3Com Office Connect Internet Server

Network appliances are all the rage and it's in this area that 3Com has chosen to kick off its small-business initiative. Appliances are devices that are as simple to use as, say, a domestic television - you just plug it in, set it up once, and it just works from that point onwards. Any network device can be a nightmare to configure, especially for small businesses that can't afford dedicated IT staff, and so network appliances can be an answer to a maiden's prayer in this regard.

3Com has therefore launched a range of small-business network appliances - the OfficeConnect Network Storage Server, the OfficeConnect eMail Server and the OfficeConnect Internet Firewall. Or you can buy the whole lot in one unit, an Internet Server, which rolls just about all the functionality of the above products into one appliance.

As well as saving a few quid, the Internet Server also makes a lot of sense from a management point of view. As the need for uptime, security and data protection in today's 'dot' economy take IT infrastructures to ever more complex levels, concerns over the interoperability of various system components becomes an almost overwhelming task for even experienced IT professionals.

So what do you get for your money? Well, at first glance, not a lot. The Internet Server is essentially a small PC, sans keyboard and monitor. Open it up and you'll find a 500Mhz Celeron processor and a 10Gb hard disk drive: not exactly mouth-watering.

Look further, though, and its usefulness becomes clear. At the rear you'll find a 10/100 Ethernet card in one of the two PCI slots, plus a serial port and an integrated 10/100 Ethernet port, labelled 'WAN'. Hooking it up to your existing 10 or 100BaseT network is a piece of cake - you plug the Internet Server into your hub and then plug a modem (or ISDN TA) in to the nine-pin serial port. You can also plug your WAN gateway (e.g. ADSL or ISDN router) into the WAN socket. Either way, this is how your network accesses the internet.

The next step is to install the IS Clients on each workstation. Although there's no reason it can't support other platforms, Internet Server only supports Windows 9x, NT4 and 2000. It can support up to 50 clients comfortably, and as it runs a version of Linux, there are no additional licences to pay.

The Internet Server is a DHCP server, so TCP/IP reconfiguration on your workstations is kept to an absolute minimum. You then point your browser to the Internet Server's IP address and run through a configuration wizard to configure the server, add users, specify your ISP details and so on. If you have all this to hand, this job can be completed in a quarter of an hour. It takes 10 times this to just install Microsoft BackOffice Small Business Server.

There's no internal backup provision, but you can set up a scheduler to back up regularly to another network device. Reporting options are pretty good, too, and the Internet Server lets you generate reports in all the key areas: for email usage, internet access/connection and system security.

Once it's up and running, the device is managed via a web browser and so can be remotely managed. It offers a laundry list of services - it's a plain vanilla file and print server and it's a web server, either externally accessible or via your intranet. It offers sophisticated firewall protection via Stateful Packet Inspection (Network Address Translation is also available) and Remote Access, allowing remote users to access their files and emails.

It's also an ftp, LDAP and DNS server, but probably most important of all, it's an email server that's compatible with Outlook Express and Netscape Messenger, though it shouldn't be too difficult to use other email clients. It supports SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4 mail protocols and a range of mail server types, such as multi-drop mailbox forwarding, mirrored mailboxes and enhanced SMTP Turn Delivery, Standalone SMTP and SMTP mailbagging. And as if that wasn't enough, it's also a proxy server.

The closest rival to the Internet Server would be a conventional server running Microsoft BackOffice Small Business Server. Not only would this be considerably more expensive (the additional SBS seat licences alone could cost more than the Internet Server) but such a system would be far more complicated to set up and maintain. Such a system would undoubtedly be more sophisticated than Internet Server, but the core functionality is much the same. And that's what matters to small businesses: they're much more interested in 'fit and forget' solutions that just work, and on that basis they should waste no time in checking out the 3Com Internet Server.

Contact
3Com 01189 278 300; www.3com.com