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Messages - nachico

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1
News and Announcements / Re: Time to resign
« on: August 19, 2014, 11:27:14 am »
Usually the idea of forking is from the community but the precedent set by what is said seems to point to "We have our own agenda". "If you want to do something different we will not stop you" "It will not be part of our project".

I can understand that you got that impression, but the message is rather "We are very happy that you want to maintain one of the dropped modules. We have heard this story before and so far nobody had the guts to do it seriously. We have wasted too much time and effort in the past with other community members who seemed promising but then didn't do anything. Sorry for being skeptical but we need to see in order to believe. Show us the working code and then we can talk."

2
News and Announcements / Re: Time to resign
« on: August 19, 2014, 11:21:55 am »
Robb, thanks a lot for your collaboration during these years, you have been a valuable asset in this forum.

Let me reply to a few of your comments.

It is clear the Zentyal project has taken a drastic turn in features and goals. These changes are made because of a change in company strategy.
Even though these changes are understandable from a company point of view, it is not the in line with a lot of community members needs, including mine.

Being an easy-to-use gateway or UTM is nothing new. There are other OSS projects doing a great job there. There is little point on wasting efforts in yet another gateway/UTM. However, there is no other OSS project implementing a MSFT-compatible backoffice. Most of the community members understand and support this re-focus.

The company is stopping investing time and effort in the gateway/UTM modules. There is nothing preventing community members to take responsibility for these orphaned modules. This is the OSS darwinian model at play. If nobody takes the lead then it's because the modules were not so necessary.

An other reason to stop is the lack of company support towards the community.

Sorry, this is not true. Like in any OSS project, nobody has the contractual obligation of maintaining it or continuing its development. The right thing to do is, if the main developer stops maintaining a project or a part of a project, he/she should try to hand it over to someone else. That's what we have done. AFAIK, only Stuart has taken the lead on one module. If there is no interest in the rest of the modules is because they were not really necessary.

I wish to thank the Zentyal company for the great product and the years I was allowed to be close to the project. Especially I want to thank Ignacio and Heidi for their hospitality and friendship when I was in Zaragoza.

You are welcome. I wish you all the best.

3
News and Announcements / Re: Goodbye Christian
« on: March 19, 2014, 11:44:46 pm »
It's been a long time since I don't post in the forum (you can't imagine how busy life gets when trying to change the world). I am really sorry to hear that Christian has left the forum, but it is somehow expected as he was not really interested in MS-compatible technology.

There has been a lot of discussion inside and outside the forum regarding the evolution of Zentyal to become a drop-in replacement for MS servers: some people love it and some other hate it. From my point of view, this is the legacy we will leave to our children, to make the world a better place. Let me explain myself: most companies in this world use Exchange as their email server; the percentage of companies using Active Directory for identity management is even bigger. These users have no other choice, so they are locked into a monopoly and depend on Microsoft's decisions. Zentyal is providing for the first time a true alternative, breaking the monopoly and offering freedom of choice. But not only so, we are providing the source code and the right to modify it, giving effectively the control on this freedom of choice to the people, so that we make sure that there will never be a monopoly again. And this is only the start.

I understand if this approach does not fit many power users. But I know as a fact that this is going to make so many lives so much better, that it is a price I am ready to pay.

4
Installation and Upgrades / Re: Zentyal server is replacement for MS SBS ?
« on: September 27, 2013, 12:07:13 pm »
Hi everyone,

good and interesting thread. FYI, at our Summit (http://summit.zentyal.com/), in just one week, we are going to publish the first technology preview of Zentyal OpenChange. This is a new module, that will be published in the new alpha version for the community edition, and which implements a perfect native replacement of Microsoft Exchange. MS Outlook users cannot make the difference between MS Exchange and Zentyal OpenChange. Zentyal integrates Samba4, so it is also natively compatible with Active Directory. With this addition, Zentyal becomes a complete and native replacement for Windows Small Business Server (which is now discontinued).

We will continue offering Zarafa for those customers who prefer that solution, but OpenChange is the best alternative for customers willing to migrate away from MS Exchange, as there is no change for their users and the migration from MS Exchange is just 3-clicks away.

Cheers,

5
Yes, I did not expect so many technical questions. Which is a good thing, because it means that attendees knew about zentyal. I thought it was going to be more about people new to Z, wondering what the heck this is all about :D So, this means that we should start thinking about setting up some technical webinar :)

6
Sorry, I can't help with that :( This is the platform Canonical uses to deliver webinars and we have no power to change it. However, as far as I know, gathering data of webinar attendees is a common practice ...

7
News and Announcements / Agenda for ZCC meeting 16 May 2012
« on: May 15, 2012, 10:12:22 pm »
Hello everyone,

this topic is just to inform publicly that tomorrow evening there will be a new Zentyal Community Council meeting which is by the way open.

You can have a look at the agenda details at http://trac.zentyal.org/wiki/Structure/CommunityCouncil

Although there are quite a few topics to discuss, if you have any other topic, please feel free to reply to this post.

Sorry for the short notice! I was supposed to announce it with a few more days but it has not been possible :-[

Cheers

8
Well I apologise for my perceived tone but my response is reflective of my opinion.

Ok. Please keep in mind that we all need to be extremely respectful on written communication. Otherwise, it is really easy to end up in senseless flames.

