Netscape's Collaborative Solution

The Internet is the ultimate collaborative environment. It offers equal access to communications services for anyone, anywhere, at any time. Within a corporation, private intranets are microcosms of the computing universe but with a restricted guest list.

Netscape Communications was one of the first companies to offer people easy access to information across wide areas, and the company has fought hard to maintain a lead on this front. Not surprisingly, Netscape is a major player in the collaborative computing arena, both outside and within the corporation. Netscape products integrate open email, groupware, companywide calendar, and browser tools for sharing information over the Internet or an intranet. I can't review every component and module in detail; instead, I'll describe them briefly and explain how you can use them to foster cooperative work environments.

Netscape's primary competitor is Microsoft, and the two companies have battled fiercely on every front. The result is two suites of features that are similar but come from different heritages and are organized as differently as night and day.

Microsoft fields a full range of products that work together on the desktop to form a collaborative environment. These components range in price from free (Internet Explorer) to ohmygosh! (Exchange Server for large networks). In contrast, Netscape bundles all its collaborative eggs into one browser basket, Communicator.

Netscape has chosen a different approach from Microsoft's, both because the strategy makes sense and because the company wants to differentiate itself from Microsoft. Both Microsoft and Netscape require one or more server pieces, but both companies' products and computing resource requirements are more similar at the server than they are at the desktop.

The Netscape paradigm for collaborative computing is a client/server environment built on open standards such as HTML, Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), MIME, and Post Office Protocol (POP). The server software runs on Windows NT 3.51 or later and talks to clients and to other servers via TCP/IP. You can also run the server software on several UNIX platforms, or for very small installations, on a Windows 95-based microcomputer.

You need server pieces for the collaborative components you select for your enterprise. This requirement can range from one to as many as nine server programs, each servicing a particular data requirement. Netscape offers four server-side collaborative pieces: the Netscape Enterprise Server, the Messaging Server, the Collabra Server, and the Calendar Server.

Of course, Netscape also sells other, noncollaborative server programs, including Directory Server, which supports a common standard--Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)--for naming users and resources; Catalog Server for accessing external databases, Certificate Server for electronic authentication, Proxy Server for more secure Internet access, and Media Server for integrating audio with Web pages and multimedia documents. You can buy all nine server pieces (listed in Table 1) in one box with Netscape's SuiteSpot bundle or individually.

I'll talk about some of the collaborative properties of each server component, but because collaborative computing is primarily about people working together across space and time, I'll emphasize this technology at the desktop, or client, level. I'll try to keep the client components with their respective server pieces (except where a client doesn't require a server, as in Netscape Conference's peer-to-peer conferencing capabilities).

Netscape Communicator Components
Netscape's client-side collaborative suite is called Netscape Communicator. Communicator is a large suite of individual components, each launched from the Communicator Web browser. The Standard Edition is for home users, and the Professional Edition is for collaborative activities in the enterprise.

Five of the eight components in the Professional Edition are collaborative tools. Communicator consists of the following collaborative elements:

• Netscape Navigator Web browser
• Netscape Messenger email client software
• Netscape Collabra for open discussion groups and document sharing
• Netscape Calendar conference and resource scheduling software
• Netscape Conference for conferencing using text, audio, and video and whiteboards