How Communications Services Satisfy Business Needs

Organizations want to deploy services that simultaneously reduce cost and complexity while providing a robust set of features. The architecture of services must add requirements for security and scalability that enable users to have more than just a single means of accessing information critical to their daily work. Communications Services meet these needs through providing scalable messaging, calendaring, and instant messaging at a total cost of ownership businesses can afford.

Communications Services enable you to develop an architecture that incorporates ease of deployment and maintenance with a complete set of features and functionality. Most important, a Communications Services architecture builds security into each service element. These elements include the network infrastructure, operating environment, and the Communications Services component products themselves.

How Messaging Server Satisfies Business Needs

Messaging Server promotes superior reliability and productivity as well as reduced administrative and operational costs. Messaging Server uses committed transactions, which means that messages are not acknowledged as received until they are committed to disk. This reliability feature protects mail messages from loss and corruption. Additionally, the Message Store is built around a custom-designed database that employs a write-once data store and a two-level index to achieve excellent performance and data integrity.

How Calendar Server Satisfies Business Needs

Calendar Server provides one of the industry’s most open, interoperable, and high-performance time and resource management solutions. Calendar Server provides the features you need at a lower total cost of ownership than alternative solutions. Through its flexible and extensible architecture, Calendar Server scales both vertically (by increasing the number of CPUs per system) and horizontally (by adding more servers to the network).

How Instant Messaging Satisfies Business Needs

Instant Messaging software is closely integrated with Java Enterprise System, helping you to shorten the project life cycle and deploy new services affordably. In addition, Instant Messaging works with Portal Server, Access Manager, Messaging Server, and Calendar Server. This integration provides users with a full-featured, secure, scalable communications and collaboration services platform from a single vendor. The well-documented Java APIs included in Instant Messaging provide open standards for ease of integration, as well as multiple platform support, platform extensibility, and customization of real-time communications and collaboration features. These features can thus be embedded in existing applications or become the basis of new applications. Also, XMPP interoperability provides a great advantage to those businesses seeking to extend their ability to practice real-time communication with their partners and customers, many of which might have separate instant messaging systems.

How Communications Express Satisfies Business Needs

Communications Express provides an integrated web-based communication and collaboration client that caters to the needs of Internet service providers, enterprises, and OEMs. Communications Express has an integrated user interface for calendar, mail, and address book and enables the access of one client module from another without re-authenticating user credentials. Communication between mail and calendar is established using Access Manager or Messaging Server single sign-on mechanism. Both calendar and mail applications share the same address book. All modules share the common user preferences specified in the Options tab of Communications Express.

Summary of Communications Services Benefits

The Communications Services components have been traditionally deployed in large-scale, carrier-class deployments. The same dependability required for the large-scale deployments can be used in the enterprise.

The following table summarizes the benefits provided by Communications Services.

Table 1–1 How Communications Services Benefit Your Organization


Key Feature	Benefits
High performance and scalability	Enables efficient communications and improves quality of service for both enterprises and ISPs.
Extensive security features	Protects the integrity of communications and data and the privacy of employees, customers and partners, and enables compliance with industry regulations.
Virtual domain hosting and delegated administration	Messaging Server, Calendar Server, and Instant Messaging enable you to host messaging for several companies on one server, or corporate IT to host multiple departments within the organization, reducing number of servers needed, and lowering TCO.
Scalable, robust and extensible components	Enables deployment of unified communication services, bringing together telephone services with email notification, faxing, paging, and other technologies.
Extensible collaboration platform for scheduling events, and for managing tasks and resources	Calendar Server improves time and resource management, and enhances user productivity.
Group scheduling for meetings and events	Calendar Server improves team collaboration and communication across the organization.
Information sharing through hyperlinks in events or tasks	Calendar Server facilitates collaboration through exchange of information relevant to tasks or events.
Multiple client support	Provides integrated web-based client and support for multiple rich clients including Ximian Evolution and Microsoft Outlook.
Open, modular, and standards-based architecture	Enables customers to deploy customized and personalized solutions.

Making the Communications Services Deployment Highly Available

You can configure Messaging Server, Calendar Server, and Instant Messaging to be highly available by using clustering software. Messaging Server supports both Sun^TM Cluster and Veritas Cluster Server software. Calendar Server and Instant Messaging support Sun Cluster software. When using clustering software, a secondary Message Server, Calendar Server, or Instant Messaging host provides services to users if the primary system is taken offline for maintenance or is down due to a problem.

Even without the use of Sun Cluster, Messaging Server has built-in monitoring capabilities that continuously check the status of server processes and service availability. Messaging Server can restart process and services automatically, if necessary. Messaging Server logs failures and recovery operations, which you can use for reporting and analysis.

Additionally, you can deploy the Communications Services products in a highly available configuration through use of redundant components. This kind of deployment gives services a high level of uptime. A highly available deployment of this sort requires the redundancy of every component in the service architecture. These components include a duplicate data store server, duplicate network interface cards, and duplicate system storage.

Note –

This guide does not discuss the details of using Sun Cluster in highly available deployments for Communications Services. See the Sun Cluster, Messaging Server, Calendar Server, and Instant Messaging documentation for more information on this topic.

Using Portal Server with Communications Services

You can install Communications Services products with Portal Server to provide access to messaging and calendar portlets in a portal page. These portlets provide a summary of messaging information, calendar schedules, and address book information. The integration of Portal Server includes single sign-on capabilities between Portal Server, Calendar Express, Messenger Express, and the Communications Express client.

Note –

You can run Communications Express in both Sun Java^TM System Schema 1 and Schema 2 environments. If you are using Schema 2, then you can use Access Manager authentication and single sign-on for Communications Express.

Portal Server also supports message archiving for Instant Messaging. In addition, the Messenger Express, Calendar Express, and Instant Messenger clients are made available to users through the Portal Server Desktop.

The following two components of Portal Server provide additional functionality to a basic Communications Services deployment:

Portal Server Desktop. Enables users to access and launch Communications Services applications from portlets.
Sun Java^TM System Portal Server Secure Remote Access. Enables remote end users to securely connect to an organization’s network and its services over the Internet. End users access Secure Remote Access by logging in to the web-based Portal Server Desktop through the Secure Remote Access gateway. The authentication module configured for Portal Server authenticates the end user. The secure end-user session is established with Portal Server and the access is enabled to the end user’s Portal Server Desktop.

Note –

This guide does not discuss portal deploying Communications Services in a portal environment. See the Portal Server documentation for more information.