It’s been four years since I first began the research and development efforts that led me to write this book. That’s quite a while, as Internet time goes. A lot has changed since Netscape’s products first demonstrated the vision of Internet groupware that continues to inspire me. And yet that vision is, in many ways, still not yet real.
We’ll always remember Netscape’s browser as the engine that propelled the World Wide Web to the forefront of public awareness and became the first truly universal software client. That was a tremendous achievement, but Netscape’s agenda was even more ambitious. What I’ve been calling the standard Internet client—that is, a suite of applications including a web browser, mailreader, and newsreader—is really a Netscape invention. In Communicator and its clones, the idea was to integrate a bunch of Internet protocols and applications into a common framework. We would use the browser to interact with hypertextual documents and forms-based applications. We would use the messaging tools to interact with people. Eventually the boundaries would blur, and the tools we’d use to produce and consume documents and applications would be the same ones we’d use to communicate with individuals and groups.
Perhaps Internet time isn’t what it used to be, now that Netscape is just a division of AOL. The marriage of the standard Internet client’s web and messaging components, which was promised in the 4.x browsers, is still not yet consummated. Communicator and Internet Explorer create expectations that they only partly fulfill. Consider, for example, their implementations of NNTP conferencing. Understood properly, this technology is a powerful and accessible way for groups to create, share, and discuss rich hypertextual documents. The Microsoft and Netscape newsreaders are collaborative tools, that, as we saw in Part I, can transform an ordinary NNTP server into a kind of read/write web server.
Without a roadmap such as this book provides, few people are likely to discover the true groupware potential of NNTP. Even with a roadmap, you’ll run into vexing obstacles. We saw in Chapter 9, for example, that despite NNTP’s surprising versatility, it’s hard to create a user experience that seamlessly joins web space and news space. Today’s Internet client gives us a tantalizing glimpse of what Internet groupware could be and can actually deliver more of the goods than most people realize. But the golden spike that will join the Web to Internet messaging has yet to be driven.
It’s inevitable, in my view, that the two realms will merge, although when and how is anybody’s guess. For the time being, my strategy is to make the most of the considerable integration that already exists and to further it in every way possible. I’ll review, once more, why and how to do so. And then I’ll close by suggesting how today’s unfinished Internet groupware tools might evolve into tomorrow’s Internet groupware platform.
In Chapter 1, I argued that discussion is the essential groupware application, distinct from email and complementary to it. If you haven’t yet enabled this mode of communication in your company, I urge you to do so now. Do it in the fastest, cheapest, most expedient way. The right answer for you might prove to be a so-called proprietary solution, such as Notes, Exchange, or FirstClass. Or it might be an open Internet-style solution based on NNTP or web conferencing. Either way, what ultimately matters is that you empower your people to collaborate this way, not what flavor of software supports the collaboration. It’s not even clear what the terms “proprietary” and “open” mean, frankly, now that products like Notes and Exchange aggressively support Internet standards such as IMAP and NNTP.
Conferencing matters because so much of what we collectively know is recorded in the messages that we write and because email-only environments force group communication into unnecessarily narrow channels. We abuse email when we try to make it into a conferencing tool. True conferencing, as I define it in Chapter 1, restores email to its realm of appropriate use and moves group communication into more public spaces where it can best flourish. As we saw in Chapter 2, conferencing is a cornerstone of the public online community. It can support and energize a web site and enable your company to connect online with customers and partners. The same conferencing technology, deployed on the intranet, can help networked teams collaborate effectively.
Of the many ways to implement conferencing, the Usenet style—NNTP clients talking to NNTP servers—can be the cheapest and easiest, because the clients are already widely deployed. To activate them, you just need an NNTP server, which, as we saw in Chapter 13, can be an inexpensive or free item and is no harder to set up and operate than any other kind of discussion server. If you’re not already committed to another solution, I suggest that you give this one a try, particularly if your people are already using the Netscape or Microsoft mailreaders. These products share much in common with their companion newsreaders, notably the message-composing tools through which so much vital message traffic flows. The message composers are landmarks that can help orient users as you teach them about the subtler mail/news synergies that we explored in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4.