Blog Entries

Progress

dbanes@cleartextsystems.com — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 01:19:39 +0100

Sometimes I wonder if the business is going forward, slowing or stopped. Today I realised that the last year has been a big step forward.

I decided to update the diagram for ClearEmail, this was created mid 2007 and had several boxes on it drawn in dotted lines to represent planned services, such as email archiving, upgraded email hosting platform and mail server monitoring.

Whilst updating this diagram I’ve realised that all of these boxes needed to be converted to solid li [...]

Hosted messaging platforms

dbanes@cleartextsystems.com — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:36:40 +0100

At Cleartext we've been using the @Mail platform from Calacode, chosen because they are an Australian company (so there's local support.. cough) and because their platform is in use by lot's of ISP types, like iiNet. @Mail has been very reliable, is easy to use and looks good. However we need to move on, with additional services, and Calacode aren't moving on as quickly as we'd hoped so I've been looking around for new platforms.

There's no denying that MessageLabs have a good core service, but they've made some questionable roadmap decisions, buying OmniPod a proprietary IM platform, and OEM'img archiving from Fortiva an [...]

Australian CEO makes Board of XMPP Standards Foundation

dbanes@cleartextsystems.com — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:47:54 +0100

Sydney, Australia. October 8th, 2008

Soon after Cisco acquires Jabber Inc, the leading vendor of XMPP (IM and Presence) solutions, Cleartext co-founder David Banes is voted onto the board of the XMPP Standards Foundation.

Cleartext, a leading provider of managed messaging and messaging security services to enterprise and SMB markets, today announced that its Managing Director/CEO, David Banes, has been voted onto the board of the XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence [...]

MessageLabs taken out of play by Symantec

dbanes@cleartextsystems.com — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:00:00 +0100

News this morning that Symantec has acquired MessageLabs which means one less brand in the competitive security SaaS space and more clients for Cleartext, those not wanting to buy Symantec. So this gives Symantec an interesting mix with the recent acquisition of PC Tools.

Jabber on the move

dbanes@cleartextsystems.com — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:00:00 +0100

I'm convinced, but that doesn't mean I'm right, that if Jabber/XMPP had strong gateways to other networks early on it would have got bigger sooner, here's why.

The 'winners' in the IM battle have been the proprietary protocols, like AIM and Yahoo!, these networks attracted the largest user counts and this is where the IM 'communities' have grown. Jabber never made it in that sense, it effectively sat on the sidelines as a geek or vertical market protocol.

If someone had bui [...]

Cisco acquiring Jabber Inc

dbanes@cleartextsystems.com — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 00:26:08 +0100

NEWSFLASH!!

Huge news in the IM space today with Cisco announcing itâ€™s acquisition of Jabber Inc the main vendor of XMPP IM and presence technology.

Enterprise IM

david@banes.org — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:00:00 +0100

We're seeing an increase in the number of requests for Enterprise IM (EIM) and I'm wondering if this is wholly due to OpenFire being open sourced and Jive discontinuing commercial support or if there's a general trend away from public IM for business use.

XMPP Standards Foundation

dbanes@cleartextsystems.com — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:00:00 +0100

We're please to announce that we've become a sponsor of the XMPP Standards Foundation.

XMPP has been around since 1999 and was/is commonly called Jabber Instant messaging, but it's much more than that now as social networks take off and architects are looking for a protocol to glue these systems together. XMPP has s shot at taking that space. We've been 'lurking' on the edges of IM/XMPP since 1999-2000 with our own EIM product called CipherIM which was unfortunately discontinued in 200 [...]

You really do need your own enterprise IM system

david@banes.org — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 14:00:00 +0100

The article linked below should demonstrate a good enough reason to use an enterprise IM platform rather than public IM. Apart from the levels of ’security’ offered by each public IM network it’s fairly obvious from the embedded chart that your conversations may not be very private…

How safe is instant messaging? A security and privacy survey

Data portability, connecting social networks

dbanes@cleartextsystems.com — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:00:00 +0100

Having followed XMPP since it's inception in 1999 and developed software around the platform, I can see some widespread activity in the greater web, rather than just discreet deployments as an IM platform.

