Designing large electronic mail systems

An electronic mail system (EMS) has been in operation within Digital Equipment Corporation now for several years. The function of the system is to help serve the internal communication needs of this geographically distributed corporation. In particular, the system was intended to increase the effectiveness of managers, although secretaries, engineers, and other employees also use the system. As the mail system grew from a pilot operation to a global communications utility, the system's managers continued to receive a wide range of informal feedback concerning users' perceptions and utilization of the system.In order to assess reliably how users were reacting to this new communication mode, usage aspects of the electronic mail system were investigated by a random survey of the user population and by an analysis of EMS learning behavior. The survey portion of the study will be discussed in this paper.

Data Exchanges between Healthcare Professionals are always limited to paper. For letters, reports, results, the physicians and hospitals are yet using the classical post-office mailing system. With the growing development of Medical Informatics within the Hospital Information Systems and the GPs offices, the way to exchange medical data will be more and more oriented towards the Telematics procedures. If Tele-consultation, video-conferencing applications appear as routine procedures, a safe, protected, and rapid transmission of medical data and records through electronic mailing systems is not yet really available.The Rithme*Inter- mediation Platform is an experimental product, tested in the town of Armentières (in the City of Lille) in the North of France to allow a better, safer, more rapid electronic communication between all the professionals of a geographical sector. One of the mail component of this platform is the “Events Server” which collects and displays all the available information concerning a dedicated patient to the medical authorised correspondents. To realise this task the Rithme*Platform takes charge of 4 main functions: formatting the messages, assuring the security, managing the directories, notifying emergencies. Currently experimented with success in the City of Lille, this Platform will be soon customised and commercialised.

One the main objective of the European Commission is to innovate and bring ICT to its full potential in any sector, including eGovernment, eCommerce, and eHealth services. Certified Electronic Mail (CEM) systems of Member States are currently not interoperable, thus impacting on economic growth and competitiveness. The paper investigates the use of the DNSSec technology as a technological evolution of the Italian CEM System and the first step towards interoperability and adherence to international standards.

Electronic mailing systems are the dominant communication systems in private and business matters. Public administrations deliver documents to citizens and businesses—subpoenas, legal verdicts, notifications, administrative penalties, and so forth. However, official activities are more strongly bound to legal regulations than in civil law. Delivery of crucial and personal documents raises the demand for qualified identification and non-repudiation services as featured by registered and certified mail in the paper world. Legal requirements for electronic delivery carried out by public administrations (eDelivery) cannot be fulfilled by standard mailing systems. Although the requirements for eDelivery systems may differ due to national legal regulations, this paper discusses common requirements and properties on an abstract level. Moreover, the author shows how these requirements have been addressed by introducing the Austrian eDelivery system for eGovernment applications.

Multimedia in the radiology environment: Current concept

The deployment of a telecommunication service involves technical issues such as cellular transmission, routing etc, which are transparent to the user. Electronic mail or Short Message System are good examples of communication services used by persons provided with wireless terminals. The incoming generation of mobile equipment will access internet-like services and WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) is a standard destined to specify the related new architectures. WAP forum efforts will also concentrate on the development of tests aimed to insure the conformance and the introperability of WAP implementations. The contribution of this paper is the design of checking sequences for the interoperability of WAP implementations. Our work mainly contributes to phase two of WAP conformance process review.

The new face of government is electronic. Prior to the development of e-government, adoption of small-scale computing and networking in homes and businesses created the world of e-business, where computer technologies mediate transactions once performed face-to-face. Through the use of computers large and small, companies reduce costs, standardize performance, extend hours of service, and increase the range of products available to consumers. These same technological advances create opportunities for governments to improve their capacity to meet growing public service mandates. Tasks that formerly required a trip to city hall can be accomplished remotely. Government employees can post answers to frequently asked questions online, and citizens can submit complex questions through the same electronic mail (e-mail) systems already used at home and in businesses. This developing e-government increases the number and complexity of electronic databases that must be managed according to the roles information plays in government operations.

