CommuniGate Pro Internet Communications Platform v5.2.9

CommuniGate Systems
Score: 3.55 out of 5
Tested on: RHEL 5
Pricing: For 100 users, first year: $2,800; $4,347 including antivirus, antispam (as tested with Kaspersky and Cloudmark); Subsequent years: $503; $1,988 including antivirus, antispam

CommuniGate Systems has been in the e-mail business for nearly two decades.

CommuniGate Pro, the company's flagship e-mail server, has evolved over the years into a modern messaging server with a focus on performance and scalability. Uniquely in this environment, CommuniGate Pro is truly platform agnostic, operating on every flavor of Unix, including Solaris, BSD, Linux, Mac OS X, as well as Windows, and legacy operating systems such as OpenVMS and AS/400. (Although we do have OpenVMS in our test lab, we ran CommuniGate Pro on Linux for a fairer comparison in this test.) CommuniGate Pro is also available in a free community edition for five users.

CommuniGate Pro's distinguishing feature is the inclusion of unified communications facilities, including a full-featured Session Initiation Protocol PBX, SIP firewall (session border controller and SIP proxy), and an instant messaging server, as well as the traditional groupware features of e-mail, shared contacts and calendaring. Although CommuniGate Pro handily squashed its competitors when it came to performance, we found fault with its truly unpleasant management interface, which seems to be designed more to frustrate and confuse than to support the system manager.

On the other hand, CommuniGate Pro's "Pronto" webmail interface, based on Adobe Air technology, will appeal to end-users who are accustomed to AJAX-based consumer Web sites. We just wish that the company could have taken some of the brilliance exhibited in Pronto and moved it to the system management side of the product.

Overall, CommuniGate Pro will seem a hard product to learn to manage for the network manager, but end users will enjoy the webmail interface and high performance.

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