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.
Two more people are going to join us by the end of May. One of them will work on the collaboration server software which will provide a simple administration interface to install/configure/maintain the servers for Mail, Calendar, Instant Messaging and CMS. The ground work for single-sign-on (SSO) to work with all the servers is completed. With this, Spicebird will be able to access all the applications seamlessly without having to authenticate to each server seperately. The focus is now on implementing an intuitive simplistic UI for administration of the servers, including backup, archiving & clustering.
The other person will work on the web client. By the time we do the enterprise release, we are planning to provide e-mail, addressbook & calendaring access to the collaboration servers through this web client.
We are hiring interns also. They will work on small modules of the above components. We see internships as a good opportunity for both us and the interns as we get to gauge the candidate's abilities and they get to know the work environment, which is very important in case of a startup. There is a huge difference between working with a startup and an established company. Past few days I have been discussing about this with lot of people. I tried to gather the views and put them here.
Comments
Hi siva , Nice to know about
Hi siva ,
Nice to know about your works . I did download the Spicebird .. nice cool app in fact . But I am trying to think of the "revenue" .. Where is the money ??
In enterprises the big brother's Outlook takes a major share .. n IBM's LotusNotes . If someone would want to shift from the standard to new I personally feel it would be pretty diffcult .. But ya i liked the concept of plugging in applets to your client . I was wondering what things i would love to have on the front page ..I should congratulate you people for addressing the problem very well . Possibly it could acts like a "Google Desktop" on to the mail client ..
But I wonder how you plan to generate money if u give out the sw for free ?If the tradition opesource philosophy is to be followed .. and you to offer services .. I have my doubts about it .
But I can easily see a possibility when the
1>social netowrks move into the mailclient ... Possibly i can prepare some ppt collaboratively (without me being needed to send over emails ) n lot more
2> Organisations building small and rich interfaces to get their process done .. For eg possibly insted of me visting some site / filling up some XL sheet .. some applet can be there in the mailclient which provides interface for user to enter details .
Great work guys ... Keep it going ..
Satish TJ
(satishtj@gmail.com)
Thanks
Hi Satish
Thanks for your feedback. Social Networks is something we have planned, but not for 1.0.
About the money, yes, support is a source of revenue. But, the other part we are looking at is the customization. The collaboration client can hook up to a myriad softwares at an enterprise, similar to what you described for filling up some spreadsheet. This opens up the scope of customization to simplify work and increase productivity.
Apart from the client, we are creating an entire solution for collaboration at enterprises, which will be our source of revenue.