What to Expect from Next Year's Net

Rich content everywhere. Web pages sport text, graphics, and active content, but today's Internet e-mail messages and Usenet postings typically lack this richness. Communicator, the next-generation Netscape client suite, aims to make Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) the standard for all user-generated content.

Secure mail. Encrypted sessions between Web servers and browsers are commonplace today, but few e-mail messages travel over a secure channel. Communicator's mail client will be one of a number of applications that are complia nt with Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (S/MIME)and make the public Net saf e for private messaging.

Authenticated mail. Internet mail today is shockingly vulnerable to forged identities. Communicator's mail and news clients will use digital IDs (aka client certificates) to prove that we are who our message headers say we are. The mail and news servers in Netscape's forthcoming SuiteSpot 3.0 family will know how to check digital IDs.

Controlled discussion. Site-specific newsgroups enable focused discussions that leverage Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) servers and clients but that can enjoy a higher signal-to-noise ratio than often prevails on the regular Usenet. Effective control of users' access to NNTP conferences is a problem today. Netscape says its next-generation news server, Collabra Server 3.0, will enable controlled use of local newsgroups both within and across corporate boundaries.

Location independence. While you can access Web, news, and mail content from any Internet node, it's really a hassle to synchronize local data across multiple nodes -- for example, your office machine, home machine, and road machine. Part of the answer is the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), which Netscape's new mail client (Messenger) and server (Messaging Server 3.0) will support. These products, or interoperable equivalents from other vendors, will enable your complete mail environment to float from machine to machine. Netscape's newly announced Constellation, a universal Internet desktop, will further strengthen the mail client's location independence.

Directory lookup. Internet e-mail programs come with address books, but today you typically can't look up names in a directory. Communicator will enable lookups using the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), and the SuiteSpot mail, news, and Web servers will also use LDAP to authenticate users against a Netscape (or other LDAP-compliant) directory server.

Open scheduling. You probably share your calendar with colleagues on the LAN, but you almost certainly don't share it over the Interne t with business partners. Communicator's calendar component will do just that, at first only with Netscape's Calendar Server, later (when the Internet Calendar Access Protocol has gelled) with any ICAP server.