re: Lyris

["John Buckman" <jbuckman @ shelby . com>]

Hello - my name is John Buckman, and I'm one of the programmers who
works on Lyris, the list server program my company publishes.  

James Cook told me about this mailing list, and the conversation
comparing Lyris, LISTSERV, ListProc & Majordomo, so I thought I'd
join in.

There have been a few questions about Lyris in the last few days, so
I'll talk about these:

> It's also only in beta. And only on one platform. 

Lyris is currently in its 4th beta for Windows NT and Windows 95. It
will ship next week when the manuals come back from our printer.

Lyris is not limited to Windows.  We wrote Lyris to be completely
cross platform, and we plan to release Lyris on many platforms:
several Unixes, OS/2, Mac and Be. We currently have it running
in-house on Win95/NT, Solaris and OS/2.  Lyris functions identically
on all platforms.  

The Web interface can currently be run on any Web server with Perl
5.001 (it uses TCP/IP to talk to the Lyris Server).

> And they've missed repeated "really soon now" announcements...

Yes we did, but we're available now.  We held back on releasing Lyris
until it worked well, and until we felt it was a significant
improvement over what was currently available.  Because quite capable
programs for running mailing lists already exist -- we felt that
no-one would benefit if we released a flawed product.  We also added 
many other features, such as "virtual server", "auto-responders", 
"mail-robots", and others in response to user testing.

> What are the copyright distribution terms on each?

Lyris is licensed on a per-machine license.  $3000 gets you a 
limitless version, while $495 and $1495 buy you use-limited versions 
(10 lists, 500 people, and 40 lists, 2000 people, respectively).  
There are no recurring fees.

> i have no experience with lyris but i find the claims on their web
> pages a bit hard to believe.

I'd like to know which claims you find hard to believe, so that I can 
address your concerns.  We completely rethought how a list server 
should function, in an attempt to get around some of the lingering 
problems with list servers, and have done many things very 
differently.  What you thought was impossible might not be.

There's a comprehensive feature list at http://www.lyris.com/features/mail/

> Lyris does appear to offer a 30 day money mback guarantee. So that
> may offer a reasonable time within which to test critical features
> of interest...

Lyris can be downloaded and used free of charge, for creating up to 2
mailing lists with up to 50 people each.  This should allow most
people to test Lyris out and see if they like it.  If you don't like
it,  Lyris can completely "uninstall" itself from your machine.  If
you purchase a use-license, you have a 30 day money back guarantee on
that.

> FWIW, there is very little that is *not* in the current release of
> ListProc (8.0) that I feel I need to manage my list. 

While ListProc is definitely very feature rich, we get many inquiries
about Lyris from current ListProc users because Lyris completely
eliminates error-mail, cuts out most spam (with new member 1st time
moderating), and lets them do everything over the web.  ListProc may
do these things as well -- but these are the frequent reasons users
of our competition's products give for contacting us.

> SmartList automatically archives as well.  And sticking something
> like WebGlimpse on top of it to do full-text searching is trivial. 
> Somehow I doubt that the text search capabilities of Lyris comes
> close to matching the sophistication of a dedicated text search
> engine like Glimpse. 

The text indexing and searching currently in Lyris is a standard
"inverted index".  Every word in every message is automatically
indexed during "idle" time.  

If you search for several words, such as "cabernet pinot bordeaux"
the messages will come back in weighted order.  The search capability
is similar to what "Lycos" provides, and is very fast.  

Lyris currently supports two kinds of searches: "look for all these
words", "look for any of these words".  In most cases, this
satisfies most person's needs.  In a future version of Lyris, we
will support full boolean searching, with AND/OR/NOT query terms. 
We did not provide full boolean with Lyris version 1.0 because we
needed to draw a line somewhere, and decide what whas going to make
it into the first version.

Glimpse is a very powerful search engine.  I don't think Lyris'
search capabilities can match it.  If I may venture an opinion, I
would guess that for many people the feature-gap between what Glimpse
provides, and what Lyris provides, is not extremely significant.  If
you disagree, I'd like to hear about it, so that we can add your
most-loved Glimpse features into Lyris.

I'll note that Lyris also provides indexed full text searching via
email commands ("search <listname> <words>"), in addition to
reading/searching/contributing on the web. 

John

john@shelby.com, Shelby Group Ltd., http://www.shelby.com/