X.400 – Isode Blog

18th May 2015

Happy Birthday M-Switch

Today we’ve been reminded, by LinkedIn, that one of our core products turns 23 this week. Happy Birthday M-Switch!

The first deployment of M-Switch, then simply called the Message Transfer Agent, was to British Telecom. Since then it has evolved into a range of Isode products, including:

M-Switch SMTP; a SMTP Message Switch.
M-Switch X.400; a X.400 Message Transfer Agent (MTA)
M-Switch MIXER; a message switch, providing conversion between X.400 and Internet email according to the MIXER specifications.
M-Switch ACP127 gateway provides mapping between STANAG 4406 and text messaging protocols such as ACP127.
M-Switch ACP145 gateway, provides STANAG 4406 message signing and verification.

As well as these core server products we also now offer add-ons to extend M-Switch, such as M-Switch Encryption to add message encryption and decryption capabilities (using S/MIME for SMTP messages and STANAG 4406 Encryption for X.400 messages) as well as an add-on to enable security label mapping & conversion.

Although it has been joined by many other core server products since 1992, products based on M-Switch, under the direction of the messaging team headed by Ian Reissmann, remain a vital part of our business, accounting for over 50% of our new product sales over the last 3 years.

Our commitment to the continued development of the M-Switch family means that it’ll be celebrating many more birthdays in the future.

1st April 2015

New Whitepaper: Isode’s Solution for BRASS

HF Radio is an important naval communication channel for ‘beyond line of sight’ (BLOS) communication, BRASS (Broadcast and Ship to Shore) is an approach used by Navies, particularly those of NATO countries, to communicate between ships and shore using HF.

In a new whitepaper (Isode’s Solution for BRASS) we give an overview of BRASS and describe our strategy and solution for this area. The whitepaper looks at how our products can support the protocols and interoperability for currently deployed BRASS systems and move them forward to state of the art capabilities that can extend the services offered over BRASS.

31st March 2015

R16.3: Multi-Master Directory, XMPP Archive/Search & ACP127 support

We’re pleased to announce the availability of Isode’s latest release, R16.3, which can be downloaded now from our website. R16.3 is a major Isode release which adds new capabilities across the entire Isode product range, including:

M-Vault

We’ve introduced a multi-master capability to M-Vault, complementing the single-master approach to replication defined in the X.500 protocols around which M-Vault was developed. M-Vault is the first directory to offer both multi-master and X.500.

M-Link

M-Link gains a new Archive Server for archive of all messages (including 1:1 chat, MUC and PubSub). XMPP clients can access archives using Message Archive Management (MAM) as defined in XEP-0313. M-Link also gains three new web applications:

Message Archive Management, allowing browser-based access to information in the archive.
Statistics, a lightweight monitoring alternative to the M-Link Console GUI.
Forms Discovery and Publishing, for end-user publishing and display of FDP forms.

M-Switch

We’ve added gateway support for text based organisational message protocols, which we’re collectively describing as ACP127. The first release of this capability supports ACP127 and DOI 103S, a popular US variant, and enables conversion with STANAG 4406 (compliant to STANAG 4406 Annex D) and SMTP (following the MMHS over SMTP extensions).

In addition we’ve made extensive improvements to MConsole and M-Link Console to support the new M-Switch and M-Link family capabilities. For a full run-down of new capabilities in R16.3, please see the Product Release page. We’ll be publishing further blog posts over the coming weeks focusing on some of the new R16.3 capabilities.