[Obm] Announcement - Roundcube as webmail alternative

[Lilian CHAMONTIN]

All,

One of the reasons we're a bit late for the OBM 2.4 release is that 
we've been carefuly evaluating Roundcube as an alternative to our 
in-house webmail module.

I'm pleased to announce it's now working. We've already made the switch 
on our production environment and have received very positive feedback.

Roundcube looks good, scales nicely, has lots of features, supports a 
wide range of plug-ins, and the integration process with OBM server was 
straightforward. The OBM team has also developed an address book 
plug-in, and plans to contribute back patches and improvements to 
Roundcube, for the mutual benefit of our communities.

OBM webmail (“minig”) is still here and will remain supported for those 
who prefer it, but you'd rather use it on small scale organizations, 
where it plays better.

Minig was a nice attempt to changing webmail, and quite a large piece of 
software, but it doesn't fit well with our ambitions for OBM 3.0 : The 
main complaints we've received were : not enough features for 
organizations, remaining performance/bug issues on large sites, and too 
often no love from our main users. It also had qualities like its single 
inbox model and its powerful full-text search. But it costs us time - 
which we could spend on more important things - and is not strategic 
anymore : as its architecture was meant to plug into OBM 2.3, we don't 
have much source code to keep for version 3 (fortunately we've learned 
from the development, and this, at least, is an important thing we won't 
loose).

So let's move on, and focus on now (immediate user satisfaction) and 
tomorrow (a great OBM 3.0) !

And welcome to Roundcube, our new webmail alternative.


Best regards,


-- 

Lilian Chamontin, OBM