InformationWeek

Beyond Browsing

Netscape enterprise groupware debuts

By Sean Gallagher
Issue date: April 28, 1997

The third prerelease version of Netscape Communications' Communicator client is a far cry from the Navigator 3.0 Web browser. Wh ile Netscape's previous browsers have had minimal mail and network news capabilities, Communicator is as much an enterprise groupware and messaging client as it is a Web browser.

Preview Release 3 of Communicator provides a lot of groupware functionality, but much of it is dependent on features implemented in Netscape's SuiteSpot server products. Communicator integrates with all SuiteSpot's servers, plus it has client-to-client conferencing and IBM host access.

With the upcoming addition of Visual JavaScript to SuiteSpot, Netscape is building a groupware application environment, where developers can use JavaScript and Netscape's Dynamic HTML to build flashy applications with database hooks. These apps will work with most browsers, but will look their best with Communicator. Netscape hopes that using both existing Internet standards and its proposed new standards will ensure Communicator's success.

One sign of how much Netscape's client philosophy has changed is Communicator's bundled administratio n tools. To reduce the headache of configuring clients, Communicator's Auto-Admin lets administrators tie the configuration of client software to information in a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol directory.

At startup, the client queries a central configuration URL that contains JavaScript set up with the Netscape Administration Kit-offered separately -to configure the client and provide instructions for downloading software.

Communicator's Messenger E-mail component covers all the bases on messaging standards. It works with POP and IMAP4 mail servers, has good rules-based filtering, and includes Secure MIME encryption and digital signatures. It also has LDAP directory look-up capabilities and other features-such as automatic completion of typed addresses-often found in corporate E-mail clients.

The Collabra discussion and network news client built into Communicator gives users both standard NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol) newsgroup access and full text search on Netscape Collabra d iscussion servers. But text search of newsgroups is limited to Collabra servers, since text indexing is done on the server.

Communicator's Calendar, a group scheduling and calendaring tool that works with Netscape's Calendar server, isn't quite standard, which isn't necessarily an impediment, since almost no groupware tool has a cross-platform standard for calendaring. Though Calendar's interface is not as refined as that of Microsoft's Outlook, it certainly shares much of its functionality.

Communicator's collaborative tools include point-to-point conferencing as well. Netscape Conference is based on the International Telecommunication Union's H.323 standard for conferencing, and provides a two-way, audio telephone-like connection and a shared whiteboard to display screen captures of data and other bit-map images for collective markup.

These features, in combination with IBM Host On-Demand-a 3270 mainframe emulator written in Java-and the just-announced Netcaster push client ( see story , p. 56) make Communicator a strong groupware contender for the desktop and network computers.

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