Conferencing, the core groupware application, works most effectively across a range of collaborative scopes. Chapter 4, shows why it’s useful to deploy conferencing at departmental, corporate, and global scopes. Now we’ll explore how to do that.
Traditionally, the setup and administration of news servers was a black art practiced exclusively by the wizards who run newsfeeds for large companies and Internet service providers. It’s true that managing a full Usenet feed is a complex task and an ongoing challenge. But when you run a standalone news server that doesn’t need to connect to the Usenet and doesn’t need to expire articles, things get a whole lot simpler. In this mode, an NNTP server works as a dedicated conferencing system. Deployed on a LAN, an intranet, an extranet, or the Internet, it can provide discussion services to anyone running a standard Internet client.
Let’s define a deployment scenario. Earlier examples in this book have revolved around a team of analysts who write and publish reports. Let’s locate these analysts in a fictitious company—the Ronin Group—that requires the following modes of conferencing:
- The analysts’ think tank
This set of newsgroups will be a place for analysts to discuss work in progress and share research data. Some of this information needs to be hidden, not only from the world at large, but also from participants in other internal newsgroups.
- The sales lounge
This set of newsgroups serves the people who market and sell the Ronin Group’s reports. They can’t be allowed to read the private deliberations of the analysts. Conversely the analysts don’t want to be exposed to the scheming and plotting that goes on in the sales lounge.
- The company water cooler
Although the nature of the business puts the sales force and the analysts into a somewhat adversarial relationship, it also requires these groups to find ways to collaborate. To this end, the virtual water cooler—a set of newsgroups visible to every Ronin Group employee—serves the same social function as the real water cooler in the Ronin Group’s main office. There’s no formal agenda or protocol. It’s just a place for networking, in the social sense of the word. Chance encounters and spontaneous remarks are welcome and can trigger the kinds of serendipitous connections that make this social activity an important business function.
What’s wrong with the real water cooler? There aren’t many opportunities to gather there. The Ronin Group operates primary satellite offices in five cities on two continents, plus a number of field sales offices. Several analysts work from their homes. Everyone’s traveling a lot. Face time is valuable but scarce. The flow of social interaction needs to be ongoing; it can’t all be compressed into those few moments when everyone can be together.
Also visible in the companywide scope are the it.helpdesk groups (see Chapter 9). All Ronin Group employees use a common suite of software applications and share the same network infrastructure. The IT staff has its hands full just trying to keep all this stuff up and running—there’s little time to spare for training and hand-holding. The it.helpdesk groups recycle questions and answers into a community knowledge base. And they ease the IT staff ’s support burden. More capable users can directly assist less capable ones, and when they do so they create a document trail for others to follow.
- The public conferences
Here visitors to the Ronin Group’s site can meet to discuss issues and trends. Why support public conferences? The Ronin Group sees both a marketing and a research benefit. From a marketing perspective, the company likes to place itself at the center of an online community regarded for high-quality networking. From a research perspective, that networking is as valuable to the analysts as it is to the site visitors. It keeps the analysts’ ears to the ground; it puts them in touch with people who apply the products and technologies about which the Ronin Group reports.
- Ad hoc focus groups
Since the Ronin Group competes with other providers of the same kinds of reports, it can’t afford to expend too much of its intellectual capital in the public groups or engage in discussion that veers into proprietary areas. Internet-accessible but access-restricted focus groups are a place for private collaboration with business partners, freelance employees, and customers. Administratively, these are just like the groups restricted to salespeople and analysts, except that they can also include nonstaffers.
Like the virtual water cooler, these ad hoc newsgroups help compensate for scarce face time. Anyone who’s been to a focus group or a retreat knows that parting promises to stay in touch are rarely kept. Often that’s because these temporary groups have no reason not to dissolve. Sometimes, though, collaboration would precede and/or follow the gathering if there were a mechanism to support it. Private conferencing is a great way to facilitate the run-up to a meeting. An agenda can be posted and discussed, initial sparring can occur, and trial balloons can be floated, so that less of the precious face time need be spent on these preliminaries. Likewise private conferencing can support the postmortem phase. Decisions can be posted and discussed; consensus can be adjusted and refined. You can use email for this purpose, and people do, but a threaded discussion that creates a central, searchable, and web-accessible transcript is a much more effective tool for the job.
Now for the nuts and bolts. We’ll explore how to use three different news servers—the standard Unix INN, Microsoft’s NNTP service, and Netscape’s Collabra Server—to support these conferencing scenarios. We’ll also look at how one proprietary groupware server—Microsoft’s Exchange Server 5.5—can support NNTP conferencing.
I include INN because it’s so widely available nowadays—every Linux CD comes with a copy of it. There are a lot of Linux machines popping up in organizations nowadays, and even the most modest of these systems—say, a 16MB 486 that no longer pushes Microsoft Office at an acceptable rate—can under Linux quite capably deliver local NNTP service. Setup can be surprisingly painless, as is administration when you factor out the complexity of Usenet replication. The biggest drawback to INN is that it lacks SSL support. If you’re lucky enough to be using a virtual private network (VPN), that may not matter. VPN traffic is encrypted in the network transport layer, so that individual applications such as web and news servers need not provide their own encryption. Nor does INN’s lack of SSL support matter for public newsgroups that you want to make available to all comers.
If you don’t have a VPN and you do want to conduct confidential and access-restricted discussions across the Internet, you’ll need a modern INN derivative with SSL support. Both the Microsoft and Netscape news servers meet this requirement. Either of these is also a good choice if you lack in-house Unix expertise, since both can run on Windows NT. People who know how to deploy other kinds of services on NT will find these servers straightforward to set up and manage.
It’s true that the SSL-specific aspects of news server administration are complex and can be intimidating. But that’s an SSL thing, not an NNTP thing. It’s tricky to create and install the server certificates (a.k.a. digital IDs) needed to run a news server in SSL mode. It’s even trickier to create and deploy client-side certificates as an alternative to basic or cookie authentication. But the same procedures govern secure web or mail servers. The battle is simply to grasp how the Microsoft and Netscape server suites deal with SSL and public-key infrastructure (PKI) matters. Once you know how to set up and operate a secure web server, you know most of what you need to set up and operate a secure news server—and vice versa.
Note that no matter which server you choose, you’ll be able to
take advantage of HTML messaging. This sometimes surprises people.
With all the snazzy new features in the Netscape and Microsoft
newsreaders—automatic encoding of attachments, inline images,
tables, rich text, and hyperlinks—it’s easy to suppose
that some kind of backend support must be required. Not so. An HTML
news message is a clump of ASCII headers and a body made of lines of
ASCII data—just like any other news message. Interpretation of
the HTML is the newsreader’s job. When HTML-aware newsreaders
see the header Content-Type: text/html, they
render the message body as HTML. But the server doesn’t know or
care what’s in the body of an HTML message.