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Innosoft's PMDF Bests the Message Backbone Pack
February 22, 1999

Links for
Additional Information

InformationWeek, Nov. 16, 1998
"Are You Outsourcing E-Mail"

InformationWeek, Oct. 12, 1998
"Net Mail Scales Up"

In the course of gathering products for this review, we discovered that the market has shrunk dramatically. The last time we tested these products (see "Sync or Swim? Will Your Merged Mail System Float Together or Drift Into Chaos?" at www.networkcomputing.com/901/901f2.html) the overabundance of participants required us to print our test results in two parts. Since then, most sites have standardized on mail systems with mini-backbones built in, such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange. While mini-backbones are perfectly adequate for mini-networks, they don't offer the rich feature set provided by a separate backbone.

Microsoft had planned to participate with Exchange, but after extensive discussions with the company's product management team, we all agreed that Exchange doesn't really compete in the messaging backbone space. We invited IBM/Lotus to bring its SoftSwitch backbone, but it never responded. Worldtalk Corp., a well-known name in this field, informed us that it is exiting the market and will stop selling message backbone products. Digital (now Compaq Computer Corp.) had dropped its MB-400 backbone product almost before it hit the market, and the company declined to participate in our tests.

Although all of the products included directory synchronization, we did not evaluate synchronization capabilities this time around; rather, we focused on the message-handling features of the backbones.

Power and Complexity As with most comparative tests, the results revealed both bright spots and some disappointing lapses. The good news is that our two top-scoring backbones, Control Data Systems' Mail*Hub and Innosoft's PMDF, give the network manager unprecedented control. Both products enabled us to crawl in, around, up and down every message going through the backbones. After examining these backbones, we felt like the masters of the e-mail universe. You say you want to keep the subject line of every message from going out to the Internet? No problem. You want to get rid of those pesky SNOWMAN.AVI attachments? It's simple.

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