Welcome Guest. | Log In| Register | Membership Benefits

InformationWeek Labs

October 12, 1998


An On-The-Road Protocol

By Dan Backman

M aintaining mobile users is a key process that siphons off time and energy for many organizations. Back when messaging was contained on a single mainframe or Unix box, users could access their mail through any available terminal or telnet session. POP and SMTP protocols adequately support users who can afford to carry mail clients with them, but not all users have notebooks at their disposal. IMAP adds the capability of server-side mail storage, but it still assumes that users somehow keep their client configurations. IMAP alone can't solve the roaming-user dilemma.

Chaining users to their desks seems like the best solution, and although the creation of the Web has achieved that goal to a certain degree, users still have legs--and some people insist on using them.

Unfortunately, IMAP doesn't offer remote-configuration services. However, work that originally started as the Internet Message Support Protocol has expanded to an IETF-proposed standard, the Application Configuration Access Protocol. A generic protocol for downloading application-configuration information from a remote server, ACAP allows for distributed clients without regard for maintaining individual mail users' configurations on each remote node. Simply distribute mail clients to all users with a single ACAP server configured, and the mail client downloads personalized configuration information from the

ACAP server. This includes everything from IMAP and SMTP server addresses and directory servers to personal address books. Likewise, administrators can take advantage of ACAP to centrally manage client preferences and enforce certain default values, such as shared address books.

However, some products (such as Netscape's Communicator) opt to access client preferences in a centrally managed directory via LDAP as opposed to relying on ACAP. The implications of client management protocol support should be a consideration when deploying IMAP services, but the issue falls beyond the scope of this article.

If you'd like to find out more about ACAP, go to Carnegie Mellon University's Cyrus messaging project Web site: andrew2.andrew.cmu.edu/cyrus/acap.

Return to main story, "Net Mail Scales Up."


Back to Labs

Send Us Your Feedback

Top of the Page