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  Innosoft's PMDF Bests the Message Backbone Pack February 22, 1999 But no product is perfect. There's a dark side to these powerful e-mail backbones, and the greater the power, the uglier the configuration. Our tests showed that the best-designed and easiest-to-use configuration utility among these products is in Wingra's Missive--the same Missive that fared the worst in completing the configuration task list. The result is repeated to a lesser degree with ISOCOR's N-PLEX Connect; the configuration and management GUI was slightly more confusing than that of Missive, but you get more power. So, what explains this paradoxical relationship between power and ease of configuration? Although point-and-click GUIs are well-suited for many applications, wedging a series of concepts into a GUI just isn't appropriate in some environments. In e-mail systems there's a point where you can't use a GUI because the necessary concepts are too complex. It remains to be seen whether it's possible to design a good GUI to configure and manage a complex yet powerful mail backbone. It could be that e-mail messaging and management is such a black art that the products will always be complex. Overall, our test results are encouraging. It's possible to build a backbone to manage, control and monitor your e-mail at a reasonable cost. As with any powerful software product, learning how to drive your backbone will take some time and energy. But once you've put it all together, you'll have the tool you need to keep the e-mail flowing, come rain, sleet, snow or spam.
Innosoft International PMDF The downside to PMDF's maturity is that once something is added to the product, apparently it's never taken away. As a result, PDMF is encrusted with lots of dank and stale bits and pieces that make little or no sense today. For example, when we installed the pager gateway on our test system, we found ourselves digging through documentation on PhoneNet, a pre-Internet store-and-forward mail network. Like Mail*Hub, PMDF is huge. Although it has a much smaller footprint on the mail server, the number of documented (and, as we discovered, undocumented) features is staggering. For example, when we wanted to turn on the new SMTP authentication system, we discovered that Innosoft hadn't installed a simple yes/no switch. Instead, we found an entire framework for authentication that included its SMTP, POP and IMAP servers, complete with an API to add your own user name and password authentication system. Installing and configuring PMDF took most of the two days allocated, and we learned that Innosoft has made considerable progress toward simplifying installation. Basic configuration is done with an interactive series of scripts that guides you through standard configurations: system names, kinds of gateways, queues and channels. From there, we branched out into the task list using a text editor--yes, a text editor. PMDF has no configuration GUI. Fortunately, the documentation is fairly good. Configuring PMDF means diving into your favorite text editor and changing a series of files--an exercise that was both exhilarating and disappointing. Having everything laid out so that it's all easy to find is particularly impressive in comparison to ISOCOR's N-PLEX Connect. With N-PLEX, we had to search in two separate products along with a registry to divine the configuration process. On the other hand, making simple changes to PMDF that would have been easy with a GUI were complex in its absence. For example, a connector to another e-mail system has selectable options--about 225 of them. Skipping back and forth between manuals and text editors is frustrating. More important, it's difficult to determine what PMDF can do without reading nearly all 200-plus keywords.
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Innosoft is often a quiet presence on the messaging backbone scene, a demeanor befitting the company with the oldest product in continuous development in this market. That maturity shows in the design of PMDF. In our tests, PMDF demonstrated rock-solid stability that kept it running smooth and steady.Page 1 | 2 | 3 | Next Page |
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