Netscape's Collaborative Solution

Netscape's client and server product suites mesh tolet you share complex information within your company and around the world

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 havebattled fiercely on every front. The result is two suites of features that aresimilar but come from different heritages and are organized as differently asnight and day.

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

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

The Netscape paradigm for collaborative computing is a client/serverenvironment built on open standards such as HTML, Network News Transfer Protocol(NNTP), MIME, and Post Office Protocol (POP). The server software runs onWindows 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 verysmall installations, on a Windows 95-based microcomputer.

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

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

I'll talk about some of the collaborative properties of each servercomponent, but because collaborative computing is primarily about people workingtogether 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 respectiveserver pieces (except where a client doesn't require a server, as in NetscapeConference'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 theCommunicator Web browser. The Standard Edition is for home users, and theProfessional Edition is for collaborative activities in the enterprise.

Five of the eight components in the Professional Edition arecollaborative tools. Communicator consists of the following collaborativeelements:

The Other Stuff:
Servers and Clients
The other components are the noncollaborative components. The CatalogServer, the Certificate Server, and the Proxy Server are valuable assets to acollaborative server, but they don't directly provide any collaborationfeatures. The Directory Server uses NT's domain and user information as a basisfor its own files. The other Netscape servers can stand alone with their owndata files or use the centralized database of the Directory Server. Performanceis excellent.

Netscape servers provide consistent rates of information delivery across awide range of user activity levels on the NT platform. If your information sitewill see tens of thousands of visitors a day, you need to scale up to amultiprocessor NT box or to the UNIX platform. You can run all nine servers onone NT Server computer, but you need at least 1GB of hard disk space for programstorage (not counting your data) and 128MB of RAM for execution. It's a goodthing hard drives are cheap, and memory's getting cheaper.

On the client side are Netscape Composer, Netscape AutoAdmin, and IBM HostOn-Demand. Each of these components adds significant value to the desktop(except for IBM Host On-Demand, if you don't have an IBM host to talk to), butthey don't contribute to the workflow in a collaborative environment. Theexception is Composer, which several collaborative components use to create HTMLmultimedia content for email, discussion groups, or conferences; therefore, youcan consider Composer part of the collaborative foundation.

What's Collaborative
With this overview, we can move on to the specifics of Netscape'sCollaborative Solutions. Let's look at the collaborative components and considersome collaborative applications.

Documents and Images:
The Enterprise Server and Netscape Communicator
The Enterprise Server is Netscape's name for the suite's Web server. Thisserver program delivers pages in HTML, as well as Common Gateway Interface (CGI)fill-in-the-blank forms. The Enterprise Server accepts user responses and canexecute scripts based on user input. Transactions can be ordinary Web stuff orsecure communications that use the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which is suitablefor electronic commerce.

What's so collaborative about a Web server? Web servers are more versatilethan you might think. You can use them for making information available to acommon base of users and as a central distribution point for documents and othertypes of files via the Web server's built-in FTP capability. Admittedly, callinga Web server collaborative is a bit of a stretch. You typically use Web serversto provide and collect information, which any good database program can do. Thedifference is that Web servers use other programs, such as browsers, to presentand collect that information. For truly collaborative capabilities, however, youneed to look a little farther down the line of the suite's components.

On the client side is the Netscape Communicator. If you've used theNetscape Navigator Web browser, you'll be comfortable with Communicator. It's alogical extension of the Navigator program, with some improvements and aslightly more friendly interface. You can use Communicator to access your Webserver--probably a Netscape Enterprise Server. If you also have Internet access,you can use the same program to access any other server you want.

Communicator nicely supports custom HTML tags in remote documents. Thesetags let Communicator launch additional components on request. For example,let's say you have a question about a colleague's document. If the document hasan HTML tag, you can click on the tag and launch your videoconferencingcomponent (also built into Communicator) and establish a video link to thatperson immediately and automatically.

Email:
The Messaging Server and Netscape Messenger
The Messaging Server is the next stop on the tour. This program fits thetraditional description of a collaborative application, even though what theprogram does is straightforward: It sends and receives email. As I discussed inthe overview article, "Pathways to Collaboration,", email isthe heart of the collaborative enterprise. The larger the enterprise and themore geographically dispersed it is, the more important email becomes.Therefore, the server must be stable, reliable, and versatile. The NetscapeMessaging Server appears to meet all three criteria.

The Messaging Server supports all common email transfer protocols includingMIME, POP, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and Internet Mail AccessProtocol 4 (IMAP4). Because the Messaging Server supports these standards, theserver is fully capable of sending and delivering rich audio and visualinformation in addition to traditional text messages. Setup is not complicated,especially if you have already installed the Directory Server.

