BIOS: Technology Means Business

Red Earth Software, a relatively new company formed in 2001, has released a server-based software solution that compresses and decompress e-mail attachments. The claimed benefit of this is that it allows you to set company-wide compression rules that can be applied to both incoming and outgoing mail, thereby helping to minimise wasted bandwidth. Designed for SMTP mail servers running Exchange Server (5.5, 2000 and 2003) or Lotus Notes/Domino, Policy Patrol Zip also lets you create customised rules by specifying conditions, exceptions and actions, each of which can be scheduled by date and time. The software only runs on Windows servers (Windows 2000 Server or later), however, and you also need to have Microsoft's .NET Framework 1.1 installed.

Pros: Rules based; schedule by date and time; good value
Cons: Runs on Windows servers only

Release: Red Earth Software, developer of e-mail content security software, has announced the release of Policy Patrol Zip, e-mail management software for Exchange Server and Lotus Domino that provides automatic compression of attachments at the server level. Policy Patrol Zip can compress and decompress attachments for outgoing and incoming e-mail, and uniquely offers the ability to compress internally sent attachments as well as external attachments (if installed on Exchange 2000 or Exchange 2003).

'Policy Patrol Zip addresses a problem that more and more companies are facing, namely the increased use and size of attachments', said Mike Spykerman, president of Red Earth Software. 'By compressing attachments Policy Patrol can help reduce bandwidth usage and decrease the amount of disk space needed for storing e-mail messages. This in turn decreases network congestion, improves employee productivity and reduces the time needed to restore messages after a mail server failure. Furthermore, since compression is done automatically at server level, this saves users having to compress attachments before they are sent out.'

Policy Patrol can also decompress attachments to avoid users having to unzip received attachments. Although decompression increases disk storage space requirements, Policy Patrol offers the flexibility to apply a file size limit to decompression rules, therefore minimising the impact on bandwidth and storage space, and only offering decompression where necessary.

Policy Patrol Zip allows companies to configure flexible, user-based rules that can be applied to specified senders and recipients, attachment types and attachment sizes. Policy Patrol works with Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, 2000, 5.5 and Lotus Notes/Domino.

Links:
Policy Patrol Zip Web site
Policy Patrol Zip 30-day trial