FEATURES
Continued

Intranet-Based
Groupware

To view the Report card.

In the final analysis, Digital AltaVista Forum stands out for its support of the most common groupware applications. The product is reasonably priced, especially when used in small workgroups. Radnet WebShare also fares well because of its graphical developmen t environment and support of open standards.

On the traditional TCP/IP server suite side, Netscape Communications Corp.'s Netscape SuiteSpot and Frontier Technologies' Intranet Genie center on NNTP news as the key to group collaboration. Netscape SuiteSpot stands out for its extremely good integration. If NNTP doesn't fit y our need, SuiteSpot's LiveWire provides a high-quality, open application development environment, but at a much lower level than AltaVista Forum or WebShare.

Web-Based Groupware

AltaVista Forum is an unexpected hit. It's immediately useful right out of the box. Rather than bundling the traditional Internet server products and calling it "groupware," Digital provides helpful, well-considered applications. They aren't merely examples for you to ponder; they're fully featured.

You can share files, if your browser supports HTML 3.2 Input Form file type uploads. If not, Digital provides a standalone file-upload utility. You can exchange notes in a threaded discussion, conduct a poll of team members, and even provide personalized information from News sources, the Web or e-mail. You can establish real-time conferencing using Internet Relay Chat (IRC). An IRC server is not included, but it's easy to reserve channels from the desktop. These can be private, team-based or available to all server users.

Although it makes extensive use of frames and tables, AltaVista Forum doesn't have many predefined graphical buttons, and applications are not as pretty as with WebShare. The discussion forums have a bland, news-reader style interface. But AltaVista Forum offers better integration with e-mail, where new information posted to a forum can trigger e-mail to the team or a moderator.

Our only reservations with AltaVista Forum are wit h its performance. Because it uses the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) to Web servers exclusively, it can be wasteful of threads. With a few clients uploading files, processor utilization hovered at 100 percent on a Pentium 90 with 64 MB of RAM. Client connections were sluggish. Digital says this is a problem with the July beta we reviewed and claims to regularly support 250 moderate users on a single server. As always, you should check out performance in your own environment.

When users log into AltaVista Forum, they get a hierarchical view. Starting at the "Summit," the highest level on the server, users can then access their own "Vista"--a custom desktop that provides personal news, a calendar, document storage or IRC launch area. With appropriate rights, users can participate in subject-oriented forums. Users get assigned to short-term, task-oriented teams, which have their own subset of applications. Access to the team forums is managed by the team itself, thankfully getting the box administrator out of the user list management business.

We installed Digital AltaVista Forum version 2.0 on a Windows NT 3.51 server, using Netscape Enterprise version 2.0 as the Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) server. You also can choose from a variety of servers from Apache, Microsoft, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) or Purveyor, running on Digital Unix, Windows NT or S olaris. AltaVista Forum uses a proprietary database engine to feed dynamic HTML to the HTTP server. Included is a modified AltaVista search engine to help locate information in forums. WebShare's search capabilities are fairly weak by comparison.

AltaVista Forum is built using Tcl ("tickle"), a widely documented scripting language. The source code for the Tcl applications is provided as part of the AltaVista Forum Toolkit, which is included in the package. In contrast, Radnet charges you $995 for each WebShare Designer seat. WebShare provides a better programming environment, but Tc l is understandable by anyone with a moderate amount of programming experience. Since the core applications (threaded discussions and file sharing) are the most-used collaborative services, you may not need to do any development work at all.