In October, 1995, Netscape Communications purchased Collabra Software with the intent of enhancing Netscape's current product line to compete more aggressively with Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes. "With the acquisition of Collabra, Netscape inherits one of the key groupware players in the marketplace today. Collabra has demonstrated a knowledge of collaborative computing and has some of the most skilled engineers in this industry," says Ben Horowitz, Collabra Marketing Manager.
Netscape plans to incorporate the client portion of Collabra Share into its Navigator product, which has an estimated 70% market share of the Web browser market. The server portion of Collabra Share will be incorporated into Netscape's News group server, NNTP Server. By incorporating Collabra Share into its family of core products, Netscape gains a powerful group-discussion facility while Collabra Share adds a powerful, distributed, partitionable, cross-platform development language--HTML.
Netscape continues to push Web development by incorporating new extensions into version 2.0 of Navigator. It includes the latest HTML extensions as well as two new technologies--LiveScript and Java. Java is a programming language, similar to C++, that allows you to create executables residing on the Web server. The Java-enhanced Web server detects clients that are Java-capable and will download these applets to the client for execution. LiveScript adds the structured elements (IF-THEN-ELSE) that are found in other development languages.
In addition, Netscape gives Collabra Share its own standard email system. Currently, Collabra Share requires you to have a VIM- or MAPI-compliant email package working before the product can be installed. With Netscape, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) email--the Internet standard--will work right out of the box. Netscape will continue to support the VIM and MAPI standards as well.
For more information, set your Web browser to http://home.netscape.com.