Windows NT Magazine Chooses Best of Show at MEC99

With agonizing deliberation and painful introspection, judges from Windows NT Magazine identified five winning products from among the 141 exhibitors at the Microsoft Exchange Conference99 (MEC99). Our judges looked for several qualities in the award-winning products. Innovation always attracts our attention. Whether in specific features or in overall product concept, each of these products is innovative. The judges also looked for products that solve a business need in a particularly elegant manner with feature-rich implementations and intuitive appeal. Because each product targets distinctly different needs, Windows NT Magazine awarded each one Best of Show. For the list of winners, see "Best of Show Winners."

Users tout the power of decision support data presented in OLAP cubes. The trick is to make the data accessible to the executives and managers who will use the information. Decision Support Panel (DSP) is an OLAP client for Microsoft Outlook that will put OLAP cubes before your decision makers who use the familiar and highly visible Outlook interface. This winner is early in its product cycle.

The next award goes to BindView Development's bv-Control for Microsoft Exchange Server, a well-designed and comprehensive package for managing Exchange servers throughout your organization. With query-based reporting for configuration and status information, drag-and-drop customized monitoring, and organizationwide mailbox administration, bv-Control will improve the quality of life for Exchange administrators in large organizations everywhere. This product is still in beta.

Email-borne viruses can be more disruptive to a business than the crash of a key server. Sybari Software's Antigen 5.5 for Exchange protects against infective email viruses in a particularly elegant way—before Exchange delivers the message to a user's mailbox.

Unified Messaging is a buzzword for organizations committed to helping their employees communicate more efficiently and effectively. Active Voice's Unity 2.2 brings voicemail and fax messages to the familiar Outlook email interface with a clean, intuitive implementation.

Even at an Exchange show, no round of awards would be complete without at least one winner in a hardware category, and this award goes to IBM's Netfinity 4000R. This 550MHz dual-Pentium III server with 2GB of Error-Correcting Code (ECC) Synchronous DRAM (SDRAM), two 18GB hard disks, and a spare PCI slot consumes just one unit of rack space (1.75"). IBM wins this award for engineering a lot of functionality into an efficient package.