So long and thanks..........

Having been away for a few weeks and coming back to nearly 1000 messages on
the list, and a few surprises  I'm a bit late joining in the thanks to
Charlie, Dan, Rich, Mike et al (what DID happen to Kirrily??) for all their
hard work and support over the years.

As a "paying" customer I've tended to be very quiet on the list, routing my
main queries via our support company to Mitel, but I couldn't let this pass
without recording my sincere thanks to all at e-smith who came up with the
concept and Mitel who've run with it for the last two years or so. The
product is fantastic, reasonably priced for an SME (we've got 3 licenced
servers) with an excellent support structure.

I realise that it now won't be on the development path for Mitel, but look
forward to seeing what the community can do. I'm a great believer in GPL,
but as an SME with only 4 IT staff to look after around 500 users over 16
sites I need the backup of a commercial enterprise when I get a problem so
I'll be sticking with the commercial version for a bit yet (at least on our
production servers, test servers are a different matter!). One thing I would
like to ask the new team is please don't drop the netatalk Mac support, it's
a blessing for companies like ours with a small number of PC's and a large
number of Macs to have a central repository for both Mac and PC data and to
have a system that can be administered from a Mac web browser.

So long Mitel, hello e-smith (I hope so, but let's not get hung up about a
name!). 

Happy Hogmanay to you all and a good and prosperous New Year to both the
Mitel team and the contribs.org team and all on the list. Who knows, maybe
I'll not be so quiet in the future!
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