These releases are an important step for our Draft, Review & Release Solution, a capability of particular interest within Military Deployments.

Draft and Release is a process of handling formal military communication, it is vital for scenarios where formal responsibility must be taken for messages sent. For example, Military commands sent as messages needing to be approved/released by an appropriate senior officer. More information on this can be found in our recently updated whitepaper.

This latest release of Harrier provides a new, simple and intuitive UI for drafters, reviewers, and releasers, making each task straightforward. Also included is a visual workflow, allowing easy tracking of messages.

There will be situations where it makes sense to send directly and to avoid any workflow. Cobalt allows simple control of users who can send directly for selected messages based on SIC and Priority.

Cobalt provides a range of capabilities to support Formal Military Message Handling Systems (MMHS), with capabilities oriented towards the support of systems using Isode’s Harrier, M-Box, and M-Switch products.

Downloads and accompanying release notes can be found in the evaluator and customer sections of the website.

One particular area of interest for Isode is enabling TCP applications to perform efficiently over HF links and our CEO, Steve Kille, gave a presentation in this area at the most recent HFIA meeting back in March. You can find a PDF of the presentation, ‘Web Browsing over HF’, here.

In an ideal world all mission-critical applications would take advantage of specific optimized protocols for HF but, as it’s impractical to do this for every service, having mechanisms to support generic services that run over IP in high-speed networks is necessary.

To provide IP services over HF in a reasonably efficient manner, a central challenge is to provide a mechanism to support TCP-based applications efficiently. This can be done with a TCP PEP (Performance Enhancing Proxy), such as our recently announced Icon-PEP product.  Icon-PEP product enables deployment of IP Applications over an HF network using STANAG 5066 link layer as the interface to that network. More information can be found on the Icon-PEP product page.

Isode will be displaying a number of unique capabilities at DSEI 2021, which you can see on our stand on the UK Pavilion, including:

Military Email

Isode’s end-to-end solution fronted by Harrier, our web based military messaging client, and including message servers and gateways covering all of the major military messaging standards.

Military Instant Messaging

Instant messaging, using the XMPP standard, is an increasingly important component of military communications systems. Isode clients, servers and gateways allow XMPP traffic over standard and constrained (SatCom/HF) links a s well as between XMPP and legacy instant messaging systems such as IRC, all of which can be controlled using Isode’s extensive security labelling infrastructure.

At DSEI 2021 we will be giving the first public demonstration of the web version of our Swift XMPP Client.

You can find more information on Isode’s products set for Military Messaging and Military Instant Messaging by following the links.

Isode Military Messaging and Military Instant Messaging products have been successfully deployed with the land, air and naval forces of over 30 countries.

Chris has a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Wolverhampton and over 30 years of experience in the IT sector. He is a keen traveler, recently exploring the USA with his family for a month. During his free time enjoys racing his laser dinghy at the local sailing club.

Chris joins us from an Isode partner, where he spent 20 years supporting customers in large, highly secure organisations around the world with their messaging projects. He is familiar with Isode software and has wasted no time getting stuck in providing support to our customers.

Welcome to the team Chris.

DSEI is the premier showcase for military technology of all types. Held every other year, DSEI attracts one the largest international audiences, with over 75,000 visitors from 114 countries at DSEI 2019.

We have attended DSEI for a number of years but always in support of demonstrations, by our valued partners, of their solutions for military messaging.

This year, we are joining over 1000 exhibitors in taking our own stand at DSEI.

As well as enabling us to provide on-site support of demonstrations by partner companies, this will also provide a central point for showcasing Isode’s unique capabilities in secure messaging and instant messaging to the many key decision makers who regularly attend DESI.

Isode messaging and instant messaging solutions are now deployed with the land, air and naval forces of over 30 countries.

You’ll find Isode on the UK Pavilion at DSEI, which will be held at the ExCel Centre, London on 14-17 September 2021.

A regular visitor to NITEC, Isode spent three enjoyable days at this year’s show demonstrating our software for chat and email messaging to an audience of systems integrators, technical influencers and representatives of end-user organisations (the militaries of NATO nations).

Of particular interest to visitors was Isode’s ability to connect different services, employing different chat and messaging standards, so that they become seamless end-to-end systems. Our demonstration of connecting XMPP based chat systems to those employing the legacy IRC system (using Isode’s M-Link IRC Gateway) was particularly popular.

Both chat and messaging demonstrations also featured security label translation, mapping labelled messages from one security domain to another (for the show we used Norwegian and NATO labels on the different “sides” of the messaging/chat systems).

Evaluation software for both Email Messaging and XMPP Chat software is available from the Isode website.

Since then over 100 countries have installed AMHS systems based around Isode messaging servers, with more sales on the way this year as new countries switch from the old AFTN system or expand their existing AMHS installations to encompass regional airports and hubs.

At the recent World ATC Congress in Madrid, as well as taking a look at all of the new developments in this vibrant market, we spent some time visiting and thanking those partners for the excellent working relationship we’ve enjoyed over the years. It was comforting to see that our partners are as enthusiastic about this market now as they were when we first met them.

The first looked at measurements of HF Modem transmissions over a channel simulator using Collins modems and simulator.  It investigates the impact of varying Interleavers for STANAG 4539 and STANAG 5069 waveforms. This presentation can be found here.

The second presentation was an overview of two whitepapers we recently published on the Isode website, Messaging Protocols for HF Radio and Measuring Performance of Messaging Protocols for HF Radio.

The final presentation gave results from an XMPP over HF trial funded by the UK MoD. The trial was carried out by Babcock, using Isode XMPP software, to evaluate the viability of providing a real time chat service for Naval and Airborne communications over HF.

• Sodium
• M-Vault Console
• Log Configuration
• Isode Service Configuration
• MConsole
• M-Link Console
• Web applications

If you do not require these components then you do not need to install Java.

Oracle has announced that Java updates for commercial customers ends after January 2019. See(https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/java-se-support-roadmap.html ).

For R17.0v7 and later, Isode recommend commercial users of Java who do not wish to purchase support from Oracle, to use Isode’s “OpenJDK for Isode” package instead. This is available from www.isode.com This contains a copy of the OpenJDK (see http://jdk.java.net) which has been tested for compatibility with R17.0, and is fully supported for use by Isode applications.

Isode will not be updating versions prior to R17.0 to work with Java 11. Commercial users using these releases will have the following options:

• Upgrade to R17.0
• Run with a version of Oracle Java 8 which will, after January 2019, no longer receive updates from Oracle
• Obtain a suitable commercial license from Oracle for a supported version of Oracle Java 8 (which will receive updates after January 2019)

Isode R17.0 is supported with Oracle Java 8 and Oracle Java 11. A future version of Isode will remove support for Java 8.

After Java 8, the next LTS (Long-Term-Support) version of Oracle Java is Oracle Java 11. Commercial users of Oracle Java 11 are required to purchase a license from Oracle.

Commercial users may purchase extended support for Oracle Java 8 if they wish to deploy it after January 2019.

The second looks at the challenges of Operating XMPP over HF Radio and Constrained Networks, describing standards that have been developed to support constrained network operation and how these are supported in our M-Link family of XMPP server and gateway products.