Re: Soft-Switch and X.500

[[e-mail]]

Hello all,

> Please don't take Mike's statement as a bash against X.500.  He's
> accurately representing what our customers are telling us...our
> customers are using the most popular e-mail products (mostly commercial)
> and virtually none of them TODAY can access an X.500 directory...our
> customers have told us quite clearly that they WILL need X.500, but if
> we (Soft-Switch) don't synchronize with the proprietary directories that
> they are using (cc:Mail, Microsoft Mail, PROFS, ALL-IN-1, etc.) we won't
> be delivering a solution to today's problem...There are organizations
> with 10,000 - 50,000 and more users in their e-mail networks paying
> people to manually replicate their e-mail directories between their
> various e-mail environments...

I agree that an immediate business requirement is the synchronisation of the 
various propriety directories maintained by the different e-mail packages.

A typical organisation uses at least a few different e-mail products, 
each maintaining their own directory, and synchronising these is 
a need that some vendors are fulfilling with synchronisation products. My
understanding of these products is that they may offer a master directory,
which contains all the company's e-mail information, and this master 
is involved in synchronising the local e-mail directories. The master
directories are not yet X.500, as far as I know.

Another area where synchronisation is needed is with the directories
maintained in the PABX systems (PBX to others from elsewhere in the world).

Some companies are now installing X.500 systems, however, and they are finding
they need to synchronise their newly acquired X.500 directory systems not
only with the PABX directories but also with the master directories of the 
the e-mail directory synchronisation systems! 

If the PABX systems and e-mail synchronisation products used an 
X.500 directories as their master directory then the problem would be 
simplified. If the e-mail products were X.500 user agents then we could 
through away the e-mail directory synchronisation products.

Having said that, if all PABX systems and e-mail products were
X.500 user agents, and the corporate information was stored in an X.500 
directory, then there would have to be well-defined data models strictly
adhered to by all these products. The reason is the information required by
each system consists of various attributes of the one directory entry. 
How likely is it that all vendors will conform to the same information model?



					-- regards, John Gottschalk

===================================================================== 
John Gottschalk, 				[e-mail]
Project Manager, CiTR,				[phone] (phone)
Gehrmann Building,                     		[phone] (fax)
The University of Queensland, 4072,
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia,
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