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They got another year to polish their generally mature offerings. Things are bound to heat up later this year, with Microsoft and Novell scheduled to release major upgrades to their respective offerings. Both companies plan numerous functional enhancements as well as significant architectural changes to Exchange and GroupWise, respectively.

Novell has strong support for client-side customization through its Custom Third-Party Objects (C3PO), but the company provides limited-to-nonexistent support for server-side customization. The new release of GroupWise, due by year's end, will offer a componentized model on the server side with an exposed API. Novell will incorporate Internet standards-based components--POP3, IMAP and SMTP--from its Novell Internet Messaging System (NIMS) into GroupWise. Novell also will expose the schema and data of each collaborative object to third-party developers via XML.

Microsoft is promising to deliver new protocols, languages and client support in the guise of the Web Store, the foundation of Exchange 2000. XML, along with the new Web Store message/object store, will provide Microsoft Exchange developers with a treasure trove of tools for customizing Exchange 2000 when it ships in the second half of the year.The Web Store also operates as an IFS (installable file system) in Windows 2000. With a few tweaks here and there, existing Win32/SMB programs should be able to access every item in the Exchange 2000 Web Store as if they were accessing the Win2000 file system. In January, Lotus demonstrated Notes database access via an IFS it is developing. Once that's finished, Lotus will have an IFS for Notes similar to Microsoft's for Exchange 2000.

Interestingly, both Lotus and Novell announced support for the Outlook 97/98/2000 client. Both went to great pains to assure anyone who would listen that they weren't abandoning their own client software in favor of Outlook, but rather were responding to customer demand. It seems many use Microsoft's Office and would like to use an Office-integrated messaging, calendaring and PIM client. Microsoft responded by saying that using Outlook with Domino and GroupWise is a "reach" experience rather than a "rich" experience.

The standards-based messaging systems, such as Gordano's NTMail, NIMS and SIMS (Sun Internet Mail Server), range from those that are sublimely simple to those that can manage departmental workloads all the way up to carrier-class systems with distributed processes and administration. For the most part, products in this class will give you e-mail via Web browsers or mail clients that support POP3 or IMAP. Some so-called standards-based systems also add support for calendaring and client location independence. But standards for these functions don't exist or haven't caught on, so support for enhancements like calendaring usually requires that you use only a single vendor's solution for server and client or Web-based access. There are some hopeful signs in this area. The IETF Calendaring and Scheduling working group is creating drafts, and in October 1999 the working group released an "Implementors' Guide to Internet Calendaring." Some additional development may be coming.

Reliability, scalability and manageability are the hallmarks of the carrier-class messaging systems. Software.Com is one of the biggest carrier-class messaging vendors you've never heard of. It claims 75 million mailboxes, and that count is growing rapidly. While SIMS is a carrier-class solution that is also marketed to enterprise users, Software.Com sells only to the telco and ISP market. Novell has raised the stakes of manageability by incorporating NIMS, a carrier-class wannabe, into NDS. Not only is user information stored in the directory, but the configuration of each component and server and the distributed administrative rights are maintained there as well. In January, Critical Path acquired Isocor, another big player in the carrier-class arena with 44 million mailboxes. Once they merge their messaging and directory technologies, the resulting products might be greater than the sum of the parts.

The carrier-class vendors have the biggest share of the outsourcing market. But the proprietary vendors have been making inroads with ASPs because of their additional functionality and gains in scalability and reliability. Look for this trend to accelerate, because Lotus, Microsoft and Novell all view the ASP space as the next frontier for marketing and design efforts. The difficulty of distributing and supporting the fat clients used by the proprietary vendors has been a major hurdle to overcome for the ISP/ASP vendors. Because of advances in the technologies and protocols, the browser-based clients from the big three are approaching fat-client usability.

The workgroup and departmental standards-based systems are typically single-server solutions that are easy to set up, maintain and manage. Most of these products run on Windows NT or 2000 and can support hundreds of users at a fraction of the cost of their more scalable or feature-rich cousins. This space is crowded with vendors that are too numerous to mention. We did a roundup of several of the vendors (see "NTMail Outpaces Solid Pack of IMAP Mail Servers") and selected Gordano's NTMail as the Editor's Choice.

IMAP has matured to the point that users can choose from among a variety of standards-based clients, relying on personal preference rather than trying to figure out what IMAP client works with which IMAP server. This freedom to choose among clients has long been a feature of the mature and simple POP protocol. IMAP has the advantage over POP of server-based storage for messages and folders. With IMAP you can get to your messages no matter what computer you happen to be using.

Lotus, Microsoft and Novell are all making a big push toward unified messaging that includes voice mail and faxes along with e-mail. Solutions for achieving the universal inbox exist, but these efforts always involve two or more vendors. Make sure your groupware vendor, your fax-server vendor, your PBX vendor and your voice-mail vendor are all on the same page.