A One-stop Communication Platform

Set up CommuniGate for all your communication needs, be it e-mail, calendaring, IMs, VoIP, IP PBX or conferencing in simple or farm environments

Monday, October 09, 2006

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Your solutions for communications come in segregated forms. That is, you have one solution for messaging/collaboration, another for VoIP, a third for your IP PBX and so on. Barring a few, most of these solutions become difficult to configure or manage in complex cluster-farm environments.
CommuniGate Pro from CommuniGate Systems (communigate. com or stalker.com) is a product that solves both problems for you by integrating into one package all your communication (messaging, collaboration and telephony) needs into one seamless solution. Let's see what the product can do.

Capabilities
CommuniGate can integrate with LDAP and RADIUS infrastructure for authentication and directory services. If your downstream clients use Outlook, they can use its MAPI capabilities to interact with the CommuniGate facilities. The software has the ability to automatically provision accounts by including a 'Sign Up' feature for new users and you can enable this with a simple checkmark on the administrative control panel. Collaboration and conferencing information is available in XML formats. CommuniGate Pro also runs on 16 OSs and 28 platforms, including Windows, Linux, various flavors of UNIX, AIX, AS/400, OpenVMS, OS/2 and QNX. Every domain and user gets its own 'website'. This website allows the user to store files and retrieve them. They do not get FTP access to do this, but need to use the CommuniGate UI to do so. The space they get is controlled by how much storage you allocate them for their account. This can be up to a limit of 1 GB or unlimited. Once configured, this website can be accessed from: http:// serverIP: 8100/~username. 

CommuniGate has a number of services readily enabled for the user, out of the box. These settings are enabled on a per-domain basis

The editions
CommuniGate Pro comes in seven different editions. The basic single server solution is the 'Core Server' that uses internal or directly attached storage. Then there is the 'Cluster Ready' edition that enables NFS/SAN/NAS based storage. The step up from this is the 'Micro Dynamic Cluster' that lets you use two active back-end servers, expandable any time. The 'Active Dynamic Cluster' edition that's meant for extremely large-scale deployments offers the highest scalability and uptimes. The edition that adds VoIP and IP PBX capabilities is the 'Real Time Communications' server, which adds SIP and Voice XML support along with the ability to do video, IM and real-time collaboration. Security using TLS, S/MIME and SRTP is also a part of this edition. 'SIP Farm' is an active and dynamic high-end cluster farm of CommuniGate Real Time Communications servers. Finally, EdgeGate Services adds edge area security and policy management. Using this, you get a completely integrated and centrally administrable communications platform. 

Installation
For our purposes, we are using the 'Unlimited Trial' version for the Win32 platform that can be downloaded from stalker.com. This is a 10 MB ZIP file. After downloading, extract its contents to a temporary folder preserving folder structures in the ZIP file and run 'Installer.exe' from that folder. You get a simple screen that lets you select alternate folders for the CommuniGate Pro's application files and the data (message boxes and so forth) files. For our demo, we're leaving both directories at their default settings.

The PBX module allows the administrator to create multiple language variants for the playback messages and tones

Click on the Install to proceed. At the end of the installation when you're prompted to start the software, click on Yes. If you want to create a clustered deployment, go ahead and install this on more machines before continuing below. Now, let's configure the software.

Configuration
Before you can proceed, you need to find out what your initial password is. The administrative user account for CommuniGate is 'postmaster'. But the password is a four-digit number that's randomly generated and stored in a text file.

Open a Windows Explorer instance and browse to 'C:\CommuniGate Files\ Accounts\postmaster.macnt'. Open the 'account.settings' file there in Notepad and note the numeric sequence along side 'Password' there. If you want to, change this to another four-digit number (lets say '1234') and save the file. Remember or write down this password somewhere.

Point your browser to the CommuniGate server system's port 8010 (eg: http://127.0.0.1:8010). This is your administrative control panel. There are no shortcuts added to your desktop or programs menus, so it is better to create bookmarks or shortcuts to this location for later.

CommuniGate's administrative panel has no central login feature. Every time you click an administrable menu option, you are prompted for your credentials. To start off, click on the Settings menu on the left side, which should drop down to reveal a sub-menu. Select General here. Enter 'postmaster' for the username and the password ('1234').

Apart from what administrators can set up per-domain basis, each user can individually control their PBX call control settings to modify CommuniGate's behavior

Cluster based
Now, you can configure clusters from Settings>General>Cluster. The beauty of CommuniGate's flexible configurability can be experienced from here itself. You only need to enter the information that is absolutely required and click on Save. Helpers are things that handle external authentication, RADIUS and content filtering. Where applicable, the helpers need to be enabled by placing a checkmark in the boxes given. You can also set up Handlers to handle user-defined events.

You can add as many as you like by filling in the fields that append themselves to the bottom of this page and give them any names you like. You then map these handlers to specific conditions from the 'Elements' sub tab (Events>Elements) and setting up at what thresholds these handlers are
invoked. Several of the configuration pages use markup tags (such as '^0') and these are documented in the product manual that can be separately downloaded from www.stalker.com.

You can also configure 'Auto Sign Up' to allow new users create their own accounts on the CommuniGate server. To do this, go into the Domain Settings tab and check the 'Auto Sign Up' box. This is a per-domain setting and if you create multiple domains (see Multi- domain configuration that follows), you will need to do this for each of them. Let's enable this at this point of time.

Multi-domain based
Just like an Exchange setup, a single CommuniGate deployment can also be confiured for multiple domains. This is done from the Domains menu on the control panel. These domains are independent of the ones you have created on your LDAP/Active Directory, although each CommuniGate domain can be mapped to a specific LDAP domain. You can assign a different IP address for each domain as well as rename them as and when you need.

Mapping domains to LDAP
To map a domain into the LDAP, go to the Directory Integration tab. You first need to enable Directory-based domains by scrolling to the bottom of this screen and clicking on the Enable button there. Now, fill in the attributes (Base DN, Object class and so on) into the various fields.
Here you need to click on 'Create It' to create the mapping.

You can also have different attribute names in CommuniGate and LDAP for the same thing. For instance, name can be called 'UserName' in
CommuniGate and 'cn' in the LDAP. Once you have directory-based domains, you can go into the Domains menu and configure it finer there.
Do note that when you create multiple CommuniGate domains, each domain needs to operate on a different IP address.

Therefore, you need to assign multiple IP addresses to your CommuniGate server's NIC and then use one of them each for each domain. Users of one domain will not be able to access their account if they try to log in from another domain's IP address.

The CommuniGate user interface (for normal users to check their e-mail and so on) is at http://serverIP:8100. Therefore, point your browser to that address now. If you have created multiple domains, administrators can customize UI skins for their users.

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