Soft-Switch Inc has made a spate of anouncements, including enhancements to its Central enterprise mail network switch, an initiative with Microsoft Corp to integrate its Enterprise Mail Exchange with Microsoft Mail, and a series of programs to provide greater levels of manageability for large-scale messaging networks. The Wayne, Pennsylvania-based company has enhanced its IBM mainframe-based Central switches to support the 1984/1988 X.400 standard using TCP/IP or OSI protocols. Also new is a Single Mail Transfer Protocol gateway, which the company says enables connection to SMTP networks without running TCP/IP on the host. Both enhancements are based on gateway implementations already available on the EMX. The enhanced version of Central is to cost $16,000, while existing users qualify for a free upgrade. The initiatives with Microsoft will see the two companies conducting interoperability tests of their 1988 X.400 implementations, using both OSI and TCP/IP protocol stacks, across both local networks and wide area networks. Additionally, they say that they will work to provide efficient directory synchronisation between the EMX Names Directory and Microsoft’s X.500-based directory, and are investigating how to integrate their respective management systems. Completion of the interoperability testing is planned for third quarter at the latest, with the other elements following. For the new messaging management programs, Soft-Switch has teamed up with Hewlett-Packard Co – following on from their marketing agreement announced last November – to integrate its Enterprise Mail Manager with Hewlett-Packard’s OpenView network management system. Initially, this will be restricted to event notification, but ultimately the duo is aiming for full manageability of the Enterprise Mail Manager from the OpenView console. The initial phase will be completed within a matter of weeks according to a spokesman.
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