Ipswitch has launched two new products, a collaboration
suite for medium-sized businesses that will compete with Microsoft
Exchange, and a major update for its network management product,
now called WhatsUp Professional.
The Collaboration Suite will offer e-mail serving, shared
calendaring and contacts and, based on the company's
research, include features people actually use and focus on
usability to cut administration time.
"We're very conscious that customers don't have time to fully
research the market, they just want software that's affordable and
easy to manage," said chief executive officer Roger Greene.
According to Ipswitch, its Collaboration Suite was developed in
response to customer demand for integrated e-mail and instant
messaging, as well as shared calendaring capabilities that
integrate with Microsoft Outlook clients already in place on users'
desktops. It also offers home-grown anti-spam technology as well a
Symantec-developed AV component.
The product replaces the company's IMail Server and Instant
Messaging products which now cease production, though they will,
said the company, be supported for the next year. The reason is
that the capabilities have been incorporated into Collaboration
Suite.
It will cost £753 for five users, up to £5,230 for unlimited
users.
Replacing WhatsUp Gold, WhatsUp Professional (WUP) adds improved
security, a new interface and a new architecture based on SQL
Server.
"It was a proprietary database but is now open. This gives users
access to it, allows you to do reporting and analysis, or to pass
it on to a central management system," said Greene.
Also new is WUP's user interface, now based on the Windows
Explorer tree view to improve ease of navigation. He added that big
enhancements have been made to the alerting function.
"Before you had to go into each device and decide what action to
take individually. If you've got 300 devices, that's a problem. Now
you can set central action policies globally as well as
individually, so you've only one place to change it.
"We didn't realise at first how big networks would become - we
started with the assumption that there was one device per person,
now it's several. It's 100% focused on the reality that admins
don't have time."
Greene added that administrators can now access the system using
a web browser rather than the console, allowing remote access, and
can assign privileges to individual parts of the network map,
allowing them to devolve responsibility to different members of IT
staff.
WhatUp Professional is priced at £870 which includes a one-year
service agreement, and WhatsUp Gold customers with a service
agreement will receive WUP automatically. Both products and more
information are now available from the company's website.
Manek Dubash writes for Techworld.com