Sync or Swim? Will Your Merged Mail System Float Together or Drift Into Chaos?

By Nancy Cox , with Dan Backman and Joel Snyder  We invited the top messaging directory synchronization vendors into our distributed, Real-World LabsTM for a shoot-out. They were tasked to sort through, synchronize and manage more than 20,000 user names among five messaging systems, running on various platforms, among three sites connected via our wide area network. They did surprisingly well. To view the Report card. Corporate waters are never still, never the same. Organizations engulfed in the swirling maelstrom of mergers, acquisitions and migrations must grapple with many upheavals, not the least of which is a variety of mail systems, most with proprietary directories. Rafts of users on different platforms--be they rickety file-sharing, sleek client/server, homegrown or anti quated host-based messaging systems--plunge into the whirlpool overnight. Moreover, making the transition from file-sharing systems, such as cc:Mail, to client/server systems like Microsoft Exchange requires message transfer and directory synchronization among the connected systems. And that's no easy task, as we found out. Network Computing challenged vendors of directory synchronization products to a sync-or-swim demonstration of their capabilities using our diverse lab-based messaging environment. Our maelstrom featured five electronic-messaging platforms with about 20,000 users total: cc:Mail Release 6 DB6 running on a NetWare 3.12 file server, Exchange 5.0 running on Windows NT 4.0 SP3 and Notes 4.6 running on NT 4.0 SP3 in central Florida; ALL-IN-1 in contributing editor Joel Snyder's lab; and Netscape Messaging Server and Directory Server 1.02 running on NT 4.0 SP3 in our Syracuse University lab. The local directories on the five mail systems contained user entries populated with last name, first name, middle initial, alias, display name, telephone numbers and locations. Each directory had a completely different set of user names. We used frame relay, ISDN or the Internet for our WAN connectivity. This was truly a distributed test of a distributed application.

For the Side Bar on A Sea Of Names The Directory Synchronization features chart , in Acrobat format. The Directory Synchronization estimated cost chart , in Acrobat format. The Directory Synchronization performance chart , in Acrobat format. Other Features King of the Road By Joel Conover