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 F E A T U R E 
When you're planning to implement a system designed to support thousands of users in a mission-critical application, you'd better get it right the first time. Enterprise-class e-mail vendors understand the challenges you face, and have designed systems for scalability, reliability and manageability from the ground up. If the system doesn't run 24/7, and if you can't manage your mail infrastructure with limited resources, you'll be looking for work elsewhere in short order.
This year's Well-Connected Award for best enterprise mail system goes to Novell Internet Messaging System (NIMS), whose integration with Novell Directory Services makes it a standout. Not only is information about your users stored in NDS, but all the configuration information for the mail infrastructure is stored in the directory as well. NDS offers a single point of administration in a distributed system that might include multiple domains and servers. Administrative responsibilities can likewise be distributed, managing who has rights where. NIMS is based on the Internet standards IMAP, POP, SMTP, HTML, SSL and LDAP, and includes a built-in Web server for access via a browser. (Novell has set up a free NIMS-based mail service at www.myrealbox.com). NIMS will also be available for Solaris and Linux by midyear.
-- Ron Anderson
Standards-based messaging servers and clients have matured in their implementation of the standard mail protocols to the point that users can pick from a number of clients, regardless of the server they're using. With the mail portion of the client approaching commodity status, vendors are employing a variety of strategies to set their products apart from the masses.
Microsoft Corp.'s Outlook 2000 takes top honors this year. Not only has the product already been proven a versatile mail client, supporting IMAP and POP servers and Microsoft Exchange Server, but in the past year, Lotus and Novell announced respective Notes and GroupWise support for Outlook 2000. Microsoft distinguished Outlook 2000 by including an integrated PIM, and by packaging the client with the Office 2000 suite.
-- Ron Anderson
Product cycles aren't unusual, but rarely do we see such a paradigm shift and improvement in a single product at the same time. Gordano's NTMail delivers a much-enhanced Web interface, with all the bells and whistles needed to acclimate your users to a Web based messaging system.
Workgroups are just as susceptible to spam as the largest of enterprise networks; for total spam protection, NTMail delivers top-notch relay, host and content policies, including real-time blacklist support, leaving the rest of the pack in the dust. Other management features include user message-store limits and message-size restrictions, which aid in efficient server management and resource use. And Windows NT shops can also breathe easy with NTMail's extensive integration of the NT user database, including user-group management to add or remove user accounts from the NTMail configuration. NTMail add-ons NTList and JUCE (Junk and Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail) allow your NTMail-based workgroup messaging solution to grow with your needs.
-- Ron Anderson
Each year, the enterprise groupware products from Lotus, Microsoft and Novell duke it out for top honors in head-to-head competitions. These three vendors dominate the groupware market by providing a multitude of features, from e-mail, scheduling and task management, to workflow, document management and custom development environments. Companies of all sizes rely on this class of product to improve productivity and enhance communication. And the vendors leapfrog each other with every new release, continually adding functionality to already-feature-rich offerings.
This year, the award in this category goes to Lotus Development Corp.'s Notes/Domino R5. The only groupware vendor to release a major upgrade during the year, Lotus raised the mark for groupware, especially in the areas of Internet integration and customizability. Domino R5, the server side of the Lotus equation, runs on anything from a small departmental NT server to an OS/390 mainframe with multiple flavors of Unix, and the AS/400 architecture in between. The Notes R5 client implements a browserlike, user-customizable interface that integrates with and displays data from a number of different sources.
-- Ron Anderson
The paperless office is a myth. E-mail has its place, but an office without a fax machine is a rare entity. Fax server vendors extend the shared office-resource motif of present-day fax machines by making a centrally managed, scalable fax resource available over the company network.
Fax server systems come in two varieties--turnkey solutions that include hardware, and software-only solutions, in which you provide the hardware. Fax servers accept faxes, distribute them electronically, and let users send faxes from their desktops. In addition, fax servers may include capabilities for mass faxing, fax-on-demand, fax-to-e-mail transfers, e-mail-to-fax transfers, and Web access to faxes.
Biscom's Faxcom 7000, a turnkey solution, covers all the bases: It provides server support for NT and Unix, and a connector for NetWare. Notes, Exchange, GroupWise, MAPI and SMTP can all be integrated into the Faxcom system, adding faxes to your users' universal inboxes. Faxcom is also expandable to 24 phone lines.
-- Ron Anderson
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