OSI/MHS Orientation Guide

Building Your Message Handling System
OSI/MHS Orientation Guide—424829-001
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What You Need to Know
•
Designing applications, and possibly upgrading 1984 applications, to take advantage
of new features of the 1988 systems
What You Need to Know
To integrate 1984 and 1988 systems in a messaging network, you must know how to
perform the following functions:
•
Planning a configuration and a routing strategy that minimize the use of 1984
systems to relay 1988 messages. If you use OSI/MHS as your backbone messaging
network or hub, such a strategy is reasonably easy to devise.
•
Describing 1984 and hybrid systems to OSI/MHS, using the Subsystem Control
Facility (SCF):
•
In defining gateways, specifying whether the application can accept 1984 or
1988 interpersonal messages (IPMs), or both.
•
In defining gateways, specifying the vintage of the system as 1984 or 1988.
(VINTAGE is the name of the configuration attribute.)
•
In defining an adjacent MTA, specifying (as the application context) whether the
MTA carries 1984 messages over 1984 underlying services, 1988 messages over
1984 underlying services, or 1988 messages over 1988 underlying services.
•
In defining the processes that provide the MTA functions of OSI/MHS,
specifying the OSI address for other systems to use. (If you specify the full
address used by 1988 systems, the same OSI/MHS processes can serve 1984
and 1988 clients.)
•
Designing or modifying applications to take advantage of new features while
recognizing the possible limitations of correspondents.
Whether your role is to create or manage a multiversion network or to design
applications that meet the expectations of network users, you must be familiar with
X.400 concepts and protocols, including the differences between 1984 and 1988
implementations, and with the conformance characteristics of communicating systems
and applications.
Where to Look
The OSI/MHS manual set contains the information you need to specify a 1984 or 1988
MTA or application to OSI/MHS. In addition to these sources, you will need
information of the following types:
•
Policy statements from your own company, from networking service providers with
whose networks yours must communicate, and from government or international
organizations whose rules you must follow
Note. Note that a P7 application cannot be the client of a 1984 MTA because neither the
message store nor the P7 protocol exists in a 1984 system. A 1988 MTA can, however, relay
information from a P7 user to a user on a 1984 system, with a possible loss of information in
transit.