access to various web services while retaining all the advantages of a desktop application. The application is based on projects like Thunderbird, Lightning and Telepathy and adds more functionality and integration among its components.

This release of Spicebird adds the following functionality:

The upcoming Spicebird 0.7 will support iGoogle applets. You will be able to add iGoogle's applets to Spicebird's home screen, along the current Applets. Most of the current applets on iGoogle work on Spicebird.

You can add an applet by dragging its image on the "Add Stuff" page in iGoogle, into the Google Applet in Spicebird. The image on the right shows a Google Maps applet added to Spicebird's home screen.

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.