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 A publication of the Information Development Department
Volume 2 Supplemental
November 2002
 Editors' MessagesWith so much happening in the FirstClass universe, we've decided to put out an interim newsletter to tell you about our acquisition by Open Text. This newsletter also gives you an overview of 7.1 features and shows you a couple of new applications (Sneek Peek section). Our full sized, FirstClass 7.1 newsletter will be out soon, but we hope this will give you some reading to tide you over until it arrives.
In the coming months, you will see some changes as we work out the details of our acquisition by Open Text. In this issue, Steve Asbury (SoftArc founder, FirstClass VP of Engineering, and senior product architect) talks about the changes from a technical and product standpoint. Note that the Centrinity logo has been removed from this newsletter and will eventually be replaced with an Open Text logo. However, we'll still be bringing you The FirstClass Newsletter with the same kind of technical content you have always enjoyed.
With the added resources of Open Text, we hope to bring you more frequent newsletters and enhance our documentation set - particularly our online documentation. We will continue our general information policy of moving online and gearing our documentation to customer needs. Information development is the conduit between software and customers, and we look forward to continuing to bring you quality information.
Ann Schwartz
Annette Ferron
Editors, FirstClass Newsletter
FirstClass and Open Textcourtesy of Steve Asbury, VP Engineering, Senior Architect, FirstClass
As news of the acquisition of Centrinity reaches our FirstClass customers, many are asking what this will mean for the FirstClass product line and its market focus. I'll try to answer some of these concerns here.
Open Text has acquired several companies in its history, many with existing successful product lines. While Open Text does sell a flagship product, LiveLink, it also continues to develop and support many products along with LiveLink. FirstClass is a strong technology product which has a customer base similar to the size of that of LiveLink. It is the intention of Open Text to operate the FirstClass division as an independent business unit within the larger parent company.
FirstClass will continue to be sold and developed as a complete messaging and collaboration product, with a roadmap derived from the original SoftArc vision. In many ways, the development and approach will represent a return to our roots as we continue to develop the groupware, collaboration and communications features of FirstClass. We will continue to strongly support the Mac OS platform and the Education market, and the development of FirstClass will be business as usual.
There are many positive changes ahead. With FirstClass now part of a profitable company, buyers need not be concerned about the future of the product. With the costs of a public company eliminated, and administrative overheads lowered, the FirstClass division will be a profitable member of the Open Text family. A second, equally important benefit will be realized as the original founders and architects of FirstClass, still with the company, are able to devote more of their time to product issues. In addition, Open Text employs a large talent pool of engineers, and owns several important technologies. These technologies will become available for integration into FirstClass, and will form the basis for many product enhancements in
the future. Open Text brings technology and expertise in areas such as fast, rich search engines, document management, workflow and records management.
FirstClass will also be offered as an integrated module to LiveLink, as described in some of the press that has been released around this acquisition. This is of interest mostly to existing LiveLink customers, as FirstClass customers already enjoy the benefits of a FirstClass collaborative environment. This integration is not a major intrusion into the FirstClass architectural vision because it is facilitated by existing technology in the FirstClass Internet Services module. Over the past several releases we have already made significant enhancements in the area of integration, to allow FirstClass to be embedded into existing web portals or to better interoperate with existing corporate intranets. LiveLink customers will be able to integrate the power of FirstClass messaging from their LiveLink workspace, and revenue from this source
will benefit the core FirstClass platform.
Open Text has become successful by identifying several market verticals and selling into them. FirstClass adds Education and Mac OS expertise to the corporate palette. FirstClass will benefit from Open Text's penetration of Global 2000 companies, an area where FirstClass has not enjoyed as much success.
In conclusion, the FirstClass team is committed to continuing their quest to build the best communications and collaboration platform possible, as well as being excited about the benefits which Open Text will bring to the product.
 Contents Summary: What's Planned for FirstClass 7.1Improved Security Features in Internet Services
Server Mail Rules
 Sneak Peek FirstClass Log Analyzer
FirstClass Messaging COM (Wrapper)
 In Future Issues...What to look for in future issues of the Centrinity Technical Newsletter
 We Still Want to Hear From You Other languages? Provide feedback? Questions? Topic ideas?
 Contact Information Resources New training courses. Where to find documentation.
