Re: Soft-Switch and X.500--Zisman Quoted

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Greg Loux @ Soft-Switch writes:
>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...

However, every large organization that *I* work with is standardizing on X.500
for directory services, and "directory synchronization" means synchronizing 
the X.500 directory with the proprietary e-mail and other directories.  The 
user agents may not be widespread throughout organizations yet, but that is 
turning out to be almost irrelevant.  The major e-mail hubs can all use X.500 
directories for routing and such, which is more important to e-mail support 
than having DUAs everywhere.

I can't imagine an organization with any type of heterogeneity in directories 
using anything but X.500 as the master.

Perhaps that is why when I see analyses of major vendors, Soft-Switch tends
to fall far short.


John DeCarlo, MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA--My views are my own
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