In the early days of planning ORF 5, we took a short break from the usual rush to see where we are now with ORF.

It was refreshing – frankly I could almost feel the summer ocean breeze. Focusing on a single thing for an entire week feels like luxury in a small team, where so few people have so many responsibilities.

It was also a break worth taking, because ORF has changed a lot since the launch back in 2002. What we have found was a fully grown product, reaching and surpassing competitors in its core functionality of spam filtering. A couple of months later our success on the VBSpam test series just underlined this – 5 testing rounds, 5 awards, over 700,000 emails, 99.11% spam catch rate, 0.0017% false positives (that is, one case of false positive for every 58422 emails).

So when the question came up “What is the best way to add value to ORF now?”, we felt this time the right answer is not just to add another spam filtering technology.

If you are into sci-fi like me, you probably know the closer your spaceship gets to the speed of light, the same increase in the velocity will require more and more energy. Similarly, in spam filtering, improving the spam catch rate by 0.5% from 99% will take tremendously more effort than from 95%. Also, the closer you get to 100% the higher the chance for false positives, similarly how running faster into a standing Vogon fleet would hurt your more (and generally, you do not want to run into Vogons at all).

This is why ORF 5 puts the administrator in focus. Given a fixed time frame, we believed we can add more value on this front. Your travel to Proxima Centauri might take 3 months more, but hey, when your sole company for 4.6 years is your ship’s computer, it better be more entertaining than Marvin the Paranoid Android, right?

In the upcoming articles in this series, we will look into the features ORF 5 has to offer and examine how they help the administrator’s work, from Configuration Synchronization to Asynchronous UI Notifications. On the TCO/ROI side, we will hear my colleague Andras Sűdy talking about how ORF cuts TCO and increases ROI. Ok, seriously, he will talk about the new ORF website, licensing and partner program – listen to the guy, he knows all the business kung-fu!

Stay tuned. See you next week and stay away from Vogons.