Juniper Networks' NetScreen-SM 3000

Get the Picture

Secure Meeting supports desktop and application sharing, text chatting, and presentation annotation, all of which worked as advertised. I found the annotation features especially useful, as I could point to a topic on the screen during a presentation and embellish it by adding text and drawing circles and squiggly lines. But for voice integration or real-time video, or a package that integrates real-time and asynchronous collaboration, you'll need to look elsewhere--these features aren't available in Secure Meeting.

You can manage users locally on the Secure Meeting server, but enterprise customers will appreciate that Juniper integrates a wide range of authentication options. I set up my Secure Meeting server to authenticate against my CommuniGate Pro mail server via LDAP so I wouldn't have to create a single local user. You can set up multiple simultaneous authentication servers and assign different roles to each user.

If you've administered any of Juniper's Instant Virtual Extranet-based security appliances, such as the Secure Access SSL VPN device, you'll be comfortable maneuvering around the Secure Meeting admin interface. Is real-time collaboration a business-critical function? Don't worry--Juniper's got you covered with both active-passive and active-active clustering, including session failover when a node goes down.

A 50-user Secure Meeting server with annual maintenance will run you $136.02 per user, per year over two years. Pricing for the 500-user version drops to $78.30/user/year over two years. When you consider that a single pay-per-use, one-hour meeting with four participants at WebEx costs $79.20, you'll agree that Secure Meeting is affordable. It's the next best thing to outsourcing where administrative overhead is concerned.

Ron Anderson is Network Computing's lab director. Write to him at [email protected].0