Assured: The Isode Blog

Isode R12 released.

We're pleased to be able to announce that the latest Isode release, 12.0, is now available for download from the Isode website. We'll be writing in details about the new features within this major release over the coming weeks but here's a quick rundown:

Signed Operations in M-Vault

Isode's M-Vault directory support for strong authentication has been extended to include Signed Operations, as described in a recent white paper. It's straightforward to restrict deployments to require signed operations for all modifications, which is important for secure directory deployments. You can find out about setting up a secure directory in our updated guide to strong authentication and secure directory configuration.

Sodium (Secure Open Data, Identity and User Manager)

Sodium is a new Directory User Agent, which will replace DDM in a future release. As well as incorporating significant as well as being a significant step forward in terms of usability over DDM, Sodium also adds support for strong Authentication and Signed Operations. You can read more about Sodium here.

MConsole2

MConsole, our main M-Switch operational management tool, has been completely rewritten. It provides an improved view of the message queue, including information and control on connections and inbound messages. Queued messages can now be viewed from MConsole. There is integrated support for Message Tracking, by access to the message database, including display of archived messages. You can read more about MConsole here.

LEMONADE: The Open Standard for Mobile Messaging

Isode has been an active participant in the IETF's 'LEMONADE' working group to define extensions to IMAP and SMTP for mobile messaging. LEMONADE Profile 1 was adopted as an RFC in June of 2006. With R12.0 Isode's M-Box and M-Switch become the first commercial messaging servers released to support these new Open Standards.

Isode's Internet Messaging whitepapers give more details on LEMONADE and why we believe that this Open Standard is important for organizations looking to provide email access to mobile staff.

Support for ACP 142, STANAG 4406 Annexe E & P1 Strong Authentication

We've enhanced our Military Messaging standards support. ACP 142 ("PMul, Protocol for Reliable Multicast Messaging in Constrained Bandwidth and Delayed Acknowledgement (EMCON) Environments"), is a CCEB (Combined Communications-Electronics Board – AU, CA, NZ, US, UK) standard for military messaging designed to support NATO's STANAG 4406 Annexe E. We've also added support for Strong Authentication of P1 connections.

You can read more about Isode's Military Messaging products here, the free whitepaper "Military Messaging over Low Bandwidth networks" gives an overview of military messaging and military messaging scenarios.

New Quick Config

With previous Isode releases we've shipped a 'Quick Configuration Wizard', a tool that enabled quick setup of pure X.400 or X.400 MIXER configurations. In order to assist with evaluations of all Isode messaging products, the Quick Config Wizard has been extended so that it now offer a choice of full ISP, aviation, EDI, military, MIXER and pure X.400 scenarios and message types. You can read more about Quick Config here.

A LEMONADE 'first' for Isode

We've been talking about the new LEMONADE standard for mobile messaging for some time and how we have plans to incorporate it into our IMAP/POP server (M-Box) and our SMTP Server (M-Switch).

As of yesterday LEMONADE moved out of the 'intend to do' category and moved into the 'have done' category when Isode sent the first message, outside of a test environment, that demonstrated a key LEMONADE function, the ability to forward a message to another recipient without first downloading it - a key capability for mobile devices like PDAs and Mobile Phones with limited storage and bandwidth.

We forwarded without downloading, over a GPRS link, two messages to Josh Maher and David Ferris of Ferris Research in preparation for a webinar that we're participating in this evening (more details and signup link).

The first contained PowerPoint presentations and PDF documents from a Ferris webinar that took place a month or so ago. The forwarded message was 55Mbytes in size but using forward without download only 2.2 kBytes of data were sent and 1.53 kBytes of data received by the client during the operation.

That's 15,099 times more efficient than forward with download.

The whole process took 26.3 seconds compared with the four hours plus it would have taken had you been insane enough to try this using normal forward with download over a GPRS link.

Because one of the recipients uses a Gmail address (with a 20Mbyte message size limit) we then sent a second message with a single attachment, one of the group of attachments forwarded in the first message. This demonstrated the LEMONADE capability to access parts of messages that have not been downloaded.

Forwarding that message without downloading was 'only' 1739 times more efficient than forward with download and took 7 seconds.

We believe that this is an important step  - bringing LEMONADE out of the lab and into the real world.