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

["Loux, Greg" <[e-mail]>]

Skip Slone writes:

> Does anyone besides me find this kind of press a bit annoying?

>>
>> Mike Zisman, President of Soft-Switch, Inc., was interviewed in the
>> August 30th issue of Communications Week, page 19:
>>
>> Comm Week:  Why don't you support the X.500 directory services
>> standard?
>>
>> Zisman:     Directory synchronization is a first step toward the
>> migration to X.500.  We are clearly committed to X.500 in the EMX
>> switch.
>>
>> If we delivered X.500 today, none of our customers could use it
>> because there's nothing else out there that uses X.500.
>>

Skip,

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...

Mike/Soft-Switch is positioning directory synchronization as a
transition path to X.500 for e-mail networks.  The key point is "for
e-mail networks"... At the Atlanta EMA (Electronic Mail Association)
meeting in June, our view was picked up by others when the XAPI
Association hosted a meeting to respond to the EMA's formal request for
the XAPIA to develop a directory synchronization standard as a
transition path to X.500.

Soft-Switch (and Mike) understands that there's been a tremendous amount
of progress with X.500 (much of it being done by this group, osi-ds) but
it appears that the popular commercial e-mail UA products are way behind
in their support of it...

I will admit that perhaps "there's nothing else out there that uses
X.500" is an overstatement, though...particularly from the perspective
of the osi-ds group...but definitely not from the e-mail world...

By the way, I'm responsible for X.500 product development at
Soft-Switch.

-Greg Loux @ Soft-Switch