[Users] April 21, 2020 Zeta Alliance Conference Call Summary

Randy Leiker randy at skywaynetworks.com
Thu Apr 23 00:09:20 CEST 2020


Hello Zeta Alliance Community, 

Here is a summary of this week’s conference call. A few brief reminders: 


    * Conference calls are every Tuesday and open to all using either the FreeConferenceCall.com VoIP app or via a dial-in number: [ https://www.freeconferencecall.com/wall/zetalliance | https://www.freeconferencecall.com/wall/zetalliance ] 
    * Each week’s call agenda can be found at: [ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uUUDJpwp2CAylU6lxtbEdVcUX_qSbciyes6gLTWw2fY/edit | https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uUUDJpwp2CAylU6lxtbEdVcUX_qSbciyes6gLTWw2fY/edit ] 
    * A copy of each week’s summary is also posted to the Zimbra Forums: 
        * February 2020 : [ https://forums.zimbra.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=67726 | https://forums.zimbra.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=67726 ] 
        * March 2020 : [ http://forums.zimbra.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=67855 | http://forums.zimbra.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=67855 ] 
        * April 2020 : [ https://forums.zimbra.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=68073 | https://forums.zimbra.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=68073 ] 
    * Constructive feedback on these call summaries is always welcome. 

April 21, 2020 Conference Call Summary 

Reactions to Closed-Source Policy for Zimbra 9 
Marc G. expressed his continued concerns about Synacor’s recent decision to change to a closed-source code policy starting with Zimbra 9. He asked everyone on the call if they thought it would be possible to organize the community to get behind a campaign to encourage Synacor to re-consider making Zimbra 9 open source. John H. suggested that Zimbra customers should contact their Synacor sales people to express their thoughts on this issue so they can be relayed to the decision makers at Synacor, but said the challenge is in how to present the argument to Synacor’s management in a meaningful way. 

Mark S. asked if Synacor’s former open source policy for all Zimbra versions offsets the higher cost of Zimbra licensing, as compared to Microsoft Exchange’s lower licensing costs. Barry D. said that he personally finds the open source policy change unfortunate. Marc G. said that he feels that the open source policy is a very important part of the value proposition of Zimbra and that he feels that Synacor still has not succeeded in engaging the open source community because there are key requests that seem to have been mostly ignored. One example he cited was the long-promised replacement for Zimbra’s Bugzilla site, where the community was previously able to report product bugs and upvote bugs that were of high importance to fix. Cine said that he has always loved Zimbra’s capability to be extended and that he feels the new Modern UI in Zimbra 9 helps fulfill this need. He explained that he feels Zimbra’s ability to integrate with other products is priceless, as compared to be forcing to change your workflow to fit a vendor’s platform or ecosystem. 

On-going Difficulties For Zimbra BSPs Selling Zimbra With Known Bugs 
Marc G. said it is critically important that things simply work in Zimbra with as few bugs as possible, in order to keep Zimbra competitive with other products in the marketplace. He shared an illustrative story of a recent new Zimbra user who encountered a known bug in the Zimbra Connector for Outlook, which causes an Outlook profile to crash. The new user reacted to this bug by assuming that Zimbra was not ready for production-use, as the user had not earlier encountered a similar problem while using competing products. Randy L. agreed that his own customers have expressed similar statements when encountering known bugs in various Zimbra and Zextras features and said that he would like to see a renewed focus from Synacor and Zextras on quality assurance efforts with expanded testing of new versions and patches, with the understanding that this could come with the trade-off of delaying new product releases or features for a period of time (for example, 3-6 months). He said that preventing breakage in existing features is more important to Zimbra customer retention than introducing new product features. Agreeing with Marc G’s comments, he commented that when Zimbra customers encounter a bug with no published schedule or guidance for when the fix will be available, that customers tend to simply jump to another vendor’s product rather than waiting indefinitely for a bug fix. 

Lorenzo, who was new to the Zeta Alliance conference call, introduced himself and expressed concerns about Zimbra licensing becoming too expensive as compared to other email platforms, along with concerns about the current feature set in Zimbra, and ongoing issues with known bugs. 

Zimbra Connect Feedback 
Gary C. shared an illustrative story where, as a Zimbra BSP, he tried to market Zimbra Connect to his customers and several reported that it was incomplete and not ready to replace other video calling services in the marketplace, which discouraged him from further marketing of the product. Cine encouraged everyone on the call to continue to report bugs and requests for enhancement (RFEs) via Zimbra Support and said that he personally considers Google Hangouts to be somewhat equivalent to Zimbra Connect at present, as compared to services like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, WebEx, etc. He also explained that both Zimbra & Zextras is listening to customer demand and that they are very willing to adapt Zimbra Connect’s features to fulfill customer needs. 

