Managing Multiple Messengers

Derrick Ho, a manager of corporate network planning at NECís Systems Advanced Engineering department (Mountain View, CA), recently faced integrating Internet messaging with proprietary systems to maximize the benefits of both. NEC had already standardized on cc:Mail -- not an ideal solution for Ho's 100-person department, many of whom depend on VMS systems. Beside s, some people wanted to use Eudora to read their mail from Japan. But most worrisome to Ho was requiring two full-time people to manage the mail servers. "That is ridiculous," he says.

Ho moved his department's messaging to Innosoft's PMDF. This allowed him to get rid of separate servers for each system the department uses. Instead, PMDF provides a channel for each system. ( See the figure. ) It further eases administration by simplifying modifications. Particularly troublesome was making changes to VMS's sendmail, through the obscure sendmail.cf file. "You have to be very good at hacking sendmail.cf to modify your system to your liking," says Ho. "Not very many people are able to do that."

Why didn't Ho just wait for similar capabilities from Lotus or Microsoft? "We're not going to deal with [the Lotus and Microsoft solutions] until they come out," he says. "They have to be better than PMDF."

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PMDF: Handling Messaging Babel

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PMDF is one product that tries to handle multi-platform messaging, either directly through SMTP/MIME or through platform-specific add-on modules.