InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
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Extended Web browsers from Netscape, Microsoft, and Apple deliver mail clients with corporate power
By Sean Gallagher
Issue da te: May 19, 1997
Intranets aren't just an excuse to surf the Web at work. As more corporate applications reside on internal and external Web sites, users are spending more time working with Web browsers. As a result, those browsers have to be much more than mere Web-page viewers. They need to provide access to corporate and external E-mail, run groupware applications built for the Internet and intranets, and help users collaborate. Suddenly, they're not just for HTML anymore-they've become intranet clients.
As intranet application servers such as Lotus Domino and Netscape SuiteSpot push groupware applications into the Web world, Web clients have grown into suites of tools. But how much can you do with software created originally for the Net?
A lot. InformationWeek Labs tested three client packages that define the class-Netscape's Communicator 4.0, Professional Edition (Preview Release 4); Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4.0 Platform Preview with Outlook Express; and Apple Co
mputer's Cyberdog 2.0. Each combines a Web browser with standards-based E-mail and discussion software and adds unique features to make working on the intranet easier.
While all three products fit the bill as intranet clients, Netscape delivers the best cross-platform capability and the widest array of collaborative tools. But some of its "standards" aren't standard and may not be compatible with other browsers, POP3 and IMAP mail clients, or news readers (not to mention servers). Thus, getting the most out of Communicator may mean going with Netscape products all the way.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer provides a close match in capabilities to Communicator, but it lacks some of the group-oriented features. It also integrates tightly with 32-bit Windows operating systems and offers proprietary features. But it falls short in cross-platform functionality, and you can't go with a 100% intranet-based solution for things such as group scheduling-yet.
Of the three products reviewed, Cyberdog 2.0 is the
most stable on the Macintosh. It offers the best integration with Mac OS, the most flexible E-mail and news clients, and a customizable interface for accessing information. But Cyberdog runs only on the Macintosh, and it falls short on support for some standards, such IMAP.
Communicator 4.0 PR4
What may be most immediately notable about Communicator 4.0 PR4 is not what's in it, but what's missing. Netscape originally promised to deliver its Netcaster push technology client in PR4, but that functionality missed the boat this cycle. As a result, no components have been added since the last prerelease (
IW, April 28, p. 61
).
Communicator is the most ambitious of the clients reviewed, with seven major components:
a Web browser, a mail client, a conferencing client, a discussion server client, a Java-based 3270 terminal emulator, an HTML editor, and a group calendaring client.
Another advantage of Communicator is that it will be available on the most platforms of the three products tested, with planned availability on all Windows operating systems, Mac OS, and the most popular Unix platforms.
I reviewed both the 32-bit Windows and Power Macintosh clients, though the Mac client was still PR3. Still, the functionality match-up between the Windows and Mac platforms was good. Be aware that Communicator's Conference collaboration software on the Power Mac requires version 1.1.2 of Apple's Open Transport networking software.
Most of the enhancements in PR4 are fine-grain fill-ins in the interface and functionality for gaps left in previous releases. But this version is less stable than the previous beta. I experienced frequent software crashes on the Windows NT workstation with no error messages or other symptom
s-the software simply shut itself down without a word.
There are a lot of nice interface touches-for example, the tree-formatted Preferences interface gives users a single configuration point to handle settings for mail, discussions, Web browser, and HTML document publishing. Another tree interface is used in Message Center, a window that gives users single-point access to mail servers, mail folders, and discussion groups.
Netscape's Messenger E-mail client can connect to a mail server via Post Office Protocol 3 or Internet Mail Access Protocol. POP3 performance was a lot more reliable in the beta than IMAP, particularly when dealing with large volumes of mail, but both worked well on the whole. IMAP can be configured with the Secure Sockets Layer encryption protocol, making it the best bet for secure E-mail outside the corporate firewall.
Communicator can also encrypt and digitally sign E-mail by using a certificate downloaded from VeriSign Inc. in Mountain View, Calif., or another certificate se
rver. The VeriSign certificates are available free for six months, though they aren't completely verifiable because they're obtained without any proof of identity other than E-mail address.
If you aren't the only one using the computer that the certificate is stored on, then you can password-protect it. But you'd better keep the password somewhere safe, because the certificate is useless without it-and you'll have to create a new configuration to download another one.
In a way, Communicator is the most proprietary of the clients I tested-many of its functions depend on using the client with Netscape's servers. To take advantage of features such as full-text searches of discussion groups and user creation of new discussion categories, you'll need Netscape's Collabra 3.0 discussion server (
see Beta Check
, p. 100) rather than a conventional news server based on NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol). But you can still search headers on NNTP servers for articles by title o
r the poster's name.
Another Netscape-only feature is the calendar client. It works well as a standalone feature, but you won't be able to set meetings with others or share appointment information unless you're connected to Netscape's Calendar server, which uses Netscape's vCalendar specification.
All these servers are part of SuiteSpot 3.0, which is scheduled to ship in the second quarter-about the same time as Communicator.
Then there are Dynamic HTML, an implementation of Netscape extensions to HTML, and JavaScript. These make it possible to create applications with layered graphics and objects that the user can move-which usually has required Java.
The good news is that Microsoft is putting Dynamic HTML into Internet Explorer 4.0 as well, so Netscape won't be the only one implementing its proposed standard. The bad news is the severe bloating of the browser-the Communicator suite occupies about 20 Mbytes of disk space on Windows 95 and NT.
Another thing to look out for is Netscape's us
e of HTML for rich text in messages. The default text editor for the Messenger mail client is essentially Communicator's Composer HTML editor. This makes it easy to create pretty E-mail applications based on HTML forms, but it also makes for huge E-mail messages. A sure way to annoy anyone not using Communicator is to send them a long E-mail message in both plain text and HTML format-the default send mode for Communicator mail. If you want to make sure that everyone can use your HTML-based application, you'll have to enclose it as an attachment rather than make it the body of your message
Some of Communicator 4.0 PR4's most impressive features aren't specific to Netscape. First, there's LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) support in Netscape's address book. The preview comes with links to five Internet LDAP E-mail directory services and a sixth service that looks up Federal Express airbill numbers.
Additional LDAP servers can be configured by the user in Communicator's preferences-which mean
s that users will be able to look up other E-mail users on just about all of the major E-mail servers (Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, Lotus cc:Mail, Netscape's Messag- ing Server, and Novell GroupWise) when those servers ship their LDAP lookup support later this year.
One Netscape-promoted standard that seems to have caught on is the vCard address card format, used in Communicator to exchange contact information by E-mail and as the format for storing contacts in Communicator's address book. The format is also used in Microsoft's Outlook Express and can be used with Microsoft's Outlook by way of an add-on product.
Netscape's Profile Manager lets administrators configure a single installation of Communicator for multiple users-especially useful in Windows NT and Unix multiuser environments. But if a single user has multiple E-mail accounts, there's no way to consolidate them into a single configuration setup or a single in-box. For each user account, there's also a separate bookmark file for Web page
s and other configuration files, so there can be a lot of duplication of effort.
To reduce the configuring, Netscape also includes a tool called AutoAdmin, which works with Netscape's administrative toolkit to create default user configurations.
Internet Explorer 4.0 Preview
In a move to turn its disparate messaging client products into a product line, Microsoft has changed the name of the Internet Mail and News clients to Outlook Express. The client is part of the IE 4.0 installation and uses parts of IE for presentation
, but its interface is styled after that of Outlook-and looks very much like Netscape Communicator.
Outlook's mail and news resources are displayed as part of a tree hierarchy, like Outlook's folders and Netscape's Message Center interface. Outlook Express also has LDAP lookup capability from its address book, with similar search functions, and it can read vCard address cards. Also like Communicator, Outlook Express supports both POP3 and IMAP mail protocols. The mail client has menu options for using Secure Password Authentication with servers that support it for mail login, as well as digital signatures and encryption with RSA Data Security Inc.'s RC2 and RC4 encryption algorithms-though this functionality was not implemented in this prerelease.
There is no administration utility for setting up users. Multiple users are supported on Windows platforms through the operating systems' user profiles. This means that users must configure their mail profile themselves.
Outlook is simple and clean, but
there are some downsides to its interface. As with Communicator, there's no way to poll multiple E-mail accounts for a common set of mail folders. Microsoft's Internet Mail and News 1.5 beta 1 on the Macintosh supports multiple users but creates separate mailboxes for them, and it has no IMAP support.
Microsoft also has its own collaborative client, called NetMeeting 2.0, which goes beyond the voice and electronic whiteboard capabilities of Communicator's Conference client, offering voice communication, multipoint electronic whiteboard conferencing, and videoconferencing. NetMeeting's Internet telephony and videoconferencing capability is based on the same standard as Communicator's-the International Telecommunication Union's H.323 standard.
Also in the IE 4.0 prerelease is Active Desktop, a customizable ActiveX component environment that replaces the wallpaper on Windows 95 and NT. ActiveX components on the Active Desktop can pull information from Web sites to update them, providing news and stock "t
ickers" and other information. The components also act as hot links to their source Web pages. This makes Active Desktop a good candidate for broadcasting data to desktops on an intranet, since ActiveX controls can now be created in most Windows-based rapid application development tools. There's also Microsoft's WebCasting push technology (
IW, April 28, p. 54
) and a Web-page subscription service built into IE 4.0 that alerts users when Web-page content changes.
Although Outlook Express and IE 4.0 will be free to Windows users, there's a lot of functionality built into them. Of course, that functionality may not translate to other operating systems. IE version 3.01 is still in beta on the Mac OS, and its functionality varies sharply from the Windows platforms. Users running IE on non-Windows platforms can expect to be second-class citizens for a while.
Cyberdog 2.0
Compared with the other products, Cyberdog's browser looks almost spartan. There are a minimum of navigation buttons and, instead of building lists of bookmarks or favorites that are accessible from the browser's menu, the user drags and drops URLs, news- group names, and E-mail addresses to Cyberdog Notebook (a document formatted like yellow ruled paper), where they become icons with hot links to the information source.
Cyberdog's mailer also looks like a study in minimalism, but it can handle multiple E-mail accounts for users and can apply rules against incoming mailboxes to sort messages into common folders. Outgoing mail can be sent in plain text or with customizable letterhead. Since the letterhead is a graphic embedded into text, it works with other mail systems that handle documents in rich text format.
Newsgroups are presented with the same interface as the Mac file system, with an expandable list and subwindows. Postings are made from the same interface as E-mail. But there's no support for IMAP and no direct support for HTML within
E-mail (though Cyberdog recognizes HTML enclosures and opens them in its browser). As with the other products, you can configure POP3 to leave messages on the server if you need to synchronize mail on multiple machines, but there's no SSL support or other encryption schemes built in.
There's also no built-in support for LDAP lookups, though you can download a free LDAP client such as maX.500 from the University of Michigan (
www.umich.edu/~rsug/ldap/max500
), which has search capabilities equal to those in Outlook Express and Communicator. Unfortunately, there's no automatic way to move E-mail addresses from those LDAP clients to Cyberdog's notebook.
Cyberdog doesn't ship with built-in Java support, so if you plan
to use Java-based applications, you'll need to get Apple's Macintosh Runtime Java 1.0.2 from Apple's Web site. MRJ is more stable than the Java Virtual Machine provided in Communicator.
Unfortunately, there's no gap-filler for JavaScript or Dynamic HTML-applications built with these will "degrade gracefully" under Cyberdog. That means applications built with JavaScript won't run, and Dynamic HTML content will be static.
Like Microsoft's IE 4.0 browser, Cyberdog is essentially a software component-it's built with Apple's OpenDoc component architecture-and is being used by many Mac developers to integrate Internet access into applications. Of course, practically no one but Apple still uses OpenDoc, and even Apple's use of it in the long term-with the acquisition of Next Software and its operating system-is in doubt. That casts a cloud on Cyberdog as well: Where does it fit in with the likes of Next's WebObjects development environment and its other software?
Of course, it helps that Cyberdog is free
. Version 2.0 is available from Apple's Web site now and will ship with Mac OS 8.0 this summer.
Intranet Co-Dependency
Microsoft's IE 4.0 suite takes a more straight-and-narrow approach to mail and NNTP news standards, so it lacks some of Communicator's functional depth. But IE's Web application capabilities are equivalent to those of Communicator. Unfortunately, in a mixed-platform environment, the non-Windows versions of IE lag well behind in functionality.
Cyberdog turns out to be the underdog in some respects, but it is the closest to a pure implementation of accepted Internet standards in the bunch. It's unfortunate that Cyberdog runs only on the Mac OS and that it's tied to Ope
nDoc, but it's a solid client for existing intranet technologies-and it's easy to implement.
As with most of Netscape's products, the evolution of Communicator has taken place in front of a large audience. All four Preview Releases, as Netscape calls its beta versions, have been available for downloading on the company's FTP and Web sites.
While not nearly as hyped as Microsoft's and Netscape's browser and mail products, Apple's Cyb
erdog 2.0 is a powerful intranet client. Although Cyberdog lacks some of the more advanced features of the other browsers, it makes up for its weak spots by being easy to use and flexible.
The real question in choosing an intranet client is whose intranet applications and servers you'll be using. Communicator is rich in useful features, but it's clearly intended as the camel's nose under the tent of groupware for Netscape-its features are fully available only when used with Netscape servers.
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Mail features POP3 mail retrieval IMAP4 mail retrieval Digital signature Encrypted mail Multiple E-mail accounts Consolidation of accounts HTML support Mail handlers and rules Embedded graphics LDAP address lookup vCard address card support
Newsgroup features
Web features
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Netscape Communicator 4.0, Professional Edition (beta)
X X X X (S/MIME) Separate profiles -- X X X (HTML) X X X X With Collabra Server X With Collabra Server X X X |
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 (beta)
X X X X (S/MIME) Different user names -- X X X (HTML) X X X -- -- X -- X JScript only X |
Apple
Cyberdog 2.0 X -- -- -- X X As enclosures X X (static) -- -- X X -- X -- With Macintosh Runtime Java -- X |
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Product
Netscape Communicator 4.0, Professional Edition (Preview Release 4) A cross-platform suite of Internet and intranet applications
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 Platform Preview An intranet suite that integrates into the shell of 32-bit Windows operating systems
Apple Cyberdog 2.0 A component-based browser based on OpenDoc for the Mac OS |
Strengths
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Weaknesses
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See related story: " Microsoft's Outlook Shapes Up "
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