Microsoft’s Exchange™, today announced PostPath Server version 3.0. The server now supports both Blackberry® Enterprise Server (BES) and Microsoft® ActiveSync®, the push technologies used by the vast majority of mobile devices for full enablement of email, calendaring, and other mobile services. In addition, PostPath Server 3.0 incorporates major performance upgrades that enable it to deliver three to five times the performance of Exchange for Outlook and mobile clients alike.

Today, companies are no longer relying on Outlook alone to access their data but are adopting a mix of access methods—handheld devices, web-browser-based clients, and remote access—in addition to Outlook. Existing corporate infrastructure is struggling to cope with the widespread rollout of this varied set of access methods. PostPath 3.0 enables companies to broadly deploy mobile access alongside their Outlook desktops, and to use web browser-based access to supplement or displace traditional desktop systems, while solving performance, data management, and interoperability issues. The performance improvements implemented in PostPath 3.0 enable enterprises to give every employee large mailboxes, without running out of server or storage bandwidth. PostPath 3.0 also lowers infrastructure costs by enabling more users per server and more data per server. 

“Broadening our support for devices and clients—and substantially improving server performance with mobile devices—supports our strategy of becoming the open corporate email and collaboration server, bridging new and old ways of working,” said Duncan Greatwood, CEO of PostPath. “The infrastructure needs more performance, flexibility, and reliability to support mobile access. It’s time to escape the artificial restrictions and inflexibility of legacy architectures that were originally designed for only one type of client.”

With native support for BES and ActiveSync, PostPath 3.0 supports the vast majority of handheld devices on the market today. BES support enables feature-rich high performance for Blackberry devices including Pearl and Curve. ActiveSync support enables users of Palm/Treo, Motorola Q, Symbian, Nokia, Windows Mobile, Helios, Blackjack, and High Tech Computer (HTC) devices—and ultimately Apple iPhone users—, to access email, calendar, and other information on the PostPath server.

"We evaluated numerous mail collaboration solutions to replace our utilitarian Linux mail server and Web mail application, and were looking for a platform that fully supported Active Directory," said Evan Wagner, director of network operations and security at The EMMES Corporation. "PostPath quickly rose to the top of the list with its ability to provide a seamless collaboration platform for Microsoft Outlook clients, without all of the baggage associated with other mail products. In addition, the PostPath Server provides robust and efficient disaster-recovery capabilities, less complexity, cost-effective licensing, virtualization support (without requiring an enterprise agreement), and non-proprietary file-storage structures."

PostPath 3.0 Improves Server Performance, Eases Installation and Management

Handheld devices typically place a load on Exchange that is two to four times the load of Outlook, as they repeatedly synchronize handheld data against the server. Major performance upgrades incorporated into PostPath 3.0 deliver five times the I/O efficiency of Exchange, and enable synchronization that is up to 100 times faster, avoiding I/O saturation and enabling the broad rollout of mobile handsets without server headaches.

PostPath Server 3.0 greatly eases installation and setup, with automatic Active Directory™ configuration detection and one-shot, no-reboot installation. It simplifies data management by providing standards-based hot-backup and hot-restore capabilities. And release 3.0 introduces a new generation of PostPath management tools, so that customers can now have the choice of using Microsoft programs in a co-existence scenario, or of switching more rapidly to an all-PostPath environment. Meanwhile, PostPath’s standards-based architecture enables straightforward, cost-effective solutions for replication, clustering, disaster recovery, and eDiscovery.

“The flexibility and scalability of the PostPath Server enables our organization to avoid being locked-in to a specific email or web client and operating system, thus providing the flexibility we need to grow our business,” said Michael Nappi, IT manager at Pax Industries. “From both a performance and an administrative perspective, PostPath is far ahead of the pack.”

Mobility Plus

PostPath 3.0 not only natively supports the major mobile platforms but also enables mixed access via other channels. Secure remote access via RPC/HTTP(S) enables Outlook use without the need for a VPN connection. The server also includes WebMail support in the form of a browser-independent, easy-to-use AJAX web client, and provides full interoperability between WebMail and other corporate data such as address lists and calendar free/busy information. This broad access support opens up the corporate infrastructure to a mixed-client future that enables mobile-, web-, or PC-based collaboration.

A recent survey by Osterman Research shows that 15 percent of the workforce at mid-sized and large organizations in North America uses employer-supplied mobile phones. Decision makers at these companies anticipate that number will grow by more than 40 percent in 2008 and by more than 30 percent in 2009. While today 19 percent of organizations say integrating presence with mobile devices is a priority, that percentage will more than double in 2008.

“It makes perfect sense for PostPath to integrate support for push email technologies into its email and collaboration server, and now is the perfect time to do it,” said Michael Osterman, principal of Osterman Research. “Companies want these capabilities, and integration plays into PostPath’s vision of an open-systems future. Finding a way to improve email server performance will be a high priority for mid-sized and large companies, given the burden that mobile devices place on them today.”