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The Government of Alberta's deployment of M-Switch and M-Vault

The Government of Alberta use M-Switch and M-Vault to provide their MAILConnect interdepartmental messaging infrastructure. This switching service sends all "@gov.ab.ca" to the correct departmental destinations, and provides value added services such as virus scanning and directory.

About the Government of Alberta

Alberta is one of Canada's most dynamic provinces, located where the Rocky Mountains meet the prairie. The breathtaking views, abundant natural resources, and skilled workforce make Alberta an excellent place to work, live and do business.

Alberta Corporate Service Centre (ACSC) provides the Government of Alberta with a sophisticated Internet infrastructure for its employees, who are located in many government departments in Edmonton and other locations, and provides a range of services for its customers and employees. There are approximately 25,000 employees dispersed through out the province of Alberta. The main locations are the cities of Edmonton and Calgary.

The MAILConnect Service

ACSC supports an electronic messaging hub, MAILConnect, to meet the government's need for an interdepartmental messaging infrastructure. In simpler terms, MAILConnect provide a central location from which all e-mail addressed to @gov.ab.ca addresses is redirected to the appropriate messaging system where the addressee's mailbox resides.

MAILConnect is a stable, proxy service for e-mail distribution to government departments. It provides a strategic standards-based e-mail addressing system, the ability to communicate with other e-mail transport protocols (SMTP, X.400) and a robust directory service (through the X.500 and LDAP standards). The intent is that all government e-mail pass through the MAILConnect hub.

Specific functions provided are:

• attachment support
• virus scanning
• EDI services via X.400 transport
• bi-directional directory maintenance
• central repository of government e-mail addresses
• statistical reporting

Message Switching Architecture

The MAILConnect message switching architecture is shown above. The core of this is a single M-Switch server, operating in a boundary messaging type configuration. M-Switch uses an M-Vault (LDAP Directory Server) for its routing configuration.

M-Switch provides the Internet facing email (SMTP) interface for the Alberta government, and its primary function is to handle the external SMTP, and then correctly route traffic to internal departmental servers, taking addresses of the form John.Doe@gov.ab.ca and translating them to the departmental addresses. M-Switch is also used for routing inter-departmental traffic.

The majority of the departments and traffic internally use SMTP, and departmental systems operate a variety of systems, including Exchange 2000, Exchange 5.5, Lotus Notes and Sendmail. A few departments operate X.400, which is used for email and EDI services. M-Switch provides conversion to X.400 according to MIXER.

As well as routing the messages, M-Switch provides anti-virus checking using the Sophos anti-virus checker in conjunction with M-Switch's anti virus capabilities. External relay is denied and enforced by using the M-Switch's authentication policies.

 

Directory and Data Architecture

 

The above diagram illustrates how employee data is managed as part of the MAILConnect service. Information on employees in each of the Government of Alberta departments is held in a central database. This data is regularly exported from each e-mail server into a CSV (Comma Separated Value) files and batch loaded into the M-Vault directory service. These loads contain daily changes additions and deletions of employee e-mail information. The entire process is automated and little or no manual intervention is involved. The data within M-Vault is then available to M-Switch for routing messages, and directly via LDAP to government employees for address lookup and white pages services. The entire government e-mail information is then extracted from M-Vault and used to load each department's Global Address Book (for use locally in the department).

Statistics

Key statistics for the MAILConnect service are:

• 130,000 messages per day
• Messages routed to and from 30 departmental servers
• 25,000 employees(service users)
• 58,000 directory entries in M-Vault
• 600 user directory queries per day to M-Vault

Operational Experience

ACSC have been running the MAILConnect service using the Isode servers since 1998. The MAILConnect support team say "We've been using the Isode products to provide the MAILConnect service over a number of years, and have been very pleased with the Isode products and their support from Isode. The service has been stable, and the flexibility of the products and their evolving functionality has proved very useful. We have been particularly pleased with the anti-virus capabilities which have provided important protection to our customers."

Future Plans

MAILConnect is a long term operational service provided by ACSC, and will evolve to meet changing requirements of the customers. The next change anticipated will be to pilot the new M-Switch anti-spam features.