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Access control in AltaVista Forum is well thought-out. Team members can add or delete others, and forum level moderators can adjust access control lists without having top-level access. Participants can register to get on immediately, or an administrator can approve them first. Users can be placed in groups to simplify administration. Forum ownership can be reassigned if necessary. Access control limits cannot be assigned to the entry ("topic," for instance) or document level, as with some proprietary groupware.

AltaVista Forum does not integrate with the underlying operating system or HTTP server security, which requires its own internal user directory. But since anonymous ac cess, user self-registration and access control delegation is possible, it's not that nasty of a problem overall.

This month, Digital will be offering free trial access to an AltaVista Forum for Internet users via its ForumForum service. Included is access to private forums that you can moderate yourself. Watch www.altavist a.forum.digital.com for more information.

AltaVista Forum's pricing favors small workgroups, where it runs $495 for 25 users connecting to a single server. If you add users, you can buy more 25-user packs. Unlimited client access to a single processor server runs $3,995, and an additional $2,395 per CPU for multiprocessor servers. The underlying Web server is not included.

Radnet WebShare

Radnet took an innovative approach to building custom groupware applications, and WebShare is much more the sum of its parts. It combines a database, Web server, an HTML-oriented development environment and some glue. That doesn't sound too glamorous, but the resulting mix is impressive. WebShare ships with starter applications that address the most popular collaborative needs. Like AltaVista Forum, it has group discussions, file sharing, calendaring and so on, but more applications are provided (see "Web-Based Groupware," on page 58). These applications are built on easily modifiable templates f or use by anyone who knows a little HTML and even less BASIC programming.

Included in the package is the Spyglass Web server, which is a capable enough server for supporting WebShare applications. If you've already settled on a Web server, it can "speak" CGI or Internet Server application programming interface (ISAPI) to it. WebShare doesn't include an e-mail server, but instead it will use the Messaging API (MAPI) or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to connect to the server of your choice for mail notifications. After logging in, the user sees all available applications on the server. Each application may have its own access-control list with customized permissions. The interfaces are more sophisticated than AltaVista Forum's, incorporating, for example, expanding and collapsing views of discussion threads.

WebShare Designer, licensed separately from the server, supplies a reasonably sophisticated visual development environment. Forms, views, data attributes and macros can be easily created. A majority of the server-side logic is coded in BasicScript, licensed from Summit Software. Simple data validation rules can be assigned in property boxes within the WebShare Designer.

Although WebShare uses open interfaces such as Open Database Connectivity (ODBC), the underlying engine is off-limits. It's just not documented well enough to give you the knowledge to keep you out of danger. Although it's built on Sybase SQL Anywhere, don't be tempted to use Sybase's replication services to move data among servers. Radnet is reportedly working on replication for a later release. (Radnet would not say if the Sybase replicator will be part of the approach.)

The WebShare Designer provides directives, in the form of custom HTML tags and BASIC extensions, that virtually eliminate any database management drudgery. Tasks that are traditionally difficult to do, such as handling one-to-many relationships, are available via a single customized HTML tag. The HTML extensions can list available applications, display all attachments to a message, define button actions, jump among views and include boilerplate interface text, for example. Tags defined for a button can launch a BasicScript macro, which can do many things. But a majority of the coding is plain-Jane HTML and JavaScript.

WebShare's heavy reliance on HTML as the predominant API can leave you wanting a good HTML authoring package. It's a good idea to use a external tool to create the major design elements, and then paste sections into the Designer.

Major weaknesses are in server-side automation, the search engine and security. Agents can be configured to send mail to users and perform other background tasks, but only on a timed basis, not on the basis of an external event such as a new document in a database. The search engine only provides the most basic keyword lookups and can't find attachments by name.