AnywhereWeb

Even though enterprises continue to rely on legacy applications as a core element of their application strategy, many are being web-enabled through the use of J2EE and similar technologies. Furthermore, most new applications are being deployed as pure web based applications. However, extending even web applications over the Internet can lead to security threats that must be carefully managed. IT organizations that are required to extend web-based applications to remote users and business partners face significant problems and concerns. For example, web-enabled resources usually reside on a company's intranet which does not use encryption, and internal host names cannot be resolved on the public Internet.

AnywhereWeb however, overcomes these obstacles and can safely extend these intranet resources,including access to file servers, to authorized business partners and employees. This is achieved by using a sophisticated URL rewriting reverse-proxy technology which operates between a remote user on the Internet and an enterprise website.

AnywhereWeb delivers secure access to corporate web and file resources without directly exposing those servers to the Internet. This is accomplished via a sophisticated URL rewriting, secure (SSL), reverse HTTP proxy which requires no software downloads to the client. The URL rewriter translates all of the URLs (in all HTML, JavaScript, and XML) using a powerful rules based XML engine to determine rewriting behavior. Although the default ruleset will permit most intranet/extranet content to be successfully rewritten and accessed remotely, additional rules can be implemented to enable virtually any content or application. By implementing a rewriting approach, all intranet/extranet content is ensured to be retrieved from the AccessAnywhere appliance, and granular access control can still be used without having to specifically create mappings for resources as is done with traditional reverse proxies.

AnywhereWeb File Access is a sub-component of AnywhereWeb that delivers a lightweight Java applet to the clients browser to support access to network file servers. Users can browse, upload, download, delete, compress, mail and search for files on remote file servers. All traffic from the AnywhereWeb File Access applet is transmitted over the AnywhereWeb SSL session, and can connect to remote file systems via SMB (Windows NT/2000/XP, Linux/Samba), FTP, or NFS. Configurable MIME-types allows automatic launching of the file into a local application.

While e-mail products like Exchange, Lotus Notes and iPlanet have their own integrated web-based e-mail interfaces (ie Outlook Web Access, iNotes, or Messenger Express) and can be delivered transparently through AnywhereWeb, not all standards based mail servers are web-enabled. To address these servers, AnywhereWeb includes a Mail Access component.

AnywhereWeb Mail Access delivers either a standard web-based application or a lightweight Java applet to the clients browser to support access to non-web enabled standards based e-mail servers. Users can connect to e-mail servers using IMAP and SMTP. All traffic is transmitted securely over the AnywhereWeb SSL session back to the AccessAnywhere appliance.