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We invited 17 vendors to come to our newest corporate l
ab in central Florida to strut their sync stuff over a three-day period--one day to install and configure the system, another day to test it and a third to uninstall the product and restore some semblance of order to our environment.
Five vendors participated in our challenge: ISOCOR Corp., Microsoft Corp., Wingra Technologies, Worldtalk Corp. and Zoomit International. Siemens Nixdorf and Digital Equipment Corp. expressed interest, but we were unable to accommodate them because of a full test schedule. Those declining included Control Data Systems and Enterprise Solutions, each of which had customer commitments; Netscape Communications Corp. and Datacraft, which didn't have a sync product; Innosoft International, which will be releasing a sync product soon and wouldn't release the beta code to us; Lotus SoftSwitch, whose PR firm stated that it has "very elaborate equipment that is difficult to install and it would be very costly for them to participate"; and Proxy (ARINC) and Unisys Corp. We did not hear
back from Hitachi or Nexor.
Our wish list was short: a master directory formed in our corporate central Florida lab from the individual directories of the five e-mail systems, the global address list of each mail platform synchronized, the master directory of all 20,000 entries visible from within the client of each mail system, and centralized naming to test for collision detection and resolution. We did not require mail connectivity among the messaging systems, unless the vendor needed it for its directory synchronization process.
The vendors' process included asking for snapshots or export files of all the directories in order to see which attributes were populated in the directories and how the fields were formatted. Some vendors asked for more detail up front than others. Vendors set up their own test beds, installing their products either on a server we provided or on one they brought along.
 After completing the initial bulk load of all 20,000 e
ntries, vendors used their mapping and filtering utilities to map all the attributes of each entry into the central directory so they would appear in native format within the e-mail directories. We then performed a series of modifications to the e-mail directories, such as adding and deleting users and changing telephone numbers. These alterations were synchronized to the central directory, which then updated the connected e-mail directories. Synchronizing all five environments accurately and within the allotted time frame formed the basis for our ranking of the products. We also examined each product's architectural design, administration and management capabilities, features and functions, security and cost.
Participating vendors succeeded in synchronizing the environments they had planned to test. Zoomit's VIA 1.1 swam for the gold by synchronizing the five directories quickly and accurately. Several of its distinctive features captured high marks: its unification of application, Internet and NOS direct
ories; its ability to reflect a few entries in a connected directory to model the mapping rules before undertaking a complete load; and its ability to create a user's cyberspace containing attributes, folders and documents. Just an arm's length behind Zoomit was Wingra's Missive, which also synchronized the five messaging systems and offered the most intuitive, functional and clever user interfaces and Web browser-based management of any product we tested.
Calming the Sea of Directory Synchronization
Although SMTP has vastly improved mail exchange among disparate messaging systems, directories aren't faring as well. Because very few companies have made the transition to full X.500 directories with LDAP interfaces, there has been little demand for synchronization. Nevertheless, accurate, available and reliable directories will become a key enabling technology for businesses, making directory synchronization a fundamental requirement.
Directory synchronization products use both proprietary scheme
s and standards, such as X.500 and LDAP. Typically, they include a management server and agents that interact with the directory on each e-mail platform. Some use e-mail clients on their management servers to communicate with the particular e-mail platform, others use native LDAP interfaces or APIs. The management server, or dir sync engine, controls the process by scheduling incremental updates once the initial load has been performed, and by mapping and filtering. We found that the initial sync of our 20,000 entries from all five directories took a very long time to complete--in some cases, overnight.
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