Upcoming Events

Interop is the only event to give you a comprehensive and unbiased understanding of all the latest innovations—including cloud computing, virtualization, security, mobility and data center advances—that help position your company for growth.

Register Now!

Innosoft's PMDF Bests the Message Backbone Pack
February 22, 1999
When saddled with our security and control task list, N-PLEX Connect performed well in some areas and poorly in others. We discovered that the product includes a multitude of hooks to manipulate messages and headers as they move through the system. However, almost all the hooks we wanted to use required application-level programming. Although ISOCOR does provide some programming examples, we felt that simple capabilities, such as rewriting addresses or deleting oversize attachments, should have been in the base product--not in a custom-written add-on. In scoring N-PLEX Connect, we subtracted points for anything that required us to dust off a C compiler to complete.

After evaluating N-PLEX Connect for a long time, it started to grow on us, and in the end it was one of our favorites. It's not really ready to handle the rigors of a corporate messaging backbone, and it will need a lot more work before it reaches that level. Right now, it boasts a strong, high-end IMAP/POP server, directory synchronization and NT-style configuration. These features make it very useful as a general e-mail server with some backbone capabilities, but that's not our emphasis here. Despite this basic shortcoming, we were won over by the symmetry of the architecture and the obvious potential of the product. Enjoying a fresh start on Windows NT without the baggage that vendors such as Innosoft and Control Data Systems have to carry is a plus. On the other hand, editing the Registry is a waste of time.

Wingra Missive/Solaris 3.5
Our testing of Wingra's Missive left us with a sense of déjà vu. Like ISOCOR's N-PLEX Connect, Missive exhibited many strengths, but they didn't add up to provide what we were looking for in a message switch.

Wingra has chosen to emphasize migration tools in its product line. The vendor will set up a message switch between your old and new e-mail systems and assist in transferring the existing mail to the new systems, shunting messages between systems during the migration and keeping the directories synchronized.

Throughout our testing, this put Missive in a tough spot. It doesn't offer the flexibility that most of the other backbones do, so it received a very low score in our report card for its control and security functions. But given Wingra's emphasis on securing the transition between mail systems, many of the features we evaluated might not be of interest to a typical Wingra customer. Indeed, Wingra told us that it counts both ISOCOR and Control Data Systems as customers of its messaging migration services.

For example, Missive provides a tool that will reach into your existing MS Mail or cc:Mail system, pull out each user's messages from all his or her folders, and stick them into a new mail server using the IMAP protocol with all folders, dates and attachments intact. Missive will even estimate the migration time. All this is crucial for a smooth migration, but it's also a specialty feature that's of little use once the migration is complete.

Missive's GUI is far superior to N-PLEX Connect or Mail*Hub. The GUI runs on the system itself and talks to the messaging switch via a network protocol. As such, it can be partially moved off-switch if necessary. A Web-based GUI, which would make moving the configuration off the server very simple, is in the works.

Wingra says it will release a new version of Missive at the end of March that will provide a Java-based GUI to increase management flexibility. That version also includes additions to the range of migration tools and migration platforms.

Although one could argue that building a GUI for a product with limited functionality is easier than building one for a full-featured messaging switch, Wingra still demonstrated plenty of power. The Missive GUI offers a major advantage when it comes to managing and monitoring mail flow. We were able to stop and start message delivery queues and view each message via this slick and consistent interface. Even if Missive's control features are a bit thin, the product excels in other areas. For example, Missive includes an easy-to-use management tool. For medium-sized networks, it is an excellent choice for day-to-day operation of the messaging hub.

Missive's maturity emerges in other areas. By providing a simple approach to integrating Missive with other e-mail systems, the Wingra team set up its backbone in less time than did any of the other participating vendors. Still, there are some drawbacks. For example, Missive uses the standard Unix sendmail utility as its SMTP connector. This raises the possibility of a mail manager having to modify sendmail.cf--an undesirable and dangerous activity.

Missive also sports more power than the GUI exposes. When we attempted to enable some of the newer antirelay features, our Wingra guide was reduced to running command-line telnet to talk the management protocol to the message switch.

Joel Snyder is a senior partner at Opus One in Tucson, Ariz., where he focuses on large e-mail systems. Send your comments on this article to him at jms@opus1.com.