25-June-2004

New Features

The development of Agent 2.1's multiple server support is progressing well. While Mark Sidell and Jim Powers were working on multiple servers, we decided to add the following features:

Multiple Server Connections

Many news servers (especially free services) control usage by capping the download speed of each connection. Agent 2.1 will open multiple, simultaneous connections to each news server. This feature will ensure that Agent users can rapidly download large multi-part binaries across multiple servers.

Task Management

With support for multiple servers and multiple connections, Agent 2.1 can process many simultaneous download and upload tasks. Much of the time, these tasks will run unattended in background. However, Agent 2.1's new Task Monitor interface will allow you to:

• Cancel messages that have been marked for download.
• Pause any active tasks such as outbound email or large binary downloads.
• Suspend all the tasks in the queue so you can quickly perform another bandwidth intensive operation such as downloading software from a web site.
• Rearrange the priority of queued tasks.

Fault-Tolerant Communications

Agent users want to queue up their download tasks and leave Agent running for days at a time. Agent 2.1's task processing module will:

• Significantly improve Agent's task retry behavior.
• Elegantly deal with server disconnects and network time-outs.
• Utilize additional servers to ensure that Agent users can download complete binaries.
• Notify users of any failures that require user intervention.

As a result of these additional features, Agent 2.1 will be the most robust newsreader for both binary collection and textual collaboration.

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Regards,

The Forté Team