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Communications Week

October 21, 1996
Issue: 634
Section: Top Of The News

Groupware Now Netscape's Focus

By John Evan Frook and Paul Kapustka

NEW YORK Netscape Communications last week outlined a new client and server strategy meant to provide corporate IT departments with Web-based integration of E-mail, groupware and other productivity applications.

In so doing, Netscape is following the money, targeting corporate intranets-a market that could produce about $10 billion in revenues by 2000, according to Forrester Research Inc., Cambridge, Mass.

Key to Netscape's push is a new client, called Communicator. It supersedes the Navigator browser by including rich E-mail, groupware and HTML publishing components in a client application. On the server side, there's Suite-Spot 3.0, an expanded line of standards-based servers that sport interoperability with existing systems.

Netscape said it plans to sell corporate America on the notion of groupware that works under a single IP architecture inside and outside a company.

Netscape also outlined plans to support ActiveX and Object Linking and Embedding controls inside its new products, an integration users and analysts hailed as a pragmatic move.

Some users said they were interested in Netscape's bundling plans, because many desktop architectures do not work well together. Barry Lynn, executive vice president for the customer information group at Wells Fargo Bank, San Francisco, said it's clumsy to cut and paste between browsers and productivity applications. "If the browser is becoming the client of choice, you really want all your applications fully integrated," Lynn said. "Nobody has done that yet."

Moreover, today's simple browsers will not support the needs of a corporation that wants to access more than the Net from its desktop, said Dan Mallin, electronic marketplace manager at Imation Inc., the Oakdale, Minn., spin-off of 3M Co.'s coated-media product division. "Eventually, you will need more functionality than just a browser," he said.

But other users and analysts questioned Netscape's ability to deliver on its promises, especially in the face of established competition in the groupware market. If the new products ship as planned early next year, Netscape will face entrenched offerings from IBM, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, said Nina Lytton, president of Open Systems Advisors, a Boston consulting company.

Netscape showed in demonstrations that a task bar embedded in Communicator lets employees send enhanced E-mail, manage calendars and revise HTML documents from a single client. Via its Messaging Server, intelligent agents sort E-mail. A Collabra server enables groups to work on the same document.

Perhaps the single biggest twist in Netscape's product direction is its plan to "embrace and integrate'' ActiveX and OLE controls in its Netscape Open Network Environment. Netscape's senior vice president of technology, Marc Andreessen, said the company will offer IT administrators a client that lets employees translate Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office 97 documents into HTML, as well as protocols to open up SQL servers for intranet document distribution on Netscape client/server networks.

Martin Marshall and Jeffrey Schwartz contributed to this story.