 Archives Where to find previous newsletter issues
 Subscribing/Unsubscribing Subscribe other FirstClass admin and subadmin staff in your organization
 Copyright NoticeA Summary of Security Tools Available in Internet Services 7.1
The goal of Internet Services (IS) 7.1 is to make it easier for you to protect your system from abuse. As part of this effort, several IS default behaviors are being changed and the UCE/Spam tab on the Basic Internet Setup form is significantly reworked. These changes are intended to make IS more secure from the start, to make it easier to stop spam from bothering your users, and to make it easier for you to provide a safe SMTP relaying environment. Here is a summary of the new and enhanced security tools and a recap of existing ones:
*NEW* SMTP AUTH Support
This feature lets you offer SMTP mail relaying to users who provide their user IDs and passwords when submitting SMTP messages. This provides a simple, and fairly foolproof, way of verifying who is allowed to relay mail on your system. You can configure most POP3 and IMAP4 mail clients to use SMTP AUTH.
*NEW* Realtime Blackhole List (RBL) Support
This feature lets you point Internet Services at a RBL server on the Internet. Whenever SMTP mail arrives, IS will contact this RBL server to see if the sending site is a known source of spam. If it is, IS can include a warning header in the message, or reject the message outright.
*NEW* True "No Relay" Setting
In earlier Internet Services versions there was a "No Relay" setting that actually meant "relay according to filters". In IS 7.1, there is a true "No Relay" setting which, prevents your system from being used as an SMTP relay site. This is useful both for sites that relay, where the administrator is trying to troubleshoot a problem, and also for sites that want to shut down relaying altogether.
*ENHANCED* Filter Documents (SMTP Mail Rules Documents)
Internet Services has long supported the idea of filter documents in which IP addresses and domain names could be marked as either "trusted" or "bad". This functionality has not changed, but the filter documents have now been further enhanced to allow you to add rules, written in IS Script. These rules can examine the content of incoming SMTP message headers and perform specific actions, such as NDNs and injecting additional headers in the message stream. Possible applications of these rules include enhanced spam control and better workflow.
This feature is especially powerful when combined with the new FirstClass server's mail rules (see Mail Rules in this issue for more information). Our goal is to take all of the built-in spam rules from Internet Services 7.0 and convert them into a rules document that can then be modified by you to suit your system's needs.
Look for a full discussion of these new and enhanced security tools and a comprehensive examination of Internet Services security in the next newsletter.
Mail Rules
FirstClass 7.1 will introduce server mail rules support. You and your users will be able to create mail rules in your Mailboxes and conferences. Rules are stored in a special rules folder, which is attached to the target container and can be opened via the container's permissions form. Rules are defined using rule documents, each containing a set of conditions and actions. When the conditions are met for a particular rules document, all of the actions associated with that document are executed. A rules document may have one or more conditions and one or more actions associated with it. Rules may be attached to messages
and mailed.
In a later FirstClass version, rules may be associated with conference groups in order to set common rules for a group of containers, and they may be copied between other rules folders.
In the next newsletter, we will further discuss mail rules and provide some examples.
courtesy of the IT Department
Sneak Peek is an area that is new to the FirstClass Newsletter. It introduces applications that Centrinity is currently working on. Because these applications are still in development, be advised that both the information and user interface design may change. Also, not all applications may be released and we cannot estimate release dates.
In this issue, we introduce FirstClass Log Analyzer and FirstClass Messaging COM (Wrapper), also called FCMCOM. The FirstClass Log Analyzer is an application that generates reports by analyzing the server statistics file and is targetted at FirstClass administrators. FCMCOM is a development wrapper to our current FirstClass gateway toolkit and is targetted at people who develop applications for FirstClass in programming languages such as Visual Basic.
1. FirstClass Log Analyzer
Want to quickly and easily find out where your system bottlenecks are? How to track your resources to make your web traffic run more smoothly? Take a snapshot of the number of users logged in on each platform? The FirstClass Log Analyzer may be what you need.
What It Is
FirstClass Server Log Analyzer uses your server statistics log files to analyze protocols and user activities on your system. This easy-to-use application has no special hardware requirements. You can run Analyzer on any machine as long as you have a server statistics log file. However, we do not recommend running it on the FirstClass server machine. You can install FirstClass Server Log Analyzer on both Windows and Mac OS platforms. Using this application, some of the protocols and user activities you can track are:
- FirstClass
- Web
- Voice
- POP3
- IMAP4
- SMTP
- FTP
- IP activity
- any activities in the Journaling control section on the Statistics Control form.
How It Works
When you launch the log analyzer you see this window:
 This is where you decide what you want to analyze and how to view the results, including:
• choosing the statistics file to analyze
• selecting which protocols and user activities you want to diagnose and in what format to output the results
After opening your server statistics file, click Setting to open the form on which to configure what you want to analyze:
 • processing the statistics file based on your configuration choices
• viewing the information analysis.
