Ipswitch Brings Streamlined Web Interfaces, Major Security Upgrades, New Packaging and More to Its IMail and ICS Solutions

Market Wire, November, 2005

A leading worldwide provider of proven email solutions to small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) since 1995, Ipswitch, Inc. today announced a sweeping product initiative which brings four significantly enhanced, next generation Ipswitch IMail and Ipswitch Collaboration Suite (ICS) solutions to market, all available immediately in 25, 100, 250, 1,000 and unlimited user versions.

The messaging and collaboration product family has expanded to include Ipswitch IMail Server 2006 and IMail Server 2006 Secure Edition and Ipswitch Collaboration Suite 2006 Premium and Standard Edition all offering superior price/performance, scalability and total cost of ownership advantages over all leading alternatives. Unlike overly complex enterprise-class products that require substantial IT overhead or, inversely, strictly limited, low-end solutions that quickly max-out at growing SMBs, Ipswitch's new offers are 'just right' software products with a dedicated focus on SMB preferences. Moreover, Ipswitch IMail Server 2006 Secure Edition and ICS 2006 Premium Edition come standard with integrated protection against spam, phishing attacks and viruses.

Today, worldwide, more than 60 million end users send and receive billions of email messages annually using Ipswitch's award-winning line of messaging and collaboration products. "With these new products," said Ipswitch vice president of marketing Alex Neihaus, "end users and administrators are both winners: end users can continue to use the dominant messaging client and administrators can replace or avoid expensive, hard-to-maintain and complex back-end messaging and collaboration systems with fast, proven and streamlined Ipswitch technology." Both constituencies, he added, also benefit because these solutions scale as SMBs grow. "Alternatives like Microsoft Small Business Server," Neihaus said, "are limited by license to 75 users, after which an expensive conversion to overweight enterprise messaging servers is mandated. For SMBs, many of whom are growing rapidly, this is a tremendous limitation and an operational risk they'd rather avoid."

New Product Specifics for The Entire Suite

All four new products feature basic security, basic anti-spam protection, and an email server with webmail and list server. All feature a completely enhanced web interface that has been redesigned by Ipswitch for flexibility and security. In the area of web messaging, a completely new web client featuring rich text editing, contact management (in ICS) and support for multiple browsers has been added. Remote web administration of all components of IMail and ICS from a single web interface has been added as well. Security upgrades developed by Ipswitch for all products in the family include solutions that sense and stop so-called dictionary attacks as well as Denial of Service (DOS) attacks. All products also include a 12-month service agreement.

ICS 2006 Standard Edition and Ipswitch IMail Server 2006 are base configurations without advanced anti-spam and anti-virus protection designed for SMBs that elect to choose their own preferred anti-spam and anti-virus solutions.

Ipswitch IMail Server 2006 Secure Edition: Robust, Reliable Email Service That's Safe

For companies that need proven email service free from spam and viruses, IMail Server 2006 Secure Edition combines a robust, commercial-grade email server with class-leading protection from email hazards like spam and viruses. By combining standards-based messaging protocols with carrier-grade anti-virus protection powered by Symantec® Scan Engine and language-aware, automatically updated anti-spam technology from Mail-Filters(TM), this product achieves new levels of integrated protection for critical messaging systems. Ipswitch's choice of Mail-Filters anti-spam system enables a unique combination of machine and human intelligence that catches 95% of spam and reduces false positives to just one in 400,000 messages. The Mail-Filters data center pushes updated "Bullet Signatures" to the IMail system every 15 minutes, giving administrators the freshest and strongest anti-spam protection without their having to lift a finger.

New Features in the Ipswitch Collaboration Suite Premium and Standard Editions

Both ICS editions from Ipswitch provide solid, scalable, standards-based messaging and group collaboration with anywhere access to email and administration via any Web browser, plus secure instant messaging, group calendaring and scheduling as well as access to shared Outlook folders. With Ipswitch Collaboration Suite 2006 Premium Edition, Ipswitch continues to offer integrated industry-leading protection against spam, phishing attacks and viruses using Symantec Scan Engine carrier-grade anti-virus technology and Mail-Filter's language-aware, automatically updated anti-spam technology.

New in ICS 2006 is enhanced presence awareness. Presence allows users of asynchronous tools -- like email -- to know when someone else is available and online. Smart tags in the Instant Messaging (IM) component of the product have been added as well. These let users see who is available and send IMs from within any smart tag compliant application, such as Microsoft Office. Also new to the product is a Web address book that syncs with Microsoft Outlook. This means that contacts in an Outlook address book are automatically available in Web messaging and vice versa.