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| Sun Java System Communications Services 6 2004Q2 Enterprise Deployment Planning Guide | |
Chapter 1
Understanding Communications ServicesThis chapter provides an overview of Sun Java™ System Communications Services 6 2004Q2, the business reasoning behind deploying Communications Services, and the deployment process itself.
This chapter contains the following sections:
Communications Services OverviewSun Java System Communications Services 6 2004Q2 are a secure, cost-effective communications and collaborations offering. Communications Services address enterprise customer concerns about costs, capabilities, and the security of the traditional enterprise communications infrastructure by offering a secure, scalable, lower total cost of ownership alternative to other enterprise messaging solutions.
Communications Services provide the email, calendar, and instant messaging solutions necessary to meet enterprise communications and collaboration needs. The products and services that form Communications Services provide a compelling response to common business requirements. All enterprises need communications, and many are required to provide these services across large, diverse, and geographically distributed communities of users. Traditional communications solutions are costly, and not sufficient to meet today’s enterprise requirements for scalability and security. Communications Services enable enterprises to deploy solutions at a total cost of ownership they can afford.
In addition, Communications Services provide differentiated services and full-featured collaboration functionality that are required by a diverse audience. Finally, a Communications Services deployment meets an enterprise’s increased security needs when extending communications outside of a corporate firewall and to mobile users through multiple devices.
The Communications Services core solution consists of:
Additional products that enhance the Communications Services solution include:
Taken as a whole, Communications Services provide a standards-based, integrated communications and collaboration suite of products for enterprise deployments of many thousands of users. Communications Services deliver a robust and flexible platform meeting the diverse communications needs of all types of organizations. Communications Services are an optimal solution to connect remote offices, distributed workgroups, and global corporate locations.
Note
Currently, this guide addresses enterprise deployments consisting of up to 5,000 enterprise users.
About Messaging Server
Sun Java System Messaging Server 6 is a high-performance, highly secure messaging platform. Scaling from thousands to millions of users, Messaging Server is suitable for enterprises interested in consolidating email servers and reducing total cost of ownership of communications infrastructure. Messaging Server provides extensive security features that help ensure the integrity of communications through user authentication, session encryption, and the appropriate content filtering to help prevent spam and viruses.
With Messaging Server, enterprises can provide secure, reliable messaging services for entire communities of employees, partners, and customers.
See the Sun Java System Messaging Server Deployment Planning Guide at the following location for more information on Messaging Server concepts and other deployment aspects not addressed by this guide:
About Calendar Server
Sun Java System Calendar Server 6 facilitates team collaboration by enabling users to manage and coordinate appointments, events, tasks, and resources. With its intuitive, Web-based interface, Calendar Server enables end users to access their personal, public, or group calendars anytime, anywhere, from any Web-enabled device. Enterprise deployments use Calendar Server, along with the Messaging Server and Instant Messaging, to offer users a comprehensive communications and collaborative environment.
See the Sun Java System Calendar Server Administration Guide at the following location for more information on Calendar Server concepts:
About Instant Messaging
Sun Java System Instant Messaging 6 enables secure, real-time communication and collaboration. Instant Messaging combines presence awareness with instant messaging capabilities such as chat, conferences, alerts, news, polls, and file transfers to create a rich collaborative environment. These features enable one-to-one as well as group collaboration through either short-lived communications or persistent venues such as conference rooms or news channels. Instant Messaging ensures the integrity of communications through its multiple authentication mechanisms and secure SSL connections. Integration with Sun Java™ System Portal Server 6 and Sun Java™ System Identity Server 6 brings additional security features, services-based provisioning access policy, user management, and secure remote access.
See the Sun Java System Instant Messaging Deployment Planning Guide at the following location for more information on Instant Messaging concepts and deployment considerations:
About Synchronization
Sun ONE Synchronization 1.1 is a software product that runs on a Windows personal computer and enables users to synchronize Calendar Server events and tasks with mobile devices and personal information managers (PIMs) such as Microsoft Outlook.
See the Sun ONE Synchronization documentation at the following location for more information:
About Connector for Microsoft Outlook
Sun Java System Connector 6 for Microsoft Outlook enables Outlook to be used as a desktop client with Sun Java Enterprise System.
Connector for Microsoft Outlook is an Outlook plug-in that you install on end-users’ desktops. Connector for Microsoft Outlook queries Messaging Server for folder hierarchies and email messages. Connector for Microsoft Outlook then converts the information into Messaging API (MAPI) properties that Outlook can display. Similarly, Connector for Microsoft Outlook uses WCAP to query Calendar Server for events and tasks, which are then converted into MAPI properties. With this model, Connector for Microsoft Outlook builds an end-user Outlook view from two separate information sources: mail from Messaging Server and calendar information from Calendar Server.
See the Connector for Microsoft Outlook documentation at the following location for more information:
About Communications Express
Sun Java System Communications Express 6 provides an integrated web-based communication and collaboration client that meets enterprise users’ needs.
