EnKoo this week is introducing SSL remote-access gear it says supports more users and lets them connect to more applications with less administrative work involved.

The company's enKoo 3000 appliance is designed to handle up to 200 concurrent users, twice that of the company's previous high-end box.

The devices sit between the Internet and corporate servers, and proxy SSL sessions between those servers and browsers on remote computers. The traffic passes through firewall ports normally left open.

New software lets enKoo devices exploit existing entries in Active Directory and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol to authorize what network resources users can access. Previously, customers had to enter that data manually.

New appliance software also lets Citrix customers access MetaFrame servers and the applications they support via Web browsers rather than Citrix client software. The software upgrade lets enKoo customers give end users Web access to terminal services. This broadens the range of applications remote users can reach via the enKoo boxes.

The Citrix support is likely to save heating/air conditioning distributor Slakey Brothers $20,000 per year, says Steve Gillespie, IT systems supervisor for the Elk Grove, Calif., company. About half the 200 users accessing the network via Citrix are being shifted over to the enKoo box, which eliminates the need for that many Citrix client licenses, he says. Those end users being switched also will have easier network access, he says, as using the Citrix client requires multiple logons, first to the Slakey firewall and then to the Citrix server.

When remote users access their e-mail, it doesn't sync properly with the Microsoft Outlook server because the laptops have separate .PST files, one for the laptop and one for the Citrix client, that keep track of the e-mails, he says. The enKoo box eliminates that problem because there is no separate .PST file needed.

The new enKoo gear is likely to make the company more attractive to the small and midsize businesses enKoo is wooing, says Michael Suby, an analyst with Stratecast Partners.

The drawback to the enKoo boxes are that they don't have as many features and support for as many applications as some of the other vendors, he says. But the company says it plans to add them, and the new box and software will fall in line with that plan.

The enKoo 3000 ranges from $4,000 for a license for 25 concurrent users to $10,000 for a license for 200. Software support for Citrix costs $1,000 to $3,000 extra, depending on the number of users the box supports. Terminal services software costs the same.

The Citrix and terminal services software are also available for enKoo's older, smaller hardware, the enKoo 1000 and 2000.