New Products

FiveRuns, whose name comes from the founder's favorite childhood fishing hole, has left the world of beta releases (now 1.0) with its open-source Systems Management product, “complete with Web 2.0 richness and usability.” According to FiveRuns, its “approach to systems management utilizes open-source technologies, such as Ajax, Ruby and Ruby on Rails to deliver a sleek, hosted application.” Because IT professionals must typically manage both open-source and proprietary environments, FiveRuns' philosophy is to support these heterogeneous environments through a single interface. FiveRuns also claims that businesses of all sizes can benefit from its products. Other features include software-as-a-service-based monitoring, allowing users the flexibility to subscribe to the appropriate level of service as infrastructure levels change, as well as automated configuration discovery and auto-baseline thresholds to keep implementation time to a minimum. Free support for the product is available through FiveRuns.net, a community of users that includes troubleshooting advice. A free 30-day trial of FiveRuns is available by signing up on the company's Web site.

www.fiveruns.com

The Kerio folks told us that they have updated their MailServer product, now Release 6.2, which supports Linux, Mac OS and Windows. The product is a groupware server targeted to small- and mid-market businesses and is available in 16 different languages. The most noteworthy new user and administrator improvements are Universal binaries (MailServer is now a Universal application on Mac OS X); two-level spam rating (messages can be tagged or blocked/rerouted); distribution-list definition and syncing; Sticky Note support (users can create and sync Sticky Notes in WebMail and Outlook); Clam AntiVirus plugin; and improved search, including calendar events and tasks. Kerio also improved its WebMail application utilizing Ajax.

www.kerio.com

The developers of e-mail applications are rockin' these days, and one of the companies responsible for the buzz is Roaring Penguin Software, who just released Version 1.0 of its CanIt-Domain-Pro. This product is an antispam solution designed specifically for organizations with complex e-mail needs related to managing multiple domains, such as ISPs, universities, governments, Web hosts and so on. Roaring Penguin says its product can solve problems in universities and governments “where each department often has its own domains” or in the ISP world where “merger activity has brought multiple domains under one roof”. Roaring Penguin's approach is to simplify the management of multiple domains by allowing a “super system administrator to delegate system administration rights” to lower-level “realms”, with realm administrators able to create baseline rules, users and streams within their jurisdictions. CanIt-Domain-Pro is available as a software download, a soft appliance or a preconfigured plug-and-play appliance.

www.roaringpenguin.com