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By tying service offerings to directory services, Novell is clearly focusing on increasing market share in the ISP community. It remains to be seen if it can break into the ISP market with any real penetration. But if its other entries into this space are as impressive as NIMS, don't rule Novell out.

A refurbished release of the Novonyx Netscape Messaging Server for NetWare, much of NIMS base code has been in operation since early last year. NIMS includes a number of agents--antispam, autoreply, directory, finger, IMAP, POP, proxy, SMTP and WebMail--tied together by the NMAP (Novonyx Messaging Access Protocol) agent. NMAP sits between the messaging agents and message store and routes messages between agents.

The NMAP protocol specifications will be released to developers, letting them enhance NIMS functionality and scalability by adding their own agents to the system. Because agents speak to NMAP via TCP/IP, third-party agents can run on any system, including Unix and NT.

In the lab, I installed this system on a NetWare 5 server. Within 15 minutes, I had configured all the agents via NWAdmin and was sending and receiving e-mail. The shipping version of the software will include Web-based setup and administration.

Over the course of one month, I successfully tested NIMS with some of the more popular IMAP and POP3 clients, including Netscape Messenger, Microsoft Outlook 98, Outlook Express, Cyrusoft Mulberry and QUALCOMM Eudora. Novell developers assured me that they took extra measures to make NIMS adhere to the various Internet standards--attention to detail that is both evident and praiseworthy.

NIMS' WebMail agent for browser-based access to e-mail is helpful. Using any browser, I was able to access and manage my mail, send new messages, add and delete folders, move messages between folders and change my password. With the exceptions of a missing address lookup feature and message spell checking--elements included in Novell's GroupWise WebAccess--the built-in Web access to NIMS was handy.

The proxy agent let me pull mail into NIMS from other POP3- and IMAP4-based systems. I consolidated my mail into a single system by supplying host names, user names and passwords for the other systems via a Web-based proxy configuration screen. The proxy agent automatically grabbed my messages from the other systems and dropped them in my NIMS inbox. Users can configure the agent to leave a copy of their messages on the other systems or to delete the messages once retrieved.

Operating in the background, the alias/directory agent created mail aliases in the system based on user information in NDS. Using the settings I defined in the lab, I was able to receive mail at rbanders@nims.syr.edu or Ron_Anderson@ nims.syr.edu. The alias/directory agent automatically created the Ron_Anderson alias by pulling the first and last name fields out of NDS.

You can scale NIMS by installing additional agents on other servers. Multiple IMAP, POP, WebMail and SMTP agents can be configured to connect to a single NMAP agent or to multiple NMAP agents managing different message stores. NDS tracks the various interconnects, making it easy to manage a multiple-server configuration.

Ron Anderson is the manager of Microcomputer Network Services at Syracuse University. Send your comments on this article to him at rbanders@syr.edu.