Well, I just got off the phone with the folks at Bynari. Here are some
highlights from the conversation:
* iCal/vCard support in their Outlook connector is mostly completed.
They believe they can offer us a beta test by February or March.
* They are still willing to provide a co-branded connector to us -- i.e.
it will say "Citadel" instead of "Bynari". This will of course be a Very
Good Thing.
* List price on the Connector is $39 (volume discount available). When I
mentioned that we were looking to offer a hosted service, they mentioned
that they can also offer a rental of the software, which would probably
come to about $0.60 per user per month.
* I'm going to be getting a license key for the _current_ connector
product, which will allow us to test their IMAP client implementation
against our IMAP server implementation, even if the rest of the Citadel
system won't understand the data format for now. Then when they deliver
the version that understands our data format, we won't have to do any
additional work.
* Bynari insists that their connector is of substantially higher quality
than either Toltec or Konsec. They actually ended up implementing
Kolab2-XML format for a large ISP that was willing to wait for Bynari to
finish that format instead of going with one of the other two,
specifically because of the quality of the product.
* Bynari Connector implements a full MAPI service provider -- NOT A SYNC
SERVICE.
I'm also talking to someone who's got a community of about 17,000 users
that are going to need a mail/calendar service. Once we have the ability
to talk to Outlook, we should be able to put the whole thing together as a
hosted service.
