Since a recent Symlabs press release mentioned that the new version 4.0 of both Symlabs Virtual Directory Server and Symlabs LDAP Proxy are nearing their availability date, I thought it would be good to give everyone an update on how the work to wrap everything up is proceeding. And, the answer is ... VERY well indeed!

We're on still target to meet our general availability date, which will be very soon now, and more important than that we're on target to deliver all the benefits that this new release was designed to offer. We're getting good feedback which is telling us that the performance improvements are going to be as dramatic in real-world implementations as we predicted they would be. Speaking as the Product Manager and also one of the developers, this is the best news we could get, since every small percentage increase in the speed and throughput of such communications-intensive processes is a prize we fight very hard to win. But, as our customers insist, this is a championship caliber prize because it's the key to making their whole infrastructure responsive - and to them that means customer satisfaction, efficient operation, and fewer problems overall.

Not to diminish the importance of usability by putting it last, but version 4.0 also gives Symlabs Virtual Directory Server and Symlabs LDAP Proxy an improved user interface to make them much nicer, meaning faster and easier to configure into working applications, plus a powerful new feature to centralize administration of multiple instances on different servers. I'll write more on that later, but already I can see that we are getting very good reports on this added usability. And, since this means we're giving our colleagues in the IT department a shiny new set of tools, that makes me feel pretty good, too.

Fernando García Vegas