Messaging's Next Blockbuster Hit By Nancy Cox   Drive by any movie theater these days and George Lucas' Star Wars trilogy leaps off the marquee. In the flashy arena of client/server messaging systems, a similar power trilogy dominates: Lotus Development Corp.'s Notes, Microsoft Corp.'s Exchange and Novell's GroupWise. Drawing record-breaking crowds, these systems have what it takes to guarantee box-office success--solid plot lines, phenomenal special effects, futuristic features and compelling sequels. But what if your company doesn't want to blindly follow the maddi ng crowd to the ticket window? Maybe your organization doesn't want to invest in Notes, or it's not tied to the Microsoft Office suite or it doesn't run Novell NetWare. Or perhaps your company is a maverick willing to take risks. What alternative client/server messaging systems exist? Is some product waiting to be discovered--to be the next blockbuster hit that expands the stellar trio into a dazzling quartet? To view the Report card. To find out, we left the the obvious "big draw" messaging systems on the cutting room floor and looked for "sleepers" with originality, creativity, thoughtful integration and special effects of their own. (For more on Notes and Exchange, see "Messaging Standoff," June 15, 1996, page 50. For more on GroupWise, see "GroupWise 5.0: With Age Comes Wisdom," September 1, 1996.) We deemed five products to be promis ing contenders for successful enterprisewide deployment: CE Software's QuickMail Pro 1.0 for Windows 1.0, Coordinate.com's BeyondMail 3.0, NetManage's Z-Mail Pro 6.1, Netscape Communications Corp.'s Communicator Preview Release 2 and SOFTARC's FirstClass 3.5. (Enterprise Solutions' EXMail, Esys Corp.'s Simeon, Hewlett-P ackard Co.'s HP OpenMail, Oracle Corp.'s Oracle Interoffice and QUALCOMM's Eudora Pro didn't make the cut. Interoffice, in the throes of a major release, was unavailable within our test window. Hewlett-Packard was "camera shy," insisting that its product did not lend itself to single-site evaluations. Simeon and EXMail, while meeting the rest of our criteria, run only on Unix servers, and Eudora provided no integrated groupware--just third-party software.) In an Orlando, Fla.-based corporate lab facility, we compared the five selected products in their out-of-the-box state, with no additional programming, plug-ins or options. All five showed thoughtful integration, intuitive navigation and movement to open standards. Ready for My Closeup, C.B. The five selected systems vary widely in the way in which they provide their application suites--some are totally integrated, some modular and some are a little of both. In addition, clients range from the very thin to the downright bloated--FirstClass, for instance, requires only 2 MB of hard drive space while NetManage's Z-Mail demands a whopping 32 MB. As it is in Hollywