InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
November 17, 1997
Microsoft's Outlook 98 Pushed As Groupware Client
But development tools are lackingBy Ju stin Hibbard and Karen M. Carrillo
Microsoft contends that coupled with Exchange Server, version 5.5 of which ships this week, Outlook 98 forms an application development platform that holds its own against Lotus Development's Notes and Domino. To woo Notes shops, Microsoft is supporting vendors such as Mesa Group Inc. in Newton, Mass., which last week released a product for preparing migrations from Notes to Exchange.
Still, Lotus continues to win business from corpor
ate customers such as Ernst & Young International. The New York consulting firm this week will announce it is standardizing on Domino Server 4.6 for an intranet used by 70,000 employees in 131 sites worldwide. "It made sense to use Domino since we're already a big Notes shop," says Philippe Kauffmann, project manager of intranet services at Ernst & Young International. Kauffmann says Ernst & Young will use the Notes development environment to write forms-based applications and make them available to Notes clients and Web browsers on several platforms.
"Where Notes remains strong and superior is in application development capabilities," says Jamie Lewis, an analyst at the Burton Group in Salt Lake City. "Exchange still can't match Notes when it comes to ad hoc and custom groupware."
Microsoft has enhanced the forms design environment in Outlook 98. And an object browser gives developers easier access to Outlook features they can incorporate in applications. But that's not enough
for Bob Cavallaro, manager of advanced technology at American International Group Inc., a New York insurer with 12,000 Outlook seats. "I'd like to see them beef up the whole development environment," he says, by adding features such as an event model.
Outlook 98 gains support for IMAP4 E-mail, LDAP directory access, HTML-based E-mail, S/MIME security, NNTP news groups, and the iCalendar scheduling protocol. Support for Internet mail standards lets Outlook access E-mail via a dial-up connection to an Internet service provider. That's something Notes can't do.
icrosoft last week released the first public beta of Outlook 98, which the company is promoting as a full-blown groupware client as well as a standalone Internet messaging client and a desktop information manager. But corporate users say Outlook still lacks sufficiently powerful tools for building collaborative applications.
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