Herd Instincts

The difference between gagging on or grokking groupware comes down to overcoming technical hurdles

Alan Joch, Senior Editor

Remember the axiom about small-town lawyers? If there's one in town, the lawyer will starve; if there are two, they'll both make a fortune. Ironic as it seems, Lotus, the leading proponent of groupware, must have felt like the lone lawyer as it tried to sell the concepts of Notes in particular and workgroups in general.

The pioneering work in groupware is over, as IBM's bid for Lotus and the Notes crown jewel makes clear. The rush of other groupware applications coming to market proves Notes is worth fighting for. But companies offering you the groupware answer to all your problems may be holding something back. To launch a successful groupware installation, you'll first have to clear a hos t of technical hurdles. "Replication's Fast Track" discusses the problems of making sure everyone in an organization has access to current data, whether it's unstructured, as in Notes databases, or highly structured, as in relational databases. "Under Construction" outlines the problems developers face.

Notes administrators and developers have been grappling with these issues for years, and they'll be front-burner items for the newest competitors in the groupware market. One such faction includes IBM (with its Notes alternative), Microsoft, and Novell. They want to compete against Notes with fully formed groupware platforms. Before its Lotus offer, IBM introduced IBM WorkGroup, which is built on an OS/2 server and clients that can be either 32-bit OS/2 or Windows 3.1. The first components to ship were for fax, E-mail, calendaring/scheduling, and Addressbook functions. Also due out this year is Microsoft's Exchange, which will become the obvious choice for companies using Windows clients and NT servers.

The current version of Novell's GroupWise tightly integrates mail, calendaring/scheduling, and task management, but it falls short as an applications-development or work-flow platform. Novell is planning a major revision and name change (GroupWise XTD) for early next year. For a detailed competitive analysis of Notes, Exchange, and GroupWise, see the chart on page 84.

A second faction consists of companies releasing products that focus on individual pieces of the groupware puzzle. For example, Collabra Share, from Collabra Software, and Attachmate's OpenMind provide conferencing and interactive discussions over LANs and client/server implementations, respectively (for a head-to-head review, see "Workgroup Conferencing," March BYTE). Conference+, from The Mesa Group, provides a simple discussion platform that sits on top of Microsoft Mail.

All the articles here point to progress in overcoming groupware's technical problems. As programming tools mature and standards evolve, groupware is mo ving further from its pioneer roots. Soon it may become axiomatic to compare Notes and its competitors to legal dream teams rather than lone wolves.