Suggestions For Improving the Zimbra Bug Fix Process 
Randy L. acknowledged he understands the challenges that existed with the deprecated Zimbra Bugzilla site and suggested that, as a simplified interim solution, Synacor should setup a process to automatically export, on a recurring basis, a one-page list of known bugs from Synacor’s internal Jira bug-tracking system that shows bugs the developers are currently working on, and those that are pending more information being gathered. He explained that this would offer Zimbra BSPs and the community insights into which bug fixes are most likely to appear in an upcoming patch. For Zimbra BSPs, this would also offer the ability to give their customers unofficial guidance on a timeline of when a fix for a bug is likely to appear, even if the bug was reported by another BSP or Zimbra community member. Very limited information about bug fixes included within a given patch, prior to release, is already visible to Zimbra Partners in the Channeltivity Portal, but it offers an incomplete picture of the overall status of all known bugs affecting the product. As it currently stands, the schedule for bug fixes operates mostly as a black box process, with Zimbra BSP customers reacting to the lack of a bug fix schedule by jumping to competing products resulting in both BSPs and Synacor losing those business opportunities. John H. said that there has been discussion internally at Synacor about how to make similar information available to the public. 

Randy L. also suggested that Synacor begin sending out periodic surveys asking Zimbra BSPs for feedback about top product issues, so the input can be used for setting priorities by Zimbra Product Management. Barry D. pointed out that the range of feedback is likely to be very diverse and may be difficult to group into meaningful priorities. Randy said that if that occurs, Synacor could tally the top 10-15 most frequently mentioned issues from the first survey, and send out a second follow-up survey asking Zimbra BSPs to place a number next to each of the 10-15 top reported issues to indicate priority. John H. said that he is meeting soon with an internal committee at Synacor to determine how to share out information related to priorities and the time frame in which they will be addressed, and he will mention these suggestions. Randy suggested that transparency and explanation of methods used to determine priorities should be disclosed at least to Zimbra BSPs, if not with the Zimbra community, to keep criticism of the process to a minimum. 

HubSpot Personas at Synacor 
Mark S. commented that Zimbra uses HubSpot, a marketing tool that requires users to document descriptions of target customers, like Zimbra BSPs, VARs, and end users, as it applies to Synacor’s business. He asked Barry D., a Synacor employee, if he had seen any of these customer descriptions in Zimbra’s HubSpot (Barry had not), and so Mark wondered if, instead of directly approaching Synacor to reconsider their decision to discontinue rolling Open Source binaries for Zimbra 9, or taking three development sprints to do not much more than refactoring, that a better option would be to encourage Zimbra to use the HubSpot Personas feature more broadly within the organization, to help Synacor employees at every level keep customers' challenges in the forefront as they carry out their job responsibilities. Mark described three examples: 

Sales 
While demonstrating 2-factor authentication in Zimbra for a long-standing customer, the cus-tomer asked why a QR code was unavailable that could be scanned to provision the Zimbra email account on the customer’s mobile device, like many other email platforms offer. The customer pointed out this feature is available via a Zimlet in the Open Source version of Zimbra, but is not available in the Zimbra Network Edition. 

Customer and Zimbra BSP Ease of Use 
While planning to retire a mailbox server in a multi-server farm, Mark opened a Zimbra sup-port case to ask how to move Zimbra Connect Spaces from one mailbox server to anoth-er. He learned that this feature does not exist and is not planned for development, but there is an undocumented variable setting to prevent Zimbra Connect Spaces from being created on a mailbox server. However, after that variable is set on a Zimbra mailbox server to be re-tired, customers have no other option but to destroy and then manually re-create their Zimbra Connect Spaces to "move" them to another server, resulting in no data being retained from their original Spaces. 

Security 
Zimbra Partners have access to the Channeltivity Portal, which has a section on upcoming patches, typically listing the specific fixes to be included within a patch a week or two before the scheduled release date. 8.8.15 Patch 8 included a security fix that prevents customers in a multi-tenant Zimbra installation from accessing the global address list (GAL) of other server tenants. But Channeltivity had no advance mention of this vulnerability, resulting in Partners learning of this security issue from the patch’s Release Notes, when the patch was released to the public, with no opportunity to plan to remediate the vulnerability in advance. 

Mark S. said that if HubSpot Personas were more broadly used within Synacor, the likelihood of these three examples happening would have been significantly reduced. Everyone on the call agreed that advance disclosure of the security issue could have been handled better, so Zimbra BSPs had more time to plan for quickly patching the issue, once the patch was re-leased. Mark was encouraged to bring up the suggestion of HubSpot Personas with his Zimbra Sales contact. 


Randy Leiker ( randy at skywaynetworks.com ) 
Skyway Networks, LLC 

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