As many in the email community will know, Gabor Cselle, VP of Engineering at Email startup Xobni, announced a month or so ago that he was leaving Xobni to start his own email company.

Luckily for us, Gabor is fitting in some travel between finishing up at Xobni and starting his new company, and Sydney is one of the stops on his itinerary. Gabor is an excellent presenter, so if you’re in Sydney, I highly recommend coming along to the seminar that he will be giving on The Future of Email at CSIRO / Macquarie University, starting 11am on Wednesday 15th October. (Here’s details of our location and how to get here if you’re planning to come along).

Of course, given Gabor’s experience as an entrepreneur, I’m sure he’ll also be happy to talk about life in a Silicon Valley startup and the lessons he’s learned along the way. So, come along for the seminar, and stick around for what’s sure to be some interesting discussion.

Gabor Cselle and Greg Duffy from Xobni gave an excellent keynote at the AAAI Email Workshop. Amongst other insights and Xobni anecdotes, their combined presentation gave an overview of just how difficult and painful it is to integrate new ideas into existing email clients like Microsoft Outlook. Such pain is, unfortunately, unavoidable if you’d like your ideas to reach any of the 400 million Outlook email users out there in the world.

The exciting news I took away from the Xobni presentation was the plan to open up external access to developer APIs to access and extend Xobni’s sidebar. This is what LinkedIn has had access to in order to achieve the recent integration with Xobni, and might be a less painful path to Outlook integration for other developers in the future.

Speculation is again surfacing that Microsoft has reached an agreement to acquire email innovator Xobni. Self-proclaimed technology entrepreneur Laurent Féral-Pierssens is reporting on his blog:

Yesterday, Xobni finally came to an agreement with Microsoft to be acquired. An official announcement with the details has yet to be made.

Unfortunately, Féral-Pierssens offers no source for his information, and refutes claims of misinformation with a hollow, but dismissive "We’ll have to wait for the official details".

Of course, a Microsoft buyout isn’t out of the question: Xobni is a Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program member, and obviously has generated excitement inside Microsoft, leading to Bill Gates’ enthusiastic demo of Xobni in his opening keynote at the Office Developers Conference in February.

Does anyone else out there know anything more?

It’s been a big day for email today. Apparently Yahoo has agreed to purchase Zimbra, the open source messaging and collaboration company, for (US)$350 million. Opinion has been varied on whether it’s a smart move by Yahoo or a gross over-valuation of Zimbra.

Zimbra is a company that I’ve been monitoring since their public launch back in 2005. At the time they noted (as many have) that email is broken.

“From overflowing inboxes to the nuisance of organizing correspondence, to the cost of managing storage, viruses, availability, retention and legal discovery and compliance, dealing with corporate e-mail has become a nightmare.”

Zimbra have worked to address these problems with their Collaboration Suite software (ZCS), which is notable for the fact that much of the source code is released under an open-source licence.

Regardless of your take on Yahoo’s purchase, what’s interesting is that this deal clearly shows the value that the market places on an alternative to Exchange/Outlook, and Lotus Notes, even an open-source one. I read this as recognition that there’s plenty of room left for innovation in the email and collaboration space.

Sat through an interesting seminar from Kevin Schofield, General Manager of Research at Microsoft Research yesterday, while he visited our Marsfield Lab. In what was a relatively short presentation, Kevin covered only a tiny part of the work at MSR in any detail. Despite time constraints, however, a couple of the points he made really made me stop and think, including his clearly heartfelt comments on the disappearance of Jim Gray.

On the technical side, one of the astounding take-home points for me was the magnitude of complexity in Microsoft’s various code bases. Code complexity is something I’ve been thinking about a bit lately, particularly in terms of concurrency. Kevin’s point was in rather a different dimension of complexity – that of software testing. In quantifying this complexity, he noted that running the full suite of regression tests over the Windows code base takes 8 weeks! On a large farm of servers!

Just think about what the impact of 8 weeks would be on your release schedule. Kinda makes it hard to have a reliable yet agile release cycle, no? If Microsoft wants to run their full suite of regression tests to ensure old bugs have not been reintroduced by new code changes, then there is a huge impact on the agility with which Microsoft can release new versions, respond to bugs and release critical security patches. While the magnitude of their problem may be somewhat larger than most due to the age, size and complexity of their code base, I’m quite sure Microsoft is not alone in having to face such a problem.

Understandably, MSR has been working to address this issue, in part by deriving mappings of the code exercised by each and every test in the regression suite. These mappings are stored and used to prioritise the regression tests, such that the tests that cover the modified code are exercised first.

Sounds like a very logical approach, and I’m surprised that I haven’t come across such techniques before. Perhaps I just haven’t looked in the right places. How do you manage your regression test suites? Do you partition or prioritise them in any novel ways?