InformationWeek

Netscape Bridges The Groupware Gap

Collabra Server 3.0 forms link between Net standard services and groupware apps

By Sean Gallagher
Issue date: May 19, 1997

Netscape Communications' Collabra Server 3. 0 is more than just a good step toward fusing intranet and groupware. It shows how far groupware based on Internet standards can be taken, and it's a compelling demonstration of what Netscape can do in the groupware arena.

In hopes of eating Lotus Development's and Microsoft's groupware lunch, Netscape is positioning its SuiteSpot bundle of server products as a collection of collaborative applications that bridge the gap between the bare-bones standard Internet services and the traditionally proprietary groupware applications such as discussion databases and calendaring.

Leading The Charge
Up front in this positioning push is Collabra Server 3.0, a group discussion server due by mid-June. Collabra Server 3.0 is the successor to Collabra Share and Netscape's News Server line. Though it's based on Internet network news standards, Collabra puts a more friendly corporate face on newsgroups.

I tested the third public beta of Collabra Server in the InformationWeek Labs on a Digital Equipment Personal Workstation 2000 running Windows NT Server 4.0 with Service Pack 2. Collabra Server won't run properly on NT 4.0 systems without the Service Pack 2 patch.

Collabra Server is essentially a beefed-up version of Netscape's News Server, which it replaces. Like News Server and other network news servers, Collabra relies on the Internet standard Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), but it adds several layers of functionality on top of the standard that are only usable from Netscape's Communicator client.

The News Server line provided essentially generic NNTP service-replicating discussion groups and postings between servers and letting clients read and post to threaded discussions. But News Server suffered from a clunky HTML administrative interface and the same cryptic configuration files as the freeware Unix news servers it's based on. Its security was limited to users and groups established on the server or to certain TCP/IP host addresses, and many parts of News Server's administration invol ved manually editing configuration files. Collabra is a dramatic improvement on these shortcomings-and it retains the base of the News Server for those who feel comfortable only when editing the guts of a file with edlin or Unix's vi.

In addition to host-based security and traditional user logon security, Collabra can get user authentication information from Netscape's Directory Server or other directory servers that take advantage of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. With LDAP support on the way for Novell's NDS and other directory services, this means that Collabra's user administration will be able to integrate with those services; NetWare users would have single-logon access to secure discussions as well as their other network resources.

Security Certificates
Collabra also uses the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol to encrypt traffic between the server and the client. To use this protocol, each client must have a security certificate, either generated by an internal certifi cate server or provided by a third party such as VeriSign Inc. in Mountain View, Calif. This is especially useful if information in Collabra discussions is being shared outside an organization over an extranet or the Internet.

Netscape uses a common Administration Server to provide a management interface for most of its SuiteSpot servers. The new Administration Server included with Collabra Server is a big improvement over the old one, which was limited because it was entirely HTML and JavaScript driven.

With News Server, navigating through discussion groups meant going through several layers of HTML form pages before getting to the screen you needed. Now, the Administration Server interface for Collabra includes Java applets that provide a more Windows-like interface for managing groups and a single screen to manage them.

Another administrative function improved from News Server in Collabra Server is the configuration of news feeds. News feeds are the replication connections that pass postings fr om server to server, either across the Internet or within the corporate WAN. In News Server 2.0, an HTML interface was provided for setting up outgoing news feeds, but administrators had to edit configuration files in a text-editing program to configure the server to allow incoming news feeds. In Collabra Server, both incoming and outgoing feeds are conveniently configured from a single HTML page.

Another administrative plus is Collabra's support for the Simple Network Management Protocol. Collabra Server can be configured to report its status and take instructions via SNMP, so that it can be controlled from a network management console.

Collabra Server is at its best when used with Netscape's Communicator client. Like all NNTP servers, it supports HTML documents, so Communicator and Navigator Gold users can create HTML, Java, and JavaScript applications as part of discussion lists-much like the shared documents in a Lotus Notes discussion database or a Microsoft Exchange shared folder.

In additio n to making it possible for users to create HTML and JavaScript applications that interact with the other components of SuiteSpot, a number of feature enhancements are supported only by the Collabra client within Communicator.

Discussion By Category
One feature in Collabra Server that you won't find in traditional news servers is a discussion group type called a categorized discussion. While the discussion group and its subgroups look like a normal discussion hierarchy to non-Collabra clients, the subgroups of a discussion appear as subfolders with full descriptive names on Collabra clients.

For example, a corporate discussion group hierarchy could include a discussion on human resources, with subdiscussions on health benefits, profit-sharing, and recreational programs. On a traditional NNTP server, these groups might appear in a newsreader as corp.hr.health, corp. hr.profitsharing, and corp.hr.rec, or maybe even more obscure titles. In Collabra, however, the groups could be called Health Benefits, Profit- Sharing, and Recreation; they would appear on Collabra clients as subgroups of Human Resources, while non-Collabra clients could still access them by their more complicated NNTP names.

Collabra users can create additional subdiscussions within existing categorized discussions. From within the Collabra client in Netscape Communicator, users with the proper access levels can use the New Category function to create a discussion within the hierarchy; the Java discussion group administration applet is then launched so that the user can enter the appropriate descriptive information.

Another Communicator-only feature of Collabra Server is full text indexing. The server can compile indexes of any selection of newsgroups, which can be searched by sender, subject, date, or any text in the message. Users can search a specific group, or search across the whole server.

This functionality brings Collabra Server 3.0 even with the discussion features of most proprietary groupware products, without abandoning the baseline NNTP newsreader users. That makes Collabra a good fit for cross-organizational teams and companies with remote employees with Internet access.

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