News, Events

To assist users with installing and configuring Synovel Collabsuite, we have created a few screencasts. The screencasts can be accessed on our YouTube "synovel" channel. They are also mentioned in the setup guide at the relevant places. We will keep uploading new screencasts as and when required.

After many months of development, we are now releasing a new version of Synovel Collabsuite. There are a whole lot of features in this release, the most prominent of them being:

• Collabsuite is now available as LiveCD for download. This makes deployment of Collabsuite much easier, as the LiveCD ISO just has to be downloaded, burnt to a CD, and can be installed on any system or VM. Added to this, the LiveCD comes preloaded with all the important system administration utilities, and servers pre-installed. This makes installation much faster.
• A new web based setup tool has been added. With this, users don't need to run the installation process from any script. They can instead perform the initial setup of the Collabsuite using this user friendly web based setup.
• Calendar Server is now based on SOGo. SOGo offers improved mobile integration (using third-party software), and improved address-book functionality.

Collabsuite 1.4 is a major version release with improvements to both admin and user end functionality. The major additions are as follows.

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.

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:

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!

One line to say what happened when Prasad went to the recent FOSS.in
event at Bangalore - "He went, he talked, he conquered!!"

Well, if Axel Hecht, could say wow then it definitely is something to talk about. One level conquered :-), lot more to go!

He gave a talk on application development using mozilla. I guess Prasad will write a blog (very soon (-;) with more details.

First of all I am very happy to announce that Prasad, our CTO is all set to rock the stage at FOSS.in. He is going to take a tutorial on how to write applications on the Mozilla platform (Yes, that is what we are doing here and Prasad is probably one of the best in this country, at it.) So Prasad and I will be in Bangalore from Dec. 4th to 8th at the event.

This event happens to be a pretty big deal for the folks up at Mozilla Foundation as they have put it up on their own site that they would be visiting. It is a pretty big event for the company as this will open all doors directly to Mozilla Foundation. All the big guys at the foundation seem to be coming down including the CEO, Mitchell Baker.