NetScreen, Gordano Up Ante In Collaboration

The new Secure Meetings appliance is an Intel-based server running NetScreen's "hardened secure" operating system that brings Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) security to common workgroup interactions, said Andrew Harding, director of marketing at the Sunnyvale, Calif., company.

NetScreen, formerly known as Neoteris, already offers an analogous VPN appliance, but said the new offering is warranted by the need for a "dedicated solution for realtime collaboration" that installs easily. "The appliance drops in and integrates with your [existing] systems and instantly provisions meeting capability," Harding said.

"Users can open up a browser and sign in. If they're provisioned by [Microsoft's] Active Directory, they can sign in with their user name and credential and create instant meetings. The beauty for administrators is they get a box that requires only power, a network connection and authentication definition, he added.

For solution providers that now might offer secure VPN capabilities, this appliance could be a good incremental sales opportunity, Harding said. This offering gives them a solution for customers not wanting to build out custom intranet capabilities, he added.

The box starts at $14,995 for 50 concurrent users. For larger companies, 100 to 250 concurrent users can be supported for $44,995.

And, compared to hosted services, "you don't have the loss of policy controls nor worry about deployment of custom software," he noted.

In other collaboration news, Gordano last week unveiled version 2 of its Gordano Messaging Suite with stronger integration with the Microsoft Outlook client.

People can continue to use Outlook tasks, notes, address books and other features but without Exchange Server at the back end. The theory is customers that find Exchange Server resource-intensive and pricey can swap it out without sacrificing the familiar Outlook interface.

The new version "does a complete sync for addresses and calendaring. ... So if you're in Outlook and send a request to someone else, the messages will look the same as if they were coming from Exchange itself," said Steve Larson, vice president of systems services for Enterprise Network Systems, a Minneapolis-based e-mail integrator.

Gordano also integrates antispam and antivirus capabilities where other servers require additional work.

Integrators said a 500-user implementation of Gordano is $1,200; 250 users is $5,000. The software runs on Windows, Linux and Unix servers.

Exchange Server 2003 Standard Edition is $699 per server, plus there can be additional CAL charges. The Enterprise Edition is $3,999.