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Exclaiming Exclaimer!

Posted on 20 Mar 2006 at 12:06

Jon Honeyball discovers a new server-side engine for enhancing Exchange Server, while David Moss revisits Microsoft's RIS

It's often all too easy to slip into a mindset that says all good software has to come from the west coast of America. When you're used to dealing with PR people, marketing and tech support across an eight-hour time difference, it can come as a pleasant surprise to be reminded that great software development is being done right here on our own doorstep. And that often makes it possible to meet the developers and the head of technical creativity, and to follow their progress over many years.

One such group was a trio of likely lads in Slough back in 1990, who under the name of Threadz built up an enviable reputation for innovative development work that was genuinely cutting edge. Their head coding guru, Gary Levell, impressed me hugely with the work he'd put into their Organizer product - a clever graphical PIM (personal information manager) that was years ahead of its time. A major deal with Lotus followed quickly, and the lads quite rightly made a lot of money by running the Organizer development program for Lotus for a number of years. To be honest, though, a lot of the good stuff Gary and I had discussed back in 1990 got lost in the grey-suited corporate corridors of such a global software giant. Lotus could and should have made Organizer into the universal information interface for all its products, especially Notes, and the fact that Lotus just didn't 'get it' in this regard is yet another reason why the company is now a niche player and Microsoft rules the corporate data roost.

Later on in the 1990s, Gary reappeared with a small development team - search through the PC Pro archives to find my column about SplatMail, a radically leading-edge email program with a distinctly fun and quirky user interface. It proved to be a bit too new and too jazzy for the market, and after a while the team closed the doors on the project. However, in the process of developing it, the team had learnt a lot about Exchange Server, Outlook and so forth that would prove to be useful later on.

Roll forward to today, and I was pleasantly surprised to see Gary pop up on my Microsoft Messenger window. It seems that his team has been working on Exchange Server-based applications for a couple of years, and that a lunch and chinwag were definitely in order. The product I got to see that day is supposed to be ready for launch by the time you read this column, but that ain't the half of it. That afternoon of furious brainstorming opened up a whole new set of possibilities for the firm's latest technology, and to be honest my head is still buzzing with the potential of what it's got there. Nevertheless, it still has to decide to go down those particular routes and bring the result to market, so I'll be following what the company's up to over the next few months.

In the meantime, there's the product it's currently shipping, Exclaimer, which is a server-side engine for enhancing Exchange Server. What it offers is contained in several main components, the first of which are called Disclaimers. These are the hefty chunks of text you get at the bottom of emails from corporate drudges, which say this isn't your email and that if you get it by mistake you should forward it to so-and-so and on and on for what seems like several paragraphs. Disclaimer addition isn't a new thing - a number of other mail programs can do it too - but I think Exclaimer's implementation is particular powerful. You have separate settings for email coming in, email that moves within the server and email that moves out from the server, and it has full support for HTML email and text email, with separate settings for normal email, encrypted email and digitally signed emails too. You can also set it up to not to add the disclaimer if the subject or body contains certain key fields.