The Other Stuff:
Servers and Clients
The other components are the noncollaborative components. The Catalog
Server, the Certificate Server, and the Proxy Server are valuable assets to a
collaborative server, but they don't directly provide any collaboration
features. The Directory Server uses NT's domain and user information as a basis
for its own files. The other Netscape servers can stand alone with their own
data files or use the centralized database of the Directory Server. Performance
is excellent.
Netscape servers provide consistent rates of information delivery across a
wide range of user activity levels on the NT platform. If your information site
will see tens of thousands of visitors a day, you need to scale up to a
multiprocessor NT box or to the UNIX platform. You can run all nine servers on
one NT Server computer, but you need at least 1GB of hard disk space for program
storage (not counting your data) and 128MB of RAM for execution. It's a good
thing hard drives are cheap, and memory's getting cheaper.
On the client side are Netscape Composer, Netscape AutoAdmin, and IBM Host
On-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), but
they don't contribute to the workflow in a collaborative environment. The
exception is Composer, which several collaborative components use to create HTML
multimedia content for email, discussion groups, or conferences; therefore, you
can consider Composer part of the collaborative foundation.
What's Collaborative
With this overview, we can move on to the specifics of Netscape's
Collaborative Solutions. Let's look at the collaborative components and consider
some collaborative applications.
Documents and Images:
The Enterprise Server and Netscape Communicator
The Enterprise Server is Netscape's name for the suite's Web server. This
server program delivers pages in HTML, as well as Common Gateway Interface (CGI)
fill-in-the-blank forms. The Enterprise Server accepts user responses and can
execute scripts based on user input. Transactions can be ordinary Web stuff or
secure communications that use the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which is suitable
for electronic commerce.
What's so collaborative about a Web server? Web servers are more versatile
than you might think. You can use them for making information available to a
common base of users and as a central distribution point for documents and other
types of files via the Web server's built-in FTP capability. Admittedly, calling
a Web server collaborative is a bit of a stretch. You typically use Web servers
to provide and collect information, which any good database program can do. The
difference is that Web servers use other programs, such as browsers, to present
and collect that information. For truly collaborative capabilities, however, you
need 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 the
Netscape Navigator Web browser, you'll be comfortable with Communicator. It's a
logical extension of the Navigator program, with some improvements and a
slightly more friendly interface. You can use Communicator to access your Web
server--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. These
tags let Communicator launch additional components on request. For example,
let's say you have a question about a colleague's document. If the document has
an HTML tag, you can click on the tag and launch your videoconferencing
component (also built into Communicator) and establish a video link to that
person immediately and automatically.
Email:
The Messaging Server and Netscape Messenger
The Messaging Server is the next stop on the tour. This program fits the
traditional description of a collaborative application, even though what the
program does is straightforward: It sends and receives email. As I discussed in
the overview article, "Pathways to Collaboration,", email is
the heart of the collaborative enterprise. The larger the enterprise and the
more geographically dispersed it is, the more important email becomes.
Therefore, the server must be stable, reliable, and versatile. The Netscape
Messaging Server appears to meet all three criteria.
The Messaging Server supports all common email transfer protocols including
MIME, POP, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and Internet Mail Access
Protocol 4 (IMAP4). Because the Messaging Server supports these standards, the
server is fully capable of sending and delivering rich audio and visual
information 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 that
creates messages based on the HTML standard. HTML is an easy way to embed
images, audio or video files, documents, applications, or virtually any type of
attachment so it is readily accessible at the destination. The client also
organizes your communications into folders and lets you search and sort at will.
The Messenger client works with the Directory Server to gather address
information 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 to
communicate and collaborate; one of the earliest services supported was the
USENET. USENET uses NNTP and a constellation of servers to provide electronic
bulletin boards that anyone can read and comment on, publicly or privately.
Netscape's Collabra Server is an NNTP server with additional features, primarily
for intranet security requirements. Collabra Server supports the Directory
Server and NT's native user information and SSL communications with the Netscape
Collabra client (or a third-party news reader).
The Collabra client is a full-featured NNTP client with extensions for the
Collabra server. You can arrange discussions by category, put markers on
important files so you can find them later, and use the Composer component to
create both regular text and HTML multimedia items. The Collabra client is easy
to operate and relatively quick for a program of this type. NNTP clients aren't
generally known for their speed of operation, so Collabra's speed is notable by
itself.
Resources and People:
The Calendar Server and Netscape Calendar
The Calendar Server provides tracking and scheduling of people and
resources, a critical feature for enterprisewide collaboration. A typical use
for 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 meetings
via the audioconferencing or videoconferencing software capabilities built into
the Communicator client.
The Netscape Calendar client talks to the Calendar Server. These two
components are the only parts of the client/server suite that aren't based
on open standards because people can't agree on standards for calendar
management. The last person to create a standard for calendar management and
make it stick was Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, and we've been trying to catch up
ever since.
Peer to Peer:
Netscape Conference
For realtime collaboration, you need a conferencing client, and Netscape
Conference is your ticket to the show. Conference supports all manner of
communications, depending on the hardware on your desktop. At the most basic
level, Conference supports remote whiteboarding and text chat, which lets two or
more people view the same application across a network, operate that program,
highlight and make other notations that everyone can see without affecting the
program's execution, and discuss in a separate chat window what you're all
seeing.
The better your system is, the better Conference gets. If you have audio
capability (a sound card, speakers, and a microphone), you can talk to other
participants in realtime. If you are fortunate enough to have a video camera and
a video capture board that digitizes images caught by the camera, other
participants can see and hear you. Not all stations need to have
videoconferencing capability. People without video cameras can still see other
people; the other people just can't see them.
Like the other Communicator components, Conference is based on common
standards, including the H.323 videoconferencing standard. The H.323 standard
lets people with a standard but non-Communicator-based system participate fully
in the videoconference. When you have the Directory Server, Conference uses it
to let you create and maintain conferencing directories based on Web pages.
Conference also supports client-to-client file transfers--a useful feature when
you'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 lets
you deliver audio--from either a live or a recorded source--across the network
by streaming.
Traditional methods of delivering audio across networks use .WAV sound
table files, and the recipient must receive the whole file before playback can
begin. Streaming audio removes this limitation with the use of a special player
client. Netscape's Communicator desktop software has this player client built
in. The player is compatible with RealAudio: Netscape and Progressive Networks
worked together to define the Real Time Streaming Protocol, which both companies
use.
All In All, It's All In One
So what's missing? The document management functions are good, but they
don't include revision control. Revision control is the ability to track changes
made in documents over time and to revert to earlier versions, if necessary. You
can do something similar to revision control, using the Collabra server and
clients. But saving different versions is mostly manual, and the system won't
keep you from accidentally doing something silly, like saving an older version
over a newer one. However, other collaborative suites (such as Lotus
Domino/Notes, which Carlos Bernal discusses in "Lotus Domino 4.5 Server and
Notes 4.5 Client,") have revision control. The
Netscape solution set has everything else you need for serious collaboration,
and Netscape adds the significant benefit of being based on widely accepted
standards for communication and storage of information.
From this description of the program elements, you might think that
Netscape has a fragmented view of the enterprise and has designed a rather
fragmented solution. The truth is that although each piece can stand by itself
and do a fine job, the system consists of a pair of suites: one for the server
and one for the desktop. Each suite is well integrated within itself and easy to
administer, and the two suites communicate well across LANs, WANs, or the
Internet.
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