MailSite Collaborator 8 is designed to compete directly with Microsoft Exchange 2007—at about 20 percent of the cost.

by Jeff Goldman [June 13, 2007]

John Davies founded Rockliffe in 1995, and the company shipped its first e-mail solution, MailSite Version 1, in 1996. In 2000, with the release of MailSite Version 4, clustering capability was added to the product, greatly increasing its scalability—and since then, the focus has been on adding functionality for everything from security to webmail.

The company's newest release is MailSite Collaborator 8—and with the new release, the company is changing its name to MailSite to focus its marketing on one brand name. With its headquarters in Silicon Valley and two offices in the U.K., MailSite now boasts 2,000 customers worldwide running about 15 million mailboxes.

MailSite 408-879-5600

Those customers, Davies says, include Verizon Business, Teleflora, and OneBox—the company's key target markets are service providers and small businesses. "The majority of our service provider customers fall in the 50,000 to 500,000 range—we do have a couple that are a million," he says.

Targeting Exchange 2007
MailSite Collaborator 8, Davies says, "provides most of the functionality of Exchange 2007 at only 20 percent of the cost." And MailSite adds a new calendar server which offers interoperability with clients like Windows Vista Calendar, Apple's iCal and Google Calendar. "The product also has anti-spam and anti-virus bundled in, so you don't need to get an additional product and install it," he says.

Davies says the anti-spam technology has been improved for MailSite Collaborator 8 with the addition of greylisting support. "The first time a server sends a message to a user on MailSite, MailSite would temporarily reject the message and ask the sender to re-send—then when the sender re-sends, it would accept the message," he says. It's particularly effective, Davies says, in dealing with botnets.

The calendar server also allow users to share calendar information outside the company, with family, friends or colleagues. "If you're working on a project with some consultants, you can very easily share your calendar with them," Davies says. "This is one of our differentiators over Exchange, because Exchange is really just within the Intranet."

ExpressPro webmail
The new release provides native support for Outlook 2007. "It's a very nice, easy integration—it doesn't require any plug-ins for Outlook 2007, and it will automatically synchronize calendar and contacts between Outlook and MailSite on the back end, so you have the same data in Outlook 2007 for e-mail, calendar and contacts that you have in MailSite with the Web interface called ExpressPro," Davies says.

ExpressPro is a new AJAX webmail client for MailSite Collaborator 8—it has no code in common, Davies says, with the webmail that was packaged with Version 7. It includes full drag-and-drop functionality, right-click support, and the ability to select multiple messages in a mailbox. "The user interface is very similar to Outlook—if you've used Outlook, then you'll instantly be able to use ExpressPro," he says.

For service providers, Davies notes, the calendaring and the webmail can be provisioned and marketed to end users as separate value added services. "It can be enabled and disabled by domain and by mailbox, so that would allow service providers to sell it as a value added service, if they wanted to do that," he says. "The different levels of service can be provisioned by account."

Pricing
MailSite Collaborator 8 is free for up to 20 users. For up to 50 users, it costs $495 a year. The service provider edition, MailSite SP, starts at $5,000 a year for up to 500 subscribers. All paid versions include support and upgrades.

The pricing is made more attractive, Davies says, by the fact that running it won't cost much in terms of labor. "We've really built this for the service provider, so they can run it with a very small amount of manpower," he says. "We have one customer hosting half a million mailboxes, and they have half a full-time administrator running the cluster. You just can't do that with hosted Exchange."

Looking ahead
Davies says the company is already actively developing MailSite 9, which will focus on adding support for the RIM BlackBerry and for Windows Mobile. "We'll be natively supporting Windows Mobile, and we're working with Research in Motion on BlackBerry support," he says. The aim is to have MailSite 9 available by the end of 2007.

In the meantime, Davies says he expects MailSite 8 to compete well with Exchange. "We believe it's going to be a very effective offering for those mid-tier service providers that can't afford full-blown Exchange or don't want to pay the royalties to Microsoft for it, but want to offer most of the functionality," he says. "And we believe that they'll be able to make a lot more money with MailSite 8 than they could with hosted Exchange."

The point, Davies says, is that there's a real need for this type of solution. "There is a space in the market for something in between, something that is a premium collaboration solution but doesn't go all the way to hosted Exchange—and that's where we're really positioning the product," he says.

— End

Related articles:
	[April 21, 2004]	A Frequently E-Mailed Question
	[Sept. 25, 2003]	Rockliffe's MailSite Adds Anti-Spam
	[June 20, 2002]	Optimism is the Message

Online resources:
	Webmail Directory
	Webmail Quick Reference Chart