What it outputs
After you have configured these tabs and processed your data you can view the report:
 As you can see, this report displays a summary of the different protocols and activities that you chose when you configured your settings. If you click any choice on the left-hand side of this form you get a detailed breakdown for that particular protocol or activity, including which platforms your users are logged in with, who is logged in, hourly activities, and supporting charts. Here are examples of some of the information you will see if you click "Web":
    If you click "Hourly Logins" you will see:
 and if you click "User Activity" you will see:
 If you click "IP Activity", then double-click one of the IP addresses in the "IP Activity" listing, you will get a breakdown of the activity for that particular IP address, for example:
 Using FirstClass Log Analyzer, you can also generate reports in HTML format by choosing the option on the Setting form:
 and this is the HTML version of the View Report form. As you can see, you can generate the same reports as above but in web page format:
 2. FCMCOM
FirstClass Messaging COM (Wrapper), also called FCMCOM, is a Gateway Toolkit COM wrapper which acts as a universal bridge between FirstClass and virtually any programming language, such as C++, Visual Basic, or Java. Its purpose is to allow application development of gateways to FirstClass without having to know Visual C++ (which the current FirstClass Gateway Toolkit requires). It comprises fcmcom.dll (the COM wrapper) and fcmdll.dll (the utility functions, including the Gateway API functions).
Certain features mentioned here may not yet be released, and may not be currently available in all geographic regions. Centrinity Inc. reserves the right to modify or cancel any features mentioned here.
• Creating FirstClass Voice Greetings and Voice Menus
A look at the different uses for voice menus, including sample scenarios, and how to create and customize voice greetings
• FirstClass Rapid Application Developer
A look at the next evolution of FirstClass RAD
Share Your Thoughts and Ideas
Do you have additional knowledge to share? New information or handy tricks to reveal? Please send them to us. In addition, send us questions you want answered by developers and technical staffers, suggestions for articles and content, queries about how to perform tasks that may make your job easier, and general comments about our newsletter.
Site Visits
The Information Development team conducts site visits to gain feedback from administrators and users of FirstClass. Previous visits have always proved successful, and were found mutually beneficial. If you would like to schedule a site visit for your company (currently in the Greater Toronto Area only*), send us an email.
*If you are outside of the Greater Toronto Area, we can organize a teleconference so you can still take advantage of the benefits these meetings provide.
Please send all correspondence to the TechNewsMail conference (TechNewsMail@centrinity.com).
Editors: Annette Ferron, Ann Schwartz
TechNewsMail@centrinity.com (TechNewsMail conference)
sales@centrinity.com (Sales)
support@centrinity.com (Centrinity Customer Support)
centrinity_id@centrinity.com (Information Development)
Please send all correspondence to the TechNewsMail conference (TechNewsMail@centrinity.com).
Main number: 905.762.6000
Main fax number: 905.762.6151
Toll-free number: 1.888.588.3444
Our address is:
Centrinity Inc.
38 Leek Crescent
Richmond Hill, ON
Canada, L4B 4N8
Documentation
Looking for new documentation? Existing documentation? Check out Documentation on our web site. Many of our latest books can be found right in your online help (Help > Contents > Online Books).
Training
The Richmond Hill office holds customized training courses throughout the year. For a training schedule or course descriptions, including prerequisites, see Training on our web site. If you have any questions, please address them to Centrinity Training or training@centrinity.com.
 AttentionLinks to downloads mentioned in this newsletter and archives can be found on our website.
Previous newsletters can be found here on our website.
We want this newsletter to reach all of the people in your organization who will directly benefit from it. If you would like to subscribe anybody else to this newsletter, please provide us with their email address or FirstClass account. Enter SUBSCRIBE as the subject line.
New Subscribers
Just subscribed to our newsletter? Haven't seen the first issue yet? Just go to the Archives section of this newsletter for a link to any back issue of the Centrinity Technical Newsletter.
Unsubscribing
If you would like to unsubscribe to this newsletter, send us an email with the subject line UNSUBSCRIBE.
Please send all correspondence to the TechNewsMail conference (TechNewsMail@centrinity.com).
Information in this document is subject to change without notice. Certain features and products described in this document may not yet be released, and may not be currently available in all geographic regions.
All rights reserved. FirstClass is a registered trademark of a Centrinity Inc. subsidiary used under license. Centrinity, the Centrinity logo, and the FirstClass logo are trademarks of Centrinity Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.
This document is bound by international copyright law and the FirstClass Software License Agreement and Limited Warranty included with every FirstClass product.
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