Even More Amazing OS X Experiences
It sure feels like we are on a roll with our improvements for Mac OS X system administrators, so why should we stop? After listening to complaint after complaint about the difficulty of installing MPP we finally took the advice of Frank Zappa, though applied to software - ’shut up and play yer guitar’. Instead of explaining why our customers were just not getting it we shut up and listened and have created something that has exceeded our expectations.
Phase 1 was to redesign our admin GUI to make things more apparent, remove cryptic techno speak and drop the assumption that everyone has enough time to figure our product out. This is an ongoing battle, but we have conquered the initial campaign and now we are in clean-up mode.
Phase 2 was to redo our installers so that it was no longer necessary to have a compiler installed or to install any perl modules. This was a monster task believe it or not, but this is conquered thanks to Ovidiu, our main technical guru. This was great, but it still required an admin to use the terminal to run our configure scripts.
Phase 3 which we have now delivered has expanded on phase 2 by removing the need to run our configure script from the command line. Since our OS X customers are either using Postfix or CommuniGate we detect which email server is in use and make all of the appropriate configurations automatically. The installer is one click and it installs MPP, MPP Manager and all dependencies, configures our email server to use MPP and launches Safari at the end with MPP Manager opened up. Pretty slick if you ask me. You still need to disable the Apple junk mail filtering from the admin control panel, but this may change in the future as well.
Phase 4 has some surprises and I am hoping to announce them soon.
Technorati Tags: Mac OS X, MPP, Email Security, Spam Filtering, Mac Email Security
Simplifying Antispam for Mac OS X Email Servers
MPP has long been a great antispam solution for Mac OS X email servers and gateways, but it has also been quite difficult to install for the busy admin. We have racked our brain on this for years and we have finally come up with a solution that goes a long way to fixing our installation issues. Further improvements are on the way, but I am really psyched about how far we have come.
Before I present the solution I want to give a little background to the problem. There are 2 components to MPP, MPP Core and MPP Manager. MPP Core has been easy to install for many years, it is just a matter of running the DMG installer for MPP and then a configure script. The configure script sets up the email server to work with MPP and sets basic settings in MPP’s configuration. The problems with getting MPP installed have mostly been related to MPP Manager or in previous iterations of our GUI (Webmin module, qReview).
The GUI controls for MPP have depenencies that we required users to install. The dependencies were a include Perl modules and 2 system libraries - expat, an XML browser, and GD, a graphing tool. Perl modules can generally be installed with CPAN, a menu driven command line utility and the libraries required source downloads a simple compiles. If your eyes are glossing over and you are ready to go back to check your favorite web site again then you are not alone. These tasks are foreign to many admins and frankly, Apple hasn’t made it any simpler. Typically a few Perl modules will fail compilation and the standard GD library won’t compile on OS X. Beyond that, unless you add a compiler on your server from XCODE, you will not be able to compile anything on OS X.
Fortunately for Apple users, there is a wonderful organization, Macports, that makes installing standard open source software easier for Mac OS X admins, but even this is too complicated for many to explore. Macports allows admins to install libraries and perl modules that have been tailored for Mac OS X. It is similar to yum or up2date on Linux and is an incredible resource. Any Mac OS X administrator that is not familiar with Macports should take a minute to explore it. I know that Apple wants to hide the terminal from you but you can really unlock the power of OS X on the terminal.
So finally, after years, we have gotten the message from our customers or potential customers and created a DMG installer for MPP Manager that installs all necessary libraries and perl modules pre-built. No more compiler, no more Macports, no more CPAN, no more nothing, just double click and install. When the installer is done Safari is automatically opened to the MPP admin link. It is the simplest installation of MPP GUI tools ever and I hope you will have the chance to check it out soon.
If you want to give it a try, please give it a try:
Mac OS X PPC
ftp://ftp.raeinternet.com/pub/mpp3/beta/mppmanager/mppmanager-1.1.1-osx.ppc.dmg
Mac OS X Intel
ftp://ftp.raeinternet.com/pub/mpp3/beta/mppmanager/mppmanager-1.1.1-osx.i386.dmg
Protagon - Partner Update
I am pleased to announce the new web site of our Portuguese partner, Protagon. Looking for MPP in Brasil?
http://www.messagepartners.com.br/
MPP - Easier to use than ever
With the release of MPP Manager 1.1.0 we have made MPP easier to use than ever. We have attempted to look at features in terms of functionality and usefulness and presented them in this manner. We have moved less frequently changed options to advanced sections, we have replaced obtuse configuration options with useful, plain descriptions and we have tried to simplify presentation as much as possible. We have removed the abundance of options that confuse and created more interpretive commands that set options for you so you don’t have the burden of understanding each and every MPP micro feature. I hope that you will check this out and give us your feedback. If you have tried MPP in the past and found it to be a lot to comprehend I hope that you will give us a second look. Having a powerful and versatile product is a blessing and a curse for the end-user, but I think we are more of the former now.