Atmail 6 Roadmap
April 22, 2010
By popular demand, we are announcing the roadmap for Atmail’s future development. Over the past 9 months, we have been adding many new features to Atmail 6 and have ported the most important features from the previous release.
Improving Atmail’s mobile features is the focus of ongoing development this year. One of our main goals is Push support for synchronization of contacts, calendar data, and mail. We aim to fully support Windows Mobile, iPhones, Blackberrys and other devices using ActiveSync.
Microsoft’s ActiveSync technology will be used with Atmail to provide Push functionality. This will be an extra module for Atmail, with the pricing ranging from $3-$6 per user/year for complete Push support. The per-user pricing is required due to the licensing fees from Microsoft.
Our passion for open protocols is as bright as ever, however. So for calendaring and contact data, and will be announcing CardDAV support for Atmail’s address-book. This will include a full client/server implementation, allowing contact data to be synchronized from a growing number of devices and applications using open protocols.
And just in time. With Apple CardDAV support announcement for the next iPhone 4.0 update, and devices such as the Android are announcing CalDAV support, devices can have advanced groupware and calendaring features without the need for ActiveSync.
We see the need to develop next-generation interfaces for mobile devices. We aim to provide users a unified interface for Mail, Calendaring and Contact data, using browsers for mobile devices, built and optimized for the mobile platform. Later this year, we will be launching elegant messaging interfaces to support the Android, iPhone, and iPad platforms.
Finally, we are committed to improving the current Webmail and Admin user-interface of Atmail with additional features. The new Atmail Plugin Framework has allowed us to develop lots of cool plugins that can interface with Atmail: embedded maps in messages, thumbnails for MS Word/Excel docs attached to an email, and integration with 3rd party appliances such as Barracuda and more.
So, onto the Roadmap!
Major new features:
- New mobile Webmail interfaces (iPad, iPhone, Andorid) - Sept
- Activesync PUSH support - Aug
- CardDAV server support - Jul
- CardDAV client support - May
Major improvements:
- Redesigned Calendar user-interface (Day, Week, Work-week, Month) views - Sept
- SMS alerts for message filters via Sieve - Aug
- Additional API methods ( logs, purge accounts, contact, calendar data ) - Jul
- Abook and Calendar import data - Support for more formats, CSV and ICS files - Jul
- Webadmin - Massmail user-interface for local accounts - Jun
- Webadmin - View verbose log files and advanced search - Jun
- Calendar alarm notification in Webmail UI - May
Ongoing developments:
- CSS Skins for the Atmail UI - Switch the color theme of the user-interface - July
- Improving the Atmail Webmail UI - Usability, additional options, advanced features - Ongoing
That’s our general roadmap for development. While not set in stone, our main focus will be bringing ActiveSync and CardDAV features into Atmail. Please feel free to comment on our ideas - and if you think one feature should have greater priority, let us know!
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