Intranets Go Head-To-Head With Groupware
Internet-related solutions give Notes a run for its money
By William Terdoslavich
Groupware such as Lotus Development Corp.'s Notes and Netscape Communications Corp.'s Collabra Share has made inroads
into corporate America, but the practice of deploying internal World Wide Web servers to act as an alternative workgroup
platform is beginning to gain an edge.
It is still early in the so-called "intranet" game, but implementation is indeed booming, a trend that should have a positive impact on
VARs willing to speak the languages of both groupware and the Internet.
"It's a little tough to talk about a trend, since the intranet discussion began in April 1995," said Lee Levitt, manager for market
development at Framingham, Mass.-based Process Software Corp.
Nevertheless, Levitt said 60 percent to 70 percent of licenses for the company's Purveyor Web server are for internal use at
businesses, up from 20 percent six months ago. Process Software's product converts existing corporate documents into the
HTML format needed for publishing in an intranet setting.
In 1996, internal licenses for Purveyor are expected to comprise between 70 percent and 80 percent of all Web servers sold by
Process Software, he said. The software costs between $295 and $1,195, depending on the platform.
The shift toward solutions based on the concept of an intranet is driven by the increasing ease with which these solutions can be
integrated, which opens up the door of opportunity to resellers at all levels of expertise.
"A small Web site can be put up in less than a day," Levitt said.
While the use of Web servers may gnaw at groupware's market position over the long term, VARs that develop groupware
solutions do not see their work being precluded by the intranet phenomenon.
"We are still a Notes integrator, but now we do more work related to the internal Web," said Todd Tomlinson, vice president for
Internet development at Claremont Technical Group Corp., Beaverton, Ore.
For Claremont, a Netscape VAR, the intranet offers three distinct business opportunities, Tomlinson said.
The first lies in content and information publishing. Items including phone directories, manuals and technical documents are easily
posted on Web servers for corporate access, he said.
The second opportunity lies in providing a basic transaction-related solution, without necessarily providing a system focused on
full-blown transaction processing. Certain aspects of a transaction can be easily handled in an intranet setting, such as accessing
information on the status of customer shipments, Tomlinson said.
Third, there is a chance for VARs to create a "community" environment that companies can use internally for communications
purposes. Like newsgroups, bulletin boards and chat rooms, the intranet is a valuable conduit for facilitating communication, he
added.
Jonathan Dreyfus, Internet sales project manager for Data Systems West, a Woodland Hills, Calif., Novell Groupwise VAR and
Netscape reseller, said the value of the intranet "is going to be shaped by groupware as time goes forward."
Groupwise's strengths, for instance, are messaging and personal productivity. "The intranet is not mature enough to compete with
this product," he said.
For the VAR, the intranet offers "ease of configuration and is more open on the back end to interoperate with existing data sets,"
Dreyfus said.
Data Systems West is working to meld the intranet with products like Groupwise, which tightly integrates a traditional messaging
environment, scheduling and tasking. The industry has yet to see a similar product for Web browser tools. "SMTP is great,"
Dreyfus said, but it cannot perform functions such as scheduling or appointment arrangement.
Planning for a typical melded installation, such as those favored by Data Systems West, would involve a survey of a customer's
current messaging environment on the part of the reseller. If the company uses Notes or Groupwise, Data Systems West would
recommend that the packages be kept, Dreyfus said. These solutions would then be integrated with an SMTP gateway, and the
Web site would be built and connected with that link as a separate entity, he added.
Internal Web projects are not expected to overthrow the groupware field anytime soon, but the situation is a dynamic one.
"An interesting play in the next 12 months is to see how the two groups will play with each other," Claremont's Tomlinson said.
One market indicator should be the progress of the Collabra Share product line, according to observers.
Netscape's purchase of groupware developer Collabra, Mountain View, Calif., offers it the opportunity to combine Collabra
Share with a Web browser.
Lotus' Notes product line is also converging with Web technology. Some observers speculate that Lotus will bundle the
groupware with a Web server in order to gain broader audience acceptance.
One unresolved challenge facing the intranet is the issue of bandwidth and how these solutions can handle files containing voice,
video and other rich communications media.
A possible solution would be to include multithreading capability into Web servers, which would allow them to operate from
within SMP server technology, Data Systems West's Dreyfus said.
"I see Web servers becoming more database-aware, from legacy systems to newly developed systems," he said. |