At the desktop, you use Netscape Messenger (or a third-party email client)to access the Messaging Server. Messenger is an enhanced email client thatcreates messages based on the HTML standard. HTML is an easy way to embedimages, audio or video files, documents, applications, or virtually any type ofattachment so it is readily accessible at the destination. The client alsoorganizes your communications into folders and lets you search and sort at will.The Messenger client works with the Directory Server to gather addressinformation both within and outside your network.

Discussions and Projects:
The Collabra Server and Netscape Collabra
People started the Internet because users at widespread locations needed tocommunicate and collaborate; one of the earliest services supported was theUSENET. USENET uses NNTP and a constellation of servers to provide electronicbulletin boards that anyone can read and comment on, publicly or privately.Netscape's Collabra Server is an NNTP server with additional features, primarilyfor intranet security requirements. Collabra Server supports the DirectoryServer and NT's native user information and SSL communications with the NetscapeCollabra client (or a third-party news reader).

The Collabra client is a full-featured NNTP client with extensions for theCollabra server. You can arrange discussions by category, put markers onimportant files so you can find them later, and use the Composer component tocreate both regular text and HTML multimedia items. The Collabra client is easyto operate and relatively quick for a program of this type. NNTP clients aren'tgenerally known for their speed of operation, so Collabra's speed is notable byitself.

Resources and People:
The Calendar Server and Netscape Calendar
The Calendar Server provides tracking and scheduling of people andresources, a critical feature for enterprisewide collaboration. A typical usefor the Calendar Server is to schedule meetings and keep track of project goals.You don't have to conduct meetings in person. You can just as well have meetingsvia the audioconferencing or videoconferencing software capabilities built intothe Communicator client.

The Netscape Calendar client talks to the Calendar Server. These twocomponents are the only parts of the client/server suite that aren't basedon open standards because people can't agree on standards for calendarmanagement. The last person to create a standard for calendar management andmake it stick was Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, and we've been trying to catch upever since.

Peer to Peer:
Netscape Conference
For realtime collaboration, you need a conferencing client, and NetscapeConference is your ticket to the show. Conference supports all manner ofcommunications, depending on the hardware on your desktop. At the most basiclevel, Conference supports remote whiteboarding and text chat, which lets two ormore people view the same application across a network, operate that program,highlight and make other notations that everyone can see without affecting theprogram's execution, and discuss in a separate chat window what you're allseeing.

The better your system is, the better Conference gets. If you have audiocapability (a sound card, speakers, and a microphone), you can talk to otherparticipants in realtime. If you are fortunate enough to have a video camera anda video capture board that digitizes images caught by the camera, otherparticipants can see and hear you. Not all stations need to havevideoconferencing capability. People without video cameras can still see otherpeople; the other people just can't see them.

Like the other Communicator components, Conference is based on commonstandards, including the H.323 videoconferencing standard. The H.323 standardlets people with a standard but non-Communicator-based system participate fullyin the videoconference. When you have the Directory Server, Conference uses itto let you create and maintain conferencing directories based on Web pages.Conference also supports client-to-client file transfers--a useful feature whenyou're sending data files back and forth.

Talk to Me, Please:
The Media Server and Netscape Communicator (again)
One server component has some collaborative aspects. The Media Server letsyou deliver audio--from either a live or a recorded source--across the networkby streaming.

Traditional methods of delivering audio across networks use .WAV soundtable files, and the recipient must receive the whole file before playback canbegin. Streaming audio removes this limitation with the use of a special playerclient. Netscape's Communicator desktop software has this player client builtin. The player is compatible with RealAudio: Netscape and Progressive Networksworked together to define the Real Time Streaming Protocol, which both companiesuse.

All In All, It's All In One
So what's missing? The document management functions are good, but theydon't include revision control. Revision control is the ability to track changesmade in documents over time and to revert to earlier versions, if necessary. Youcan do something similar to revision control, using the Collabra server andclients. But saving different versions is mostly manual, and the system won'tkeep you from accidentally doing something silly, like saving an older versionover a newer one. However, other collaborative suites (such as LotusDomino/Notes, which Carlos Bernal discusses in "Lotus Domino 4.5 Server andNotes 4.5 Client,") have revision control. TheNetscape solution set has everything else you need for serious collaboration,and Netscape adds the significant benefit of being based on widely acceptedstandards for communication and storage of information.

From this description of the program elements, you might think thatNetscape has a fragmented view of the enterprise and has designed a ratherfragmented solution. The truth is that although each piece can stand by itselfand do a fine job, the system consists of a pair of suites: one for the serverand one for the desktop. Each suite is well integrated within itself and easy toadminister, and the two suites communicate well across LANs, WANs, or theInternet.