Banyan Systems Inc, Westborough, Massachusetts has turned its eye to the electronic mail market with the announcement of tightly integrated messaging into its Vines network operating system. The company also announced details of its strategic direction for electronic mail and messaging, which includes support for both Microsoft’s Messaging Application Programming Interface and Lotus Development Corp’s rival Vendor-Independent Messaging application programming interfaces. Under the proposed scheme of things Banyan is attempting to make electronic mail a network component like any other and to this end, is promising a few useful touches, such as the ability to manage the system with the Simple Network Management Protocol, IBM Corp’s NetView and the Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Management Environment. The idea is that network managers should be able to administer the messaging software using their existing management stations. The SNMP agent is available in the first release, and can, says the company, be used to view message queues, examine message envelopes and as well as various other aspects of the messaging engine. There’s going to be a bit of a wait for the NetView and DME agents, although how long isn’t certain – Banyan is keeping very quiet over timescales. The same holds true for support for the Messaging and Vendor Independent interfaces. Meanwhile in the first release, the company has added onthefly data compression for large messages travelling over high-cost wide area links; a multi threaded mail-engine that is claimed to produce more consistent mail performance and better processor utilisation. The first release is due early this month at UKP1,365, or UKP905 for customers that order before September 7. Upgrades for Vines 5.0 customers come in at UKP90 for those belonging to the software subscription programme, UKP815 for the rest.
