The original business problem was brought to the Messaging Forum by Boeing, who were attempting to establish secure e-mail connection with a number of different business partners. This proved to be impossible to achieve because
- Products from different vendors were unable to exchange encrypted e-mails and
- It was not acceptable for one company to mandate that all of its business partners use a single product
Boeing summarized their Messaging needs as:
- Provide access to strongly encrypted e-mail outside the enterprise
- Reduce complexity of deploying secure e-mail
- Present a single solution which can span the enterprise
- Provide broadly acceptable solution to customers, partners, suppliers
- Boeing initiated their project in Q4/1999
- Challenge issued in Q3/2001
- Solution demonstrated in Q1/2002
- Report and toolkit published in Q2/2002
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Enable organizations to exchange strongly encrypted e-mail, using a standards-based, vendor neutral architecture that does not require manual key exchange.
In January 2002, 6 months after the challenge was issued, a solution was demonstrated, using products from a number of vendors:
- Lotus Notes
- Microsoft Exchange
- Microsoft Outlook
- Sendmail
- Linux with Open LDAP
- Windows Active Directory
- Maxware Virtual Directory
- Verisign Directory Server
Later in 2002, two documents were produced to record and promote the results:
Boeing have defined usage of secure messaging as defined by the challenge toolkit as a contractual obligation for communication with their business partners in a major new project. This has revealed a shortage of skilled individuals able to support companies in deployment.
The architecture defined by the challenge formed the basis of the S/MIME Secure Messaging Architecture. This in turn forms the baseline for the S/MIME Secure Messaging Certification program which encourages and identifies skilled messaging practitioners.
LDAP directory proxy technology development within the project has been made available under an open source license.
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