abridean Provisor

Reviewed by Mitch Tulloch

www.abridean.com 

This review is reprinted from my new book Administering Exchange Server 2000 from McGraw-Hill

abridean Provisor is a product designed for Application Server Providers (ASPs) to use for provisioning their clients with customized Exchange 2000-based messaging and collaboration solutions. The idea behind Provisor is to make the application provisioning process fast and simple by using intuitive Wizard-driven and MMC console-based management interfaces. Using abridean Provisor an ASP can quickly provision Exchange 2000 for multiple companies together with integrated metering and billing features with SQL Server 7.0 is used for the billing database.

A single Exchange 2000 server can securely host multiple companies using Provisor’s proprietary Customer Partitioning feature, and it takes only a few mouse clicks to set up a new company using the ASP admin tools. The result for customers is managed messaging and collaboration services hosted by the ASP and administered largely by the customers themselves. For companies looking to outsource their messaging and collaboration needs from an ASP, they may need to look no farther than to find an ASP running abridean Provisor.

The ASP administrators use the management console to create and configure top-level organizational units representing companies belonging to different customers. These customers are also provided with their own version of the management console for customizing their provisioned Exchange 2000 services (Figure A2-5). Using this console customers can easily create and configure their own organizational units, users, groups, and contacts, change passwords, delegate administrative responsibilities over organizational units and their contents to specific users, and perform other common management tasks.

Figure A2-5: abridean Provisor management console (reprinted with permission from Abridean Inc.)

Hardware and software requirements for Provisor are basic enough than any ASP wanting to provision their customers with Exchange 2000 services should be able to get up and running quickly. Recommended requirements include one Active Directory domain controller, one SQL 7.0 server, one or more Exchange 2000 servers, and a broadband Internet connection.

Note: I hope to do a fuller hands-on review of this product early in the new year and will let you know my rating (number of stars) of the product at that time!