The Future of Kolab Now: Part I

This is an introduction to the Kolab Now roadmap, and what the future is going to bring. I’ll give you a high-level overview of our future plans.

It’ll constitute the first in a series of blog posts, and different people will speak in more detail about individual topics.

The biggest change of all will hit the shelves right as we transition from our current Cockpit to this next version, and it concerns the way in which you pay for the service. We’ll transition from invoicing you for future use to charging your account balance to reflect actual use in the past.

The upgrade will require a service window during which we’ll require no changes be made to any of the accounts in the Kolab Now environment.

From there, we’ll seek to implement some of the following features (in no particular order);

The ability to opt-in or opt-out of using Guam, our reverse IMAP proxy that filters out groupware folders for IMAP clients like Thunderbird and Outlook and clients on mobile devices. The ability to opt-in or opt-out of so-called greylisting, the rather effective anti-spam measure that causes an initial delivery of a new communication stream to fail on a temporary basis, requiring the sender to attempt to resend the message later. The integration of Voice & Video conferencing with the platform. The ability to lock out certain if not most geographic locations from using your account (such as allowing you to log in only from Switzerland). Limited access to your audit trail, including from whence you have logged in, including failed message delivery attempts (inbound w/ greylisting, outbound with errors of some sort). Proper second factor authentication for IMAP and SMTP. Import/export of your data, including migration from and to third party groupware service providers like Office 365 and Google. One-way synchronization of external calendars. Shared folders, distribution groups, delegation and forwarding accounts. Additional controllers to a Kolab Now account, so multiple users can be assigned the access to control (add, edit and delete) users, groups, and the likes, as well as top-up the account balance.

As you can probably tell, this will build a nice pipeline of attractive features for Kolab Now customers. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll go in to more detail on some of these features, and how we’re going to get there.