Monday, April 9, 2007

Communigate Administration

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topics should be:

  • installation
  • platforms
  • authentication
  • spam assassin
  • clam AV

The MAPI plugin for Outlook

Microsoft Outlook is a great email client...and quite a lot more. It was introduced in 1997 as a replacement for the Microsoft Exchange client. Outlook integrates email, contacts, calendaring, to-do lists, and notes. It can be an extremely powerful tool for managing and accounting for your time. Outlook has extremely powerful features for collaboration amongst users too.

The drawback to Outlook's powerful collaboration capabilities is that you need to have an Exchange server in the back office. Exchange server is expensive and can only be run on a Microsoft Windows server.

But not any longer. CommuniGate provides a free plugin for Outlook (versions 97-2007) that gives your Outlook users most (but not nearly all) of the features of having a backend Exchange server.

Pronto!: CommuniGate's Outlook Workalike in Flash

In the CommuniGate v5.1 release in September '06 the Pronto interface was released. It has been slowly growing in features, and more importantly, becoming stable and usable. As of this writing, the CGP server v5.1.8 (released 5/30/07) includes Pronto v 0.8.9. The version number is an indicator of where the company thinks the product is in terms of releasability. I'm guessing there will be 3 or 4 more releases before it is labeled with a v1.0.

Pronto takes a different approach from other webmail interfaces. The traditional CGP webmail was simple HTML. GMail uses AJAX complex dynamic HTML. Pronto is using the Flash programming language to deliver a program to be run inside your browser. Flash is very widely adopted and installed. YouTube videos are all viewed through Flash. Windows, Mac and Linux support Flash. To check your installed Flash plugin version, try this link at Adobe to test your flash plugin and check the version.

CommuniGate As An IM Server

CommuniGate supports the XMPP (aka Jabber)protocol as a server. Your messaging users can easily have an internal, private instant messenger account if you enable this option and provide configuration information.

Friday, April 6, 2007

Selecting CommuniGate for a Corporate Mailserver

Many years ago I was introduced to the CommuniGatePro mail server. I've thought back many times about where I first read about it, or what person recommended it to me. It was Marc Van Hoof, my coworker down in Melbourne, Australia who told me about it. The recommendation came from halfway around the world and
Back in 1998, the company I was managing IT services for had an aging POP mail server, but had just come into a new round of funding and was looking to beef up infrastructure all around. The