Software Components

During installation of your Messenger system, you selected components to install, as described in "Installing a Novell Messenger System" in the Messenger 1.0 Installation Guide.

NOTE:  The Installation program interface illustrated throughout this section is available when installing from a Windows* workstation, but not when installing on Linux*, where a text-based interface is used.

• Messaging Agent
• Archive Agent
• Administration Files

Messaging Agent

One (and only one) Messaging Agent runs in your Messenger system. The Messaging Agent performs the following activities:

• Accesses Novell eDirectory on behalf of users to authenticate users to the Messenger system when they start the Messenger client, to search for contacts as users build their contact lists, to save users' option settings for the Messenger client, and so on
• Transfers instant messages back and forth between Messenger users
• Maintains presence information about Messenger users so that the Messenger client can show user availability status (such as online, busy, away, and idle)
• Passes conversations to the Archive Agent if archiving is enabled

The Messaging Agent is highly scalable. If you are setting up a large Messenger system, you would want to run the Messaging Agent on a dedicated server with a processor speed of 1-2 GHz and with 1 GB of RAM. The Messaging Agent has been tested to easily support 1000 active conversations on such hardware. If you assume that 2% of Messenger users might be conversing simultaneously, you could plan on your Messenger system including as many as 50,000 users. Although Messenger has not been tested with this many actual users, you can be confident that it can scale to meet the needs of a very large number of users.

Archive Agent

If you need to retain a long-term record of all conversations, you can enable archiving. For example, you might need to retain conversations for legal reasons, as an aspect of a corporate e-mail retention policy.

In order to enable archiving, you need to run one (and only one) Archive Agent in your Messenger system. The Archive Agent performs the following activities:

• Accesses eDirectory on behalf of authorized Messenger users in order to grant them access to the Messenger archive
• Receives completed conversations from the Messaging Agent and stores them in the Messenger archive
• Indexes the archived conversations so that they can be searched by authorized Messenger users
• Performs searches in the Messenger archive for authorized Messenger users
• Manages expiration of old conversations
• Repairs the Messenger archive in case of damage to its database

Administration Files

Messenger system administration is performed by using ConsoleOne^®. The Messenger snap-in to ConsoleOne can be installed with the version of ConsoleOne that runs on Windows workstations and servers, NetWare^® servers, or Linux workstations and servers. After the initial installation of your Messenger system, you can install the Messenger snap-in to ConsoleOne to additional workstations and servers using the Admin Files Only option of the Messenger Installation program.