The XMPP community is talking about social networks and how XMPP could have a role in connecting these in a pub-sub fashion. An interesting article (spotted by Tamir) on Social Media Today points towards this type of connectivity.

OpenFire Enterprise goes Open Source

david@banes.org — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 14:00:00 +0100

Great news that Jive Software have open sourced the Enterprise features of OpenFire, read the post here.

Jive Software news

david@banes.org — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 14:00:00 +0100

Jive Software launched their new web site this weekend, focusing on Clearspace and Clearspace Community (formerly Clearspace X). This site is very slick and 'Web 2.0' and creates a great online brand for Clearspace and their new community 'Clearstep'. Learn more about Clearspace Community here.

Itâ€™s all about the support

david@banes.org — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Support is our driving force at Cleartext, if customers are happy they spend more and give you a bit of leeway when things go off the rails. It’s for this reason I’m recommending JoomlaPlates as a Joomla template provider.

During a recent ‘free’ web site project we needed a good template and selected one of JoomlaPlates, their php is good and the CSS is well documented. To my dismay there was a small bug in the CSS when displaying some rounded corners in IE7.

Hosted Archiving

david@banes.org — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0100

I used to wonder why companies would want to archive their email externally, given they'd almost certainly be charged a premium. That is until I got a call from a client needing help 'fixing' a tape archive that wasn't restoring.

Of course, it's all about media rotation, or not having to do it. Hosted archiving not only removes the tedium of having to backup and restore email archives, it removes the need to continually refresh the media archives are stored on.

We all know how dif [...]

Hosting

david@banes.org — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0100

We've been a NetRegistry reseller for many years and recently started using Media Temple in the USA for customers asking for virtual servers. Recently customers have been asking about offshore hosting.

When should I use Australian hosting?

Australian hosting is fine for most companies hosting requirements, if you're a typical Australian small to medium business then any of the myriad of hosting companies can provide enough storage and data at a reasonable cost. We recomm [...]

Launching ClearEmail EDM

lbirch@cleartextsystems.com — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0100

We soft launched a new service this week, ClearEmail EDM 'Outbound Email Campaign Management'. This service complements our inbound email filtering and content control (which also has outbound mail control). Our one paragraph description goes like this;"ClearEmail EDM is an outbound email direct marketing service that is designed to move marketing departments outbound email onto our platform. This eliminates high volume traffic from corporate mail servers, minimises risk of black listing whils [...]

Joomla 1.5 'feature'

david@banes.org — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Whilst building a new site using Joomla 1.5 I needed to display an RSS image without test, unfortunately the standard mod_syndicate module doesn't let me save the 'Text' Module Parameter empty, it defaults to 'Feed Entries'.My fix was to edit the default.php file in /modules/mod_syndicate/tmpl/ and remove the code that display this text. this gives the following result.<img src="http://www.davidbanes.com/wp-content/Welcome%20to%20Cleartext-5.jpg" />

Jabber/XMPP update

david@banes.org — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Following on from my earlier post about reviewing technologies I've been having another look at the Jabber/XMPP community and there are some interesting things going on.OpenFire from Jive Software now includes public IM gateways in the open source version, this used to be in their Enterprise version, so everyone can run a sensible company IM platform now. OpenFire runs under Java so it's OS independant.Jabber Inc ha [...]

Creating Clearspace plugins

david@banes.org — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Clearspace is an excellent example of a product that makes something more by combining some parts. I bet many of us have thought about how best to use technolgies like blogs, wiki's and forums.Well think no more and just install Clearspace and you're all set, then start creating plugins to get that extra 10% you need. Jive Clearspace Plugin