The Push For Internet News Services
By Andy Covell
New Internet "push" technologies can empower your users by providing them with targeted and timely news and information. If you're a network or technology manager whose users thrive on the latest information, you'll likely be called on to determine which scheme is the best fit for your environment. In doing so, you'll need to match content and delivery
characteristics of the various services to the information needs of network users, while ensuring that the technology put in place will prove reliable and resource-efficient as more users gravitate toward this new mode of keeping up to date.
To he
lp you with your evaluation and decisions, we'll present some of the issues and options available, and share our experiences with push technologies we've tested, including BackWeb Technologies' BackWeb, Individual's First! Intranet, Marimba's Castanet, Netscape Communications Corp.'s In-Box Direct and PointCast's PointCast and I-Server.
We focused most of our attention during our testing on Individual's First! Intranet and PointCast and I-Server, which are the best candidates for enterprisewide deployment. PointCast is best used as a general desktop news and information solution; First! Intranet, for organizations or departments that have specialized information needs.
Technically, with the exception of In-Box Direct, these Internet news services aren't truly push services. They rely on a client to initiate the updates from the content provider's server--which is basically more of a client "pull" than a server "push." Of course, users never lift a finger to request updates, so from a user's standpoin
t it all looks and acts like push technology.
The pull strategy enables some user control over the timing of updates, and it circumvents a problem true push technology can have with firewalls, which prohibit incoming connections. The pull can be as straightforwa
rd as the daily FTP transfer of First! Intranet or the hourly HTTP transfer of the PointCast client. Or it can be as sophisticated as the proprietary approaches of Castanet, a TCP-based transfer that provides differential updates to client-side information and Java code, or of BackWeb, with its proprietary Polite Agent protocol, running over User Datagram Protocol (UDP), which monitors client network usage and downloads updates during periods of relative inactivity.
The pull is usually initiated on a set schedule that's determined by the client software, server or user preference. The timing of pull updates affects the timeliness of user news and information. All but Netscape's In-Box Direct
and Individual's First! Intranet offer the use
r some control over the timing or frequency of downloads and the promise of near-continuous news updates.
Network Stress Points
Internet news services are judged primarily on content, timeliness and ease of use. However, when evaluating one for his or her own organization, a manager must also take into account the potential for stress on the network. The enterprise Internet connection--already burdened with day-to-day Web traffic, file transfers and e-mail--is the place where Internet news services are most likely to cause network contention. Fortunately, most services offer a caching proxy server, which greatly eases the strain on your Internet connection and firewall; BackWeb and In-Box Direct are the only products we tested that don't offer a proxy server. Officials from BackWeb Technologies say the company plans to deliver one soon.
While we only tested the client, BackWeb ran problem-free. A beta of Marimba's Castanet client, called the Tuner (we didn't test the other Castanet component
s), had a couple of system freezes--not surprising for a beta. Version 1.0 is now available for a free download. Between the two top enterprise news service candidates--PointCast and First! Intranet--we'd have to give the reliability edge to PointCast. Its client is well b
eyond the 1.0 release, and although PointCast's I-Server is actually a 1.0 product, it is very well documented and performed flawlessly once we got a few nasty bugs worked out during installation.
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