Bridging The Interoperability Gap Businesses also should address interoperability issues such as encryption (in individual stores and across transport), access control, replication, conflict resolution, content preservation, mapping (threads and links), data consistency and large text searches across environments. In addition, they may have to provide many simultaneous users with optimum performance and handle multiple data types such as image, voice, video and binary files. The available products each take a different approach to interoperability and each has its own niche. For example, LinkAge Software's Exchange-Notes Connector provides a direct e-mail link between Notes and Exchange to provide the transparent exchange o f messages. OfficeLink 2.0 for Notes by Brainstorm Technologies permits the storing of Microsoft Office documents within Notes databases. And Worldtalk Corp.'s NetForum performs enterprisewide replication of discussion databases. For our testing, we looked for a product that offered both mail exchange and database replication. The Mesa Group's JumpStart proved to be the most complete interoperability product for our tests. The JumpStart Multispan Bridge We put JumpStart through its paces in our San Mateo lab between Notes 4.11a and Exchange 4.0 using SMTP as the transport. JumpStart uses connection agents to synchronize discussion and structured databases between Internet news servers, Exchange, Notes and The Mesa Group's Conference+. JumpStart takes advantage of Windows NT services, such as monitoring, distribution and scheduling, to automatically generate replications. The product runs on Windows NT 3.51 with a Windows95 client for the administrator's use. JumpStart assumes basic connectiv ity using either SMTP or X.400 for message exchange. We used the Lotus Notes SMTP MTA and the Exchange SMTP connector to provide the connectivity for testing. You can replicate databases without this connectivity, but you cannot send mail. This is helpful if all you want to do is publish or convert information stored in one system to the other. The most effort in installing JumpStart involved planning--deciding which databases to replicate and mapping properties such as message priority or message ID between Notes and Exchange. You have to determine which databases can be shared among systems, which ones are critical and which ones have few users, are not strategic and are better left alone. Every message or document contains data and has attributes, properties or items (form) such as "author," "date" or "subject," displayed in a certain way to the user (view) and stored in a container (folder or database). JumpStart generally retains properties such as rich text, attachments, Object Linking and Embe dding (OLE) documents and document links as well as message hierarchies. JumpStart maps a Notes field to a built-in Exchange property tag, named MAPI property and data type. It converts messages by mapping properties and finding a corresponding property in the other system. The product includes common Notes templates such as discussion databases, document libraries, news, customer tracking and status reports, making it easy to map Notes databases to Exchange folders. In testing this functionality, we found that configuring the included templates and a simple custom form was quick and easy. JumpStart performs a one-to-one replication. If a corresponding folder or form is not set up on Exchange, it must be created with all access rights. Each form must have similar properties to ensure synchronization and conversion: for example, a message priority of high, medium or low, mapping to 1-, 2- or 3-level priorities. Replication in JumpStart is two-way between Notes and Exchange. One-way synchronization for conversion or publishing can be specified in the administrator's tool. JumpStart replicates changes only. The replicator is an automatically scheduled push process. You run the JumpStart replication after Notes and Exchange replications are complete. We fou nd that you should allocate enough temporary storage space on the JumpStart server for the replication--initially 50 MB is recommended, but some installations with larger databases may need more. Also, Exchange folders require significantly more storage space than Notes databases, and attachments in Exchange take more space because of the lack of compression in the message store. In our tests, we found that Exchange requires at least five times the space of Notes. This will be a problem in organizations with extremely high-volume message stores. However, JumpStart does give space comparisons to assist in system planning.

DCE: All Dressed Up and Nowhere to go by Dan Backman Updated February 21, 1997