An algorithm for load balancing in multiprocessor systems

Can management affect the rate by which organizational members adopt a new computer based communication medium? The question is addressed by comparing the rate by which employees start to use an electronic mail system (EMS) and case descriptions across four departments during a five year period in a large Swedish manufacturing company. Data on EMS use are fitted to a model describing the spread of use as a function of social and management influence. Data are consistent with the hypothesis that the rate of new users of EMS can be influenced by both department-level management and peers. Faster growth in use occurred when department-level management exercised implementation efforts. The rate of growth increased significantly when a local information center (IC) was established. The more resources the local IC was supplied with the higher the rate of growth in EMS use. Management of the implementation process may be especially preferred when introducing end-use network technologies in organizations due to interdependent demand among users.

The Department of Defense's transition from AUTODIN store and forward messaging and baseline individual electronic mail (email) systems to the Defense Message System (DMS) will involve fielding a messaging infrastructure to support a million plus users. The DMS service management capability needs to be able to handle operational issues such as end-to-end performance, message monitoring and tracking, fault correlation and filtering, provisioning, short-term and long range planning, configuration management, and user help desk functions. The DMS service management needs to be scalable from the initial deployment to the target, and it needs to be able to evolve functionally as the industry and government improves their understanding of what is required to manage large scale enterprise-wide services such as messaging, global directories, electronic commerce, and other services. This paper presents the three-tiered management organization along with the roles and responsibilities for managing DMS within the Defense Information Infrastructure (DII) Control Concept. Next, the tools and technology and the evolution strategy for the management capability are discussed. During the transition the DMS-compliant and the baseline capabilities will co-exist, however, minimal investment is being made to improve or change the management of the baseline systems. Thus, the focus of this paper is the operations and management concepts for the DMS-compliant capabilities.

In this paper, we discuss the design of an MPEG-4 compression technology based multimedia e-mail system. As our test in ISDN context indicates, the MPEG-4 gives high compression ratio up to 130:1 without discernable quality deterioration in multimedia e-mail application where video is featured by infrequent and slow motions. It is an exciting improvement over other compressors in this area. The performance comparison of our system with other similar systems is also given in this paper. IN our multimedia e- mail system, messaging subsystem is implemented with Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI). A special architecture of multimedia e-mail package is also presented.

A new mailing system, known as the Multi-Media Slide Presentation (MMSP), incorporating multimedia elements is proposed to allow the presenter to prepare a slide presentation and transmit it like an electronic mail (e-mail) to a distant place and offer the same presentation environment, without being physically present. The prototype for MMSP was developed on Microsoft Windows for the PC environment, enabling text, audio and pictures and application data to be embedded into frames that may be transmitted and received on the network running under Windows. The prototype conforms to the Microsoft Multimedia extension and uses Microsoft Mail Application Interface (MAPI) and Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). The prototype was tested successfully for generating slides, transmitting and receiving on the network as an electronic mail. This paper presents the implementation details of the proposed MMSP, including the limitations. The availability of larger bandwidth networks and various efficient data compression techniques will make the MMSP more efficient, fast and effective application for real-time based slide presentations.

Uses for computer conferencing: Electronic mail for discussions

Nginx is a commonly used and free open-source web server that is used as a reverse proxy server, load balancer and HTTP cache. It consumes less memory and can handle more clients with less number of processes. Nginx provides users with five predefined load balancing algorithms. However, most of these algorithms are static and some of the load balancing rules are inefficient. In order to make the load of a cluster more stable under high concurrent requests, we developed a Dynamic Load Balancing (DLB) algorithm that uses Nginx as a network security control panel to provide load balancing for a cluster of backend servers. The DLB algorithm is based on the weighted round robin module of Nginx, Logistic Regression and Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) algorithm. It handles the situation of high concurrent requests and reduces the probability of omitted or under-reported incident and status. We also propose a Hybrid Load Balance Method (HLBM) that incorporates the DLB algorithm and evolutionary computing to further improve the performance. We have conducted limited experiment by using dynamic load balancing algorithm. We will complete to develop the Hybrid Load Balance method and conduct experiments for HLBM.

Load balancing algorithms are designed to achieve efficient resource utilisation in large-scale distributed systems. The primary goal of designing load balancing algorithms is to balance the overall workload among all the nodes in distributed systems to improve the performance. This paper presents an in-depth study and detailed comparative analysis of different load monitoring and balancing algorithms employing fuzzy logic and mobile agents. A detailed qualitative as well as quantitative analysis of algorithmic performances is included. The analytical survey presented in this paper would enable understanding of applications of different algorithms under different computing environments. Furthermore, this paper proposes a hybrid architecture combining fuzzy logic and mobile agents for load balancing and monitoring in distributed systems.