Paul,
What is in the "German profile" that isn't in the IETF standard?
If I remember correctly, I left Lotus more than 16 months ago, the
military establishments of many European countries decided that they
wanted a "Commercial of the Shelf" (COTS) messaging system based on open
standards (in this case S/MIME). They then each produced a huge pile of
requirements that differed from country to country, and couldn't be met by
any COTS system. In order to win the business, the vendor organization in
each country, first attempted to have their base products modified. The
vendors development organizations having been led down a similar garden
path by the US DOD over the X.400 based (kind of) Defense Messaging
System, refused. The revenue opportunities couldn't justify the cost.
Since salesmen never take no for an answer, they then contracted with
local software houses to produce plug-ins. These tend not to work very
well, inter-operate, etc. I think this is what Marc is referring to. This
of course has nothing to do with the S/MIME you and I are familiar with,
but with special military versions of S/MIME, or more accurately "sort of
S/MIME".
Nick
Nick Shelness
Independent Technology Consultant
Fellow - Differéntis Ltd.
Advisor - Oak Investment Partners
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