IT Director takes a look at Kubi, which is a collaboration product that bridges the gap between the email client and the collaboration portal. According to the article, Kubi provides collaboration for shared documents, shared discussion groups, tasks and calendars. The big difference is that instead of providing these in a separate workspace or portal, it builds these facilities on top of the familiar Outlook or Lotus Notes email client.

The New York Times reports that Microsoft, Palm, and Symbian are battling each other to dominate the smartphone market. The article then goes on to review Mircosoft’s entry in the smartphone market, the Motorola MPx200, which allows you to synchronize the phone’s address book, calendar and email with Microsoft Outlook on a Windows PC. Free registration is required to view this article.

eChannelLine takes a look at Microsoft CRM 1.2. The new CRM release supports Microsoft Windows Server System 2003, Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and Microsoft Office 2003. Small businesses will also find support for Microsoft Small Business Server.

Network Engines announced its first firewall appliance for Microsoft Exchange. The Network Engines Firewall for Microsoft Exchange, which is based upon Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2000, utilizes the features of Microsoft ISA Server 2000 to provide protection for customers using Microsoft Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003.

Pumatech announced the availability of its new Intellisync: goAnywhere software, which allows users with Web-enabled devices – a laptop PC, mobile phone or personal digital assistant (PDA) – to remotely access Microsoft Outlook information and files that reside on their desktop computer, including email, contacts, tasks, calendars and documents.

LastBit Software announced the release of Secret Explorer 5.0, a software tool for browsing though Microsoft Protected Storage files for Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003. Secret Explorer enables users to locate hidden information in any Windows-based system. This information includes, but is not limited to so-called auto-fill data from Internet Explorer, such as Web form logins and passwords, Microsoft Outlook account and identity passwords, dial-up passwords and so on.

Light Reading has completed a technology test, with eight SSL-based VPN gateways put through their paces. The gateways were subjected to a range of performance and scaleability tests to determine which products performed best in terms of: session rate; concurrent user capacity; Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA) handling (with and without denial-of-service attacks); forwarding rate; and security.

Mirapoint unveiled new versions of its Message Server and Message Director email and security appliances. According to CRN, the Mirapoint Messaging Operating System, MOS 3.4 becomes an all-in-one Web mail appliance. The Message Server supports Microsoft Outlook as well, giving users the ability to schedule in Outlook and synchronize the changes with the Mirapoint back end.

Internet News reports that Brightmail released an upgrade to its enterprise spam filtering software. Brightmail Anti-Spam Version 5.5 contains new URL rules to catch those who send spam containing deceptive URLs, along with a second-generation Open Proxy List, the company’s real-time blacklist. The upgrade includes administrative controls for corporate administrators who prefer hands on to the product’s set and forget premise.

A new research report from Ferris Research and Stata Laboratories entitled the Time Overhead of Email (December 2003) found that email users typically spend at least 1-2 hours per week on overhead tasks, including waiting for email to download, searching through folders to find messages, printing out emails, filing messages into folders, processing spam and virus, and using address books. Today’s email users commonly spend a lot of time searching for messages, however, many email products, notably Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook, have very poor search capabilities according to the Ferris report.