We have a niche open source product with a rigid (closed) subscription service that seems to be following the Stella Artois marketing racket of being reassuringly expensive.
From a business logic perspective lumping all your services into a monolithic product is contrary to modern business practise. This negates any purchase feedback as your weak products will be buried with the strong.

Personally I don't subscribe to the "It's expensive so it most be good" in the similar vain "Open source must be bad as it can be free".
For me that is a ridiculous notion and a complete misinterpretation of the current economic and technology climate.

Thanks for your opinion. Our decision was taken after a lot of analysis and thought, based on plenty of feedback from customers and prospects. I can assure you that we have taken good care on being based on solid facts and advice before taking this step. Anyway, we are human and we might be wrong, only time will say.

9
Firstly I wasn't talking about the community edition. Would you kindly compare the previous subscription charges with the current apart from name changes and the 25 user split there is little difference.

Example:

* Before: professional subscription (195 €) + ASU (95 €) + Essential support (245 €) = 535 €/year
* Now: Small Business Edition 495€/year

Then when it comes to common network methodology with above 25 users could you explain why you have such a rigid and costly subscription service. RHEL premium levels with longer response times? In fact it looks like you have used their price levels and copied them rather than thinking about the usage and pocket of the community that uses Zentyal?

We have not changed the licensing of the software, so the community users have not been affected. Like I said before, all we have done is repackaging our existing services based on the feedback from our customers and prospects.

10
Hi DogManCat,

thanks for your comments. I will reply briefly.

The previous offering allowed the customer to select the kind of services he would require, but it forced him to foresee the need of support and security updates (among others). This has proved to be a big mistake, as it disgruntled many customers who realized too late they actually would have needed these services.

Moreover, the offering was very confusing for end customers who actually had a hard time understanding the value proposition and they often needed a personal explanation and support to select the right packages.

Well-informed customers ended up selecting either professional subscription + advanced security updates + essential support, or enterprise subscription + advanced security updates + disaster recovery + standard support. These were the packages we have used as a base for current editions.

The limit for 25 users is not an arbitrary one: the vast majority of our customers and users are within this limit.

If you are using Zentyal only as a firewall, which is not the use case where it provides the biggest value, the best two options are either using the community edition (if you do not require support for it) or the small business edition (if you do not use the users module, there is no user limit).

Moreover, having a very low entry-level price might seem a good idea, but we have realized it is dangerous: if it is too low, customers perception is that the service cannot be good. During the last months, we stopped pitching our entry-level pricing (195€/year) and we started pitching our current Small Business Edition price (including support and ASU), as it felt righter in the mind of the customer.

As a personal note, I would like to ask you to refrain from insulting or being too aggressive in your posts, and to try to keep a respectful tone of conversation.

Thanks.

11
What about the user number limit and VPN tunneling between sites feature? It will be possible connect more than 25 users or tunneling between sites with the Community edition?

Sure. Nothing has changed in the community edition, apart from the label.

The reason for limiting the Small Business Edition to small companies (up to 25 users) using Zentyal as a standalone server (no VPN tunnelling between sites) is because they demand way less support than larger organizations with a more complex IT infrastructure and thus they can have a lower price for the services.

12
Hi everyone,

you might have already seen the news in the .com site about the repackaging of our commercial offering. Until now it was based on Professional and Enterprise subscriptions as well as a series of extra services such as security updates and technical support.

We have realized that although our offering was very flexible and allowed to select just the needed services, it was actually too complex for our customers. So we have simplified it and bundled most services together in two options, targeting very different customer profiles: Small Business Edition for small businesses using Zentyal as a standalone server, and Enterprise Edition for medium businesses with more complex IT environments.

The other change has been semantic: many of our customers did not understand very well the concept of an open source, community software that got commercial services in the form of a subscription. So, despite the fact that we are not eager to separate community from commercial editions, we need to call them that way in order to make our offering understood. The good news is that it is just a semantic change: a commercial edition uses the same source code than community edition but it is bundled with commercial services (support, software and security updates, disaster recovery, etc).

In short, we have repackaged our commercial offering and changed its name, but that's all. I know it is not such an important announcement for the community forum but I just wanted to make it clear. If you have any questions or doubts please ask.

Cheers,


13
Thanks for the tip. It is great to hear that we are famous 8)

I just checked our stats and there does not seem to be any unnormal behaviour from German IP ranges. However, at the beginning of this week there were around 30,000 downloads from Egypt (according to Sourceforge). That's typically the total downloads we get per month globally. Is Egypt now part of Germany? ;D

14
German / Re: Willkommen im Deutschen Forum
« on: December 08, 2011, 09:05:04 pm »
we are just using  the main forum in English up to now  ;), perhaps it's much more difficult for the russian guys...... ::)

Ooookey, it makes sense :)

15
German / Re: Willkommen im Deutschen Forum
« on: December 07, 2011, 05:43:28 pm »
hola, nachico

up to 50 postings... ok, i work on it.... ;)

You are almost half of your way. Go go go! ;)

By the way, Russian forum is kicking German's butt: theirs was created a couple of days later and they already have four times the # of posts!!! ;D

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