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Monitoring the flow of messages and tracking them through the enterprise and beyond should be part of any management product. We have explored this topic previously and will not treat it again here. For a review of message flow issues, products and features, see "Managing Messaging Mayhem" (March 1, page 62).

What can users and administrators do for themselves to effectively manage their wily message stores? New products are offering capabilities to assist users. For instance, Netscape Communications Corp.'s Communicator Preview Release 4 lets users compact their message folders-if doing so will save more than a predefined amount of storage space. Communicator also gives users the option of keeping the 30 newest news messages, retaining only those unread and removing those older than a certain number of days. Microsoft Exchange 5.0 provides an autoarchive feature on folders that will off-load messages to "archive.pst" after a certain amount of time or delete them entirely. Exchange also lets users specify an expiration date when creating a new message. On the date specified, Exchange automatically deletes the message.

Administrators managing large messages stores will find the ability to limit the size of all user message stores or that of a particular user quite appealing. When the message store limit is close to the warning threshold set in Exchange, the user receives notification messages until the store is reduced . If it is not, the system will not let the user send mail.

Because some users-typically those in Human Resources, Benefits, Legal, Contracts and Engineering departments-require more storage space than others, an administrator can assign these users storage limits that are higher than that of the other users. Wi th some management products, the message store can have charges associated with it to encourage the heavy users to purge unnec essary messages or reduce the amount of messages sent. The notion of charging more for premium service (such as more storage and/or ability to send files during peak hours) is finally taking hold as products offering this capability are brought to market.

Administrators also can configure the system to limit the size of the files that are exchanged or sent through gateways. For example, Intel's stated policy is that no file over 10 MB will be transported through the messaging system. Nondelivery notices are sent to the user. Anything larger than 10 MB can be posted to the Web, placed on an ftp server or sent to a public folder.

Since most messages are small, hierarchical storage management is difficult to justify in any big way. Archiving to local disk is a common practice. But this will quickly change when people become enamored with sending huge multimedia files. An option is to have live storage on the server, an active archive on media, such as RAID, and long-term storage on tape or other media.

Vendors now see the benefit of developing products that manage the entire life cycle of the messaging system from initial installation to deployment and configuration to managing upgrades. Within life-cycle management, the product can easily be used for sophisticated software distribution. The Tivoli Management Environment (TME) 10 Module for Domino/Notes lets administrators perform product installations, upgrades, dependency checking, monitoring, and routine operational tasks such as resetting passwords remotely or restarting a server. The creation of a new user's mailbox can be managed remotely from the administrator's console and software distribution can be scheduled for off-hours. TME 10 hides NT domain management activities from the administrator.

Software.com's InterMail messaging product for very large enterprises and service providers uses the Mail-Enabled Tool Language (M ETL) to profile and monitor the messaging system. The program uses the Web to provide the management interface and checks on the si ze of message queues and logs. Messages are tracked via queries against an Oracle database.

Novell's GroupWise Monitor in the 5.2 Beta is integrated with the Administrative Console and ManageWise. Monitor offers remote-control capabilities, autochecking for status changes in monitored objects and the ability to discover agents such as the Message Transfer Agent (MTA) or Post Office Agent. The tool features sophisticated rules and filter options and generates alerts, launches applications, sends Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) traps or issues an e-mail message. GroupWise lets the administrator schedule an "expire and reduce" action on the database to purge old or deleted messages. The system collects statistics such as the size of the use's message store, the total number of messages, what type and how old. If an individual user's information store is corrupt beyond r epair and a backup hasn't been performed for 60 days, for example, the system looks at all the message databases and rebuilds the user's store in its entirety from pointers.

Another product to watch, whose NT version was not ready in time for testing, is Insider Technologies' iMC (Integrated Messaging Management Centre). An integrated suite of messaging management applications, iMC offers service object management, message tracking and service engineering, tracking and availability. It's built on open standards and protocols and supports X.400, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), SQL, Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) and SNMP. It provides monitoring and control of hardware, system software, devices and applications, billing and accounting as well as usage, performance and capacity analysis, portending a more comprehensive product that those currently on the market.