As a web-based client, the Communications Express depends on a web server for access and a browser for presentation. The Communications Express offering consists of three client modules: Calendar, Address Book, and Mail. The Calendar, Address Book, and Mail client modules are deployed as a single application on any web container.
You can customize most of the features in Communications Express. See the Communications Express documentation at the following location for more information.
Communications Services Component Product Dependencies
Communications Services also have dependencies on other Sun Java System component products that provide infrastructure services. These component products include Sun Java™ System Directory Server and Sun Java™ System Identity Server. Additionally, Communication Services depend on a web server to serve HTML content and provide HTML connections. You can use Sun Java™ System Web Server (also known as Sun™ ONE Web Server) to fulfill this need.
Communications Services also depend on the existence of DNS. You need to have a functioning DNS server before you can install the Communications Services products.
See Chapter 3, "Understanding Product Requirements and Considerations" for more information on product dependencies.
How Communications Services Satisfy Enterprise Business NeedsEnterprises want to deploy services that simultaneously reduce cost and complexity while providing a robust set of features. The architecture of services for enterprise communications 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 enterprises 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 Service 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 a message store on 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 lifecycle and deploy new services affordably. In addition, Instant Messaging is fully integrated with Portal Server, Identity Server, Messaging Server, and Calendar Server. This integration provides enterprise 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 enterprise applications or become the basis of new applications.
Summary of Communications Services Benefits
The Communications Services components have been traditionally deployed in large-scale, carrier-class deployments. As discussed in this guide, the same dependability required for the large-scale deployments can be used in the enterprise.
The following table summarizes the benefits to the enterprise provided by Communications Services.
Making the Communications Services Deployment Highly Available
Messaging Server and Calendar Server both provide high-availability options that support both the Sun™ Cluster services and Veritas� clustering solutions. With this option, a secondary Message Server or Calendar Server 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.
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 web client, Messaging Express web client, and the Communications Express client.
Portal Server also supports message archiving for Instant Messaging. In addition, the Messaging Express, Calendar Express, and Instant Messaging 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. Instant Messenger installed on Portal Server enables the Instant Messaging client to be launched from the Instant Messaging channel.
- Sun Java™ System Portal Server 6, Secure Remote Access. Enables remote end users to securely connect to Secure Remote Access 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 end-user session is established with Portal Server and the access is enabled to the end user’s Portal Server Desktop.
Understanding the Deployment ProcessThe Communications Services deployment process consists of the following general phases:
The deployment phases are not rigid: the deployment process is iterative in nature. Nevertheless, the following subsections discuss each of the deployment phases independently.
For detailed information on the deployment process for Communications Services, see the Sun Java Systems Messaging Server Deployment Planning Guide:
Designing the Deployment and Architecture
In general, during the deployment design phase, you construct a deployment architecture based on the deployment scenario specified in the requirements analysis phase. The objective is to map the logical building blocks (the logical architecture) to a physical environment (a physical topology) in a way that meets the system requirements specified in the deployment scenario.
One aspect of this design is sizing the physical environment to meet load, availability, and performance requirements. The deployment architecture takes into account details of the physical topology, such as the capabilities of different computing nodes and network bandwidth, in assigning system servers and application components to the computing nodes in the environment.
Development and Customization
The logical architecture specified in the requirements analysis stage of the life cycle determines the scope of the development work needed to implement a solution.
Additional work might be necessary, either in extending services through the use of APIs, or in customizing look and feel, for example, introducing a corporate branding.
For some solutions, development and customization might be quite extensive, requiring you to develop new business and presentation services. In other cases, it might be sufficient to customize existing graphical user interfaces, such as the Portal Server desktop, to achieve the functionality required.
For more information on using product APIs and customizing product functionality, see the appropriate component product documentation, including:
Prototyping and Testing
In the prototyping phase, you prototype your deployment design by implementing the deployment architecture in a test environment. You use new application logic and server customizations from the development effort, as described above (see Development and Customization), to perform proof-of-concept deployment testing. This phase involves installing, configuring, and starting up distributed applications and any required infrastructure services in your test environment.
If prototype testing reveals shortcomings in your deployment architecture, you modify the architecture, prototype again, and test again. This iterative process should eventually result in a deployment architecture that is ready for deployment in a production environment.
Rolling Out the Production System
In the production rollout phase, you implement your deployment architecture in a production environment. This phase involves installing, configuring, and starting up distributed applications and any required infrastructure services in a production environment. You normally start with a limited deployment and move to organization-wide implementation. In this process, you perform trial runs, in which you apply increasing loads and stress test the system.
As part of the rollout phase you might need to perform administrative tasks such as provisioning users, implementing single sign-on, and tuning the system to meet performance objectives. Verifying the deployment and performing capacity planning are also part of this phase. Capacity planning, of which monitoring the system plays an important role, is necessary for meeting the long-term needs of system growth.