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March 2008

March 19, 2008

Isode R14.2 Released

Existing Isode partners and customers will know that we've probably been more open about our plans for 14.2, and the expected release date, than we have for any previous Isode product release.

Access to the password-protected section of our website has enabled them to examine the release plans for 14.2 as well as our longer term development plans. They've also been reading and commenting on the drafts of whitepapers due to be published over the next few weeks and beyond.

Internally the Engineering department have had to stare at the countdown clocks (days to code freeze and days to marketing handover) on the company Intranet.

On the pages that customers have had access to we've been talking about a 14.2 release in "March 2008". As anyone in the software industry knows this is normally code for "11:59pm March 31st .... in Fiji" so it's to the credit to Isode's Engineers that we managed to beat that end-of-March deadline by a full 2 weeks when we released 14.2 on Monday.

14.2 includes the first release of our XMPP Instant Messaging and Presence server, M-Link (you can read more about M-Link here) as well as  HF Radio support improvements (we've added support for STANAG 4406 Annex E and ACP 142 operation over STANAG 5066), a preview release of security labels and clearances (including Rule-Based Access Controls) in M-Vault, changes to Sodium Sync to include comprehensive LDIF support and the addition of a Sodium Sync server which will perform scheduled updates independent of the GUI.

We'll be blogging more about these items individually later, in the meantime a rundown of 14.2 improvements can be found on the release page.

March 03, 2008

Mobile XMPP Client: Agile Messenger

This is the first in a series of posts in which we'll be posting short opinions of some of the available XMPP clients, in the run up to the launch of our XMPP server, M-Link.

There is a good choice of the Internet Standard XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) clients for all common desktop platforms, including decent quality free products. 

We have not found a good free mobile XMPP client, but Agile Messenger from Agile Mobile is a neat commercial one.  It's reasonably priced at 45USD and you can try a free seven day trial version prior to purchase. It runs Windows Mobile and on a wide range of Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones. It's very easy to set up and use, and does everything you would expect a mobile XMPP client to do. Importantly, it makes good use of the limited screen size on mobile phones with a tidy layout and adjustable font sizes.