First Class - Criticism

Criticism

FirstClass has been criticized in a number of areas:

• An insufficient method for users to individually archive emails and other content. This affects users who are leaving a FirstClass system and who wish to take their content with them. FirstClass attempts to produce an archive using a variety of standard formats (RTF, HTML, etc.) and ends up with something that is human-readable and searchable, but doesn't easily import into other groupware systems or mail clients. FirstClass cites a lack of standards in this area as the reason for this issue.
• The system's single-threaded server design has been criticized as dated and as causing undesirable side-effects such as 100% server processor usage, but this design (among other features) makes FirstClass more scalable than other groupwise systems because it causes fewer context switches. One server can therefore handle tens of thousands of simultaneous connections, a load that would require multi-server clustering with other systems. In FirstClass v10, the server is now 64-bit and multi-threaded, but the new version has in turn been criticized for high memory requirements (primarily due to the indexing required by the new "instant search" feature), and for not retaining 32-bit compatibility.