Jim Parkinson's Weblog: "That which does not Kill you Makes you Stronger"

It's never as good as you want it to be, but it's never quite as bad as you think either ! Not sure who said that but I have found it to be really true.

This applies really well to the Comms product suite. Part of my job at Sun is working with Comms team to re-invest in the product
and make sure that it is a strong Microsoft Exchange alternative.

I have seen many blog entries and emails from customers and employees (including our CEO) which express frustration with bug fixing, feature addition, etc.

I hear you and we are going to do something about it !

Priorities going forward

1. Bring "Wow" back into the Web Client. Actively under construction is aWeb 2.0 client for mail, calendar, IM and contacts that will raise more than a few eyebrows.
2. Complete rebuild of the install environment (so SIMPLE my mom could install it).
   
3. Deliver a calendar server based on the latest CalDAV standard.
4. Open Source Comms components
5. Increase search and management  capability of the message store
6. Enable large message store capability
7. Bring carrier grade, push e-mail to the market.  Based on IETF/Lemonade standards.
8. Granular and light-weight web services to all Comms backend data.
9. Deliver SyncML support
10. Improve and expand Outlook Connector
11. Offer support for better /cheaper storage & mail-store integration.
    
12. A connection back to Sun for to better support users
13. Add a blogging engine to the Comms Suite
    

Just a partial list of what we are planning, and over the coming months we will be sharing more and more info with you as we get things released. So how are we going to deliver on this?  By making significant new  investment in sustaining and QA.  This will allow us to have developers spend most of their time doing what they are best at - innovating and developing cool new products.  Of course this won't all happen at once, but we have a strong server technology base to build on that makes this possible.

To learn more about Sun's Java Communications Suite and how it can help your business, you can  take a look at http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hubs/comms/overview/index.jsp

Send your comments and feedback, we believe in our products and we know that Comms on Solaris can be a competitive advantage for you in your business.

 Coming soon.....

A screen shot of our next generation web client 

Most people have had the experience of moving into a home or apartment that was previously occupied and wondering, as one gets familiar with the new digs, "Why did they paint it that color"? or "Whoever thought that this linoleum/tile/carpet was a good idea...what were they thinking!?"....

Something similar happens when you move into a new organization, with the difference being that if you keep your mouth shut long enough (not easy for me!) you will find that not only are there very good reasons for doing things a certain way, but also that there are a lot of very good things going on that you need to appreciate and encourage.

So, some of the great things I have found recently in my new organization:

StarOffice 8 supports ODF - Open Document Format. Important because ODF is a true open standard, and has been adopted and implemented by IBM, Sun, Google, Red Hat and even Microsoft. It matters because ODF allows you to create documents whose formatting is independent of the application used to actually do the creation. Guarantees availability of the content well into the future.  StarOffice 8 also works with the Sun Weblog Publisher, a terrific blogging tool!

  Really smart people who understand open source really well. 
 The engineers on Sun's Java Communications Suite and StarOffice have joined the Mozilla Calendaring Project which develops Lightning, a calendaring extension for Mozilla Thunderbird.

They have two goals: provide a calendaring solution for StarOffice & OpenOffice.org users and integrate support for Sun's Java System Calendar Server into Lightning. The current release of Lightning, downloadable from the Mozilla site, contains the WCAP code that allows for connecting to Sun's Calendar Servers.

Communications Products - A great team of people and what amazing IP. Turns out that one of the inventors of MIME, Ned Freed, works for Sun. He's currently doing some really cool stuff with MTA (Mail Transport Agent).

network.com "The data center on demand". Also known as the Sun Grid Compute Utility, network.com's release 1.1 is out with lots of new features and new ISVs. We have already committed 20 new user applications to open source with hundreds more to go. Go to network.com/application to see the on line applications available and to sign up. In a few months they will be releasing the ability to access network.com with an API and also to allow you to open network connection to other sites to read, collect, write and store data.

All this, still for only $1/CPU/hour. Great for developers looking for a cost-effective way of testing their code across a large number of machines.

Read More:
The Register talks about Grid as a "Developer thang"
Internet News  article on  the Grid as an "Application JukeBox"
Sys-Con Media with an article on the features in  Network.com


ISV-Engineering This worldwide engineering team has a simple mission: MAKE APPLICATIONS RUN best on Solaris!  Recent successes include integration of Cisco's Secure Access Control Server with Sun's Identity Manager.  The integration of network access control and identity management gives the enterprise the ability for a truly centralized secure system. 

Sun's ISV-Engineering team recently concluded a tuning effort on Symantec's Brightmail. Running on Solaris 10 and Sun's T1000 we achieved an increase in message throughput of 6X to 10X!

The result;  per Symantec, Sun's T1000 "Niagara" platform is now the preferred platform for deploying Brightmail.  Price to performance and power utilization can't be beat!  A rack of T1000's can process over one billion messages per week and can support a million mailboxes.  When Brightmail is used with Sun's Java Messaging Server and Storage, it is a complete email solution!

And check out the latest on the Detroit Red Wings - my favorite hockey team. The latest news is in the right nav bar over here....