http://www.ferris.com Analysts specializing in messaging & collaboration Fri, 09 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Whether or not you or I believe BorderWare's amazing claim that it filters 98% of spam using reputation alone, it's clear that reputation is increasingly important. No surprise there, but what's the implication on legitimate email users? As more and more spam filtering relies on your reputation as an email sender, your ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/05/07/your-reputation-in-peril-use-outbound-spam-filtering/ Web conferencing is a valuable Internet technology that allows users to connect globally, sharing files, presentations, and any software running on the desktop. Major players in this market are WebEx (recently purchased by Cisco), Microsoft LiveMeeting, and Citrix GoToMeeting. WebEx, LiveMeeting, and GoToMeeting are fee-based services sold to enterprises. Now a ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/05/06/dimdim-web-conferencing-gets-high-marks/ BorderWare is making a very interesting claim. It seems to be blocking an enormous proportion of its customers' inbound spam simply using IP reputation. While most anti-spam vendors these days talk about blocking roughly 75% of the spam using IP reputation (basically a fancy word for DNSBLs), BorderWare's quoted statistic is ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/05/05/borderware-claims-amazing-reputation-filtering/ Splunk won "Best of Interop" in the Network Management, Software, and Services category. With more than 450 enterprise customers and a lot of momentum, this is a company to watch. Splunk brands itself as "IT Search" with the ability to search log files, configuration files, messages, traps, alerts, scripts, and metrics. ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/05/04/splunk-useful-compliance-and-ed-tool/ Moore's Law discusses the exponential growth of electronic circuits. Perhaps email is another case where Moore's Law applies. Consider email quantity. Where once we sent and received only a handful of emails daily, today we routinely send and receive hundreds of emails. You might argue that the volumes are increasing exponentially. ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/05/01/email-and-moores-law/ I attended Microsoft's inaugural INTERACT2008 conference in San Diego earlier in April. While Office Communications Server (OCS) was the clear focal point for the event, Microsoft’s Exchange Server 2007 received good coverage as well. Two tidbits I noted from a compliance standpoint:     Microsoft Exchange team has adopted a Protect, Preserve, Discover, Prove ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/29/compliance-notes-from-microsoft-interact2008/ I moderated a webinar earlier this week. It was intended to be a press-only event, to support Abaca's recent launch of ReceiverNet. Inevitably with these things, a few non-press register, but that's perfectly OK. The thing that really surprised me was that non-press outnumbered the press folks two-to-one. There also seems ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/24/media-bored-with-spam/ You're probably flooded with inbound emails. Managing thousands of emails is time consuming, error prone and extremely frustrating. Plus it diverts you from more important tasks. Two new tools aim to make life easier. The first is ClearContext. Its product is named Information Management System (IMS). This is an Outlook add-on ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/23/tools-to-manage-email-overload/ Attachments are one of the reasons for Exchange storage growth. People use Exchange email to send files to co-workers and customers, and depending on the file content (e.g., text, pictures, audio, video), these files can be quite large. Files in the 30MB-50MB range are becoming common. This causes rapid Exchange ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/22/sending-large-attachments-with-exchange/ ClamAV is an open source, free anti-virus tool, designed for email scanning on mail gateways. It is owned by Sourcefire, which employs the ClamAV developers and provides commercial support for ClamAV. The most important capability of an anti-virus product is to be able to remove a high percentage of viruses, including rapid ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/21/clamav-useful-free-anti-virus/ This was sent to me anonymously. However, it seems reliable and well-founded. "Zantaz had a couple more layoffs this year across multiple departments such as QA, engineering and services. People also have been leaving voluntarily at all levels from Boston and Pleasanton office. More people will leave, especially from the Boston ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/19/zantaz-layoffs-2/ Trend Micro takes an unusual approach with its hosted/managed/in-the-cloud email security service. Rather than trying to do everything, it sticks to what a service is good at. Trend is applying the 80/20 rule. It promotes a hybrid approach, with the hosted service implementing only a first level of spam filtering based ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/17/trend-micros-hybrid-hosted-service/ We recently talked to Voltage Security, which announced something called "Connected VSN." VSN is the Voltage Security Network, and it isn't new. It's a hosted service that implements the key management for Voltage-style identity-based encryption (IBE). The idea is that instead of on-premise key management, you centralize the key generation in ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/16/voltages-hybrid-encryption-service/ IronKey isn't just another encrypted USB flash-drive-key-stick-thingy. For a start, the company makes a big thing of its claim that IronKey is the only such device designed from the get-go to be secure (as opposed to a flash drive that's had security "bolted-on," presumably). It's an interesting claim, but of arguable ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/15/ironkey-encrypted-usb-flash-drive-on-steroids/ 2factor is primarily an encryption technology licensing business: The company sells its technology to OEMs. The core technology is called Real Privacy Management (RPM). It works by calculating symmetric private keys; that is, it doesn't use a public/private key pair. Each party in a transaction has a private key, which it ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/14/2factors-interesting-encryption-technology/ Proofpoint has a new VP of marketing, and not a moment too soon. Andrew Lochart is the first to admit that his new employer has been very quiet recently, and he aims to change that. Aside from the recent $20 million funding round and the additional 40 employees hired already this ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/13/proofpoint-still-here/ Checking a BlackBerry in the middle of a 5-15 person meeting is often disrespectful and disruptive. DDB Canada, a marketing communications company, has implemented a novel policy in an effort to thwart this behavior. Similar to soccer, they have implemented a carding system. Fellow employees are encouraged to flash a Yellow ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/10/teaching-blackberry-etiquette/ Google has joined the list of vendors of email archiving and e-discovery. The firm recently announced its Google Message Discovery service. The service is part of the corporate offerings acquired with the purchase of Postini. Hosted email archiving solutions like Google's compete with in-house email archive solutions on cost and quick ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/09/google-gets-email-discovery/ For the last few years, Exchange databases have grown in size, to the extent that performance has suffered, and there has been an increased risk of service disruption. Consider how Exchange has evolved. When mailboxes were tens of gigabytes in size, hundreds of mailboxes could be managed on a single CPU ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/08/exchange-storage-challenges/ David Ferris recently wrote a bulletin about several interesting aspects of the Fortiva archiving solutions. I thought that our readers might be interested in a little more technical detail. The architects of an archival and e-discovery product or service have to solve a number of difficult technical problems. These include, but ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/07/fortiva-technical-review/