OVERLINE:
Industry News
HEAD:
Netscape Brings Out Its Web-Based Groupware
DECK:
Top player in the browser world to take on Lotus
Notes.
The announcement by Netscape Communications Corp.
in mid-October of its Netscape Communicator collaborative client
software signals the arrival of a major competitor in the groupware
market.
Communicator is the result of combining technology
from the former Collabra Software Inc.--which Netscape acquired
in September 1995--with Netscape's well-known Internet and intranet-based
Web products. Communicator integrates five components: Netscape
Navigator 4.0 browser software; Netscape Composer HTML authoring
software; electronic mail; group discussion software; and realtime
collaboration software. A professional edition also incorporates
calendar scheduling and centralized user administration.
The result is expected to become prime competition
for IBM's Lotus Notes groupware, which has dominated the market.
Lotus has added Web capability to Notes in the form of its Domino
software, which some loyal Notes users have latched onto as a
way of moving them into the Web era.
"Netscape is simply saying that they see that
collaboration is going to be a big thing, so they're going to
use the rewritten Collabra technology," says Hadley Reynolds,
director of research for Delphi Consulting in Boston. "The
rumor was that since Netscape had bought Collabra--a Notes competitor--that
it was also the death of Notes. We'll see exactly what happens.
But Lotus has already conceded that [Netscape] will be a major
deployment choice of many people. I think it will be a new competitive
era for Lotus to deal with."
For its part, Netscape puts heavy emphasis on its
efforts to make Communicator the open systems choice, basing it
on open standards and making its parts interchangeable with other
vendors' open standards-based products. "Ours is a modular,
distributed approach vs. a monolithic, service approach,"
says Ben Horowitz, group product manager for Netscape's messaging
and collaboration servers in Mountain View, CA. "We think
that's a far more cost-effective and far more scalable and open
architecture to build on."
Where Netscape Communicator is expected to shine
is in its ability to communicate outside the walls of a company.
"A groupware solution in 1997 or 1998 where you can only
communicate inside your company is kind of like a telephone system
in 1990 where you can only communicate inside your company,"
Horowitz says. "It's not going to be real competitive for
MIS." However, Netscape also will have to deal with the security
fears of potential users as well as overcome Notes' large customer
base and IBM's marketing prowess.
Communicator is based on the user interface of the
familiar Netscape Navigator, which most Web users already employ
as their browser. Netscape claims an installed base of 45 million
computers for Navigator. Communicator will support 17 operating
environments and make information that users create accessible
to anyone with the appropriate permissions on the Internet or
intranets. Netscape says it plans initially to support 11 languages
with the groupware product.
In addition, Communicator comes with the recently
unveiled Netscape Inbox Direct service. Subscribers to Inbox Direct
get messages with Web formatting put into their in-boxes from
more than 40 companies, including a number of online publishers
such as the *HotWired Network*, *The New York Times* and *Times
Mirror* magazines.