What’s New in This Release of Communications Express

Sun Java System Communications Express 6.3 includes the following changes and new features:

• Support for Attachments in Events/Tasks

• Next Available Free Period Button

• Address Book Sharing

• Support for Multiple Address Book

• Preserving Customization

• Password Encryption

• LDAP Failover Mechanism

• Mail Integration into Communications Express

• Removal of Access Manager SDK Dependency for Schema 2 Deployment

Support for Attachments in Events/Tasks

The Calendar component of Communications Express allows users to include attachments to an event or task.

Next Available Free Period Button

Communications Express allows users to check availability of invitees. If the invitee is not available for the day of the event, the next available free period button displays the availability of the invitee in the subsequent six days.

Address Book Sharing

The Address book component of Communications Express allows users to share their address book globally as well as to specific users. You can also assign specific permissions to users who subscribe to your address book. You can also subscribe to other shared address books.

Support for Multiple Address Book

Communications Express allows users to create and maintain more than one address books.

Preserving Customization

Starting this release, the Communications Express upgrade script will preserve all customizations that have been made in the product. This was not possible in earlier releases and all customizations were lost on a patch upgrade.

Password Encryption

Starting this release Communications Express configurator tool enctyps passwords during configuration. This is done transparently by the configuration tool. Communications Express now has a tool to encrypt and manage passwords. Administrators can change passwords by running this script.

LDAP Failover Mechanism

The LDAP failover mechanism in Communications Express balances load between a number of configured master and slave LDAP servers. This increasing performance by decreases the response time. Communications Express contains an LDAP failover Manager module that is responsible to retrieve connections from the master or slave servers. Each load balancing server maintains a pool of available free connections. Whenever a Communications Express component requires a connection to the LDAP server, the LDAP failover manager provides the component with a connection based on the load balancing strategy employed.

Mail Integration into Communications Express

Starting this release, the Webmail related user interface components have been moved to Communications Express. In the earlier releases of Communications Express, the mail related files were resident in the Messaging Server. Also, in previous releases of Communications Express, the webmail and the web container ports had to be available for it to work. As a result of this change, only the web container port needs to be available for Communications Express to work.

Removal of Access Manager SDK Dependency for Schema 2 Deployment

In previous releases, Communications Express used the following APIs and libraries to establish connections and fetch information from an LDAP store:

• Domain MAP API (which a part of Communications Express) if Communications Express was deployed using Schema 1 mode.

• Access Manager SDK if Communications Express was deployed using Schema 2

This made Communications Express dependent on Access Manager in Schema 2 mode even though Access Manager is not mandatory for it to work apart from just connecting and fetching information from the LDAP store. Starting this release, this dependency on Access Manager for Schema 2 has been removed. Communications Express is now shipped with a new Domain MAP API for Schema 2.

As a result of this, users who log in to Communications Express can not log on to Access Manager Console.