NetScreen Unveils SSL-Based Meeting Appliances

NetScreen Technologies this week unveiled a series of SSL-based meeting appliances designed to provision secure online meetings, remote desktop support, and conferencing sessions across platforms without the recurring costs of hosted services.

The appliances -- NetScreen-SM 3010, NetScreen-SM 3020, and NetScreen-SM 3030 -- all fall into the vendor's new NetScreen Secure Meeting product line. They were expected to be available to channel partners immediately.

According to Krishna Kolluri, general manager of NetScreen's secure access products, the appliances improve upon traditional approaches to Web meetings by applying a secure SSL VPN approach to user-to-user interactions.

"With the new [NetScreen Secure Meeting] appliances, enterprises can instantly and securely deploy dedicated application sharing and online meetings to hundreds of attendees," Kolluri said. "By delivering Web-based meeting functionality without the security trade-offs and high recurring costs of traditional approaches, the appliances fundamentally change collaboration [for good]."

As Kolluri explained, the NetScreen Secure Meeting appliances implement security strategies similar to those in the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company's popular Secure Access SSL VPN line. The Secure Meeting tools enable real-time collaborative sessions, multi-location document review, and remote desktop support and diagnostics, and do it across platforms, offering online meeting services for attendees using Windows, Macintosh, or Linux environments.

Built upon the Neoteris Instant Virtual Extranet (IVE) platform that NetScreen acquired in an October 2003 acquisition, the devices also feature functionalities including application sharing; policy based authentication, and password management; delegated administrated and scheduling; audit queries and filters; and clustering and fail-over.

Lastly, Kolluri said that the devices require no custom software configuration and no new server deployments. Pricing for the products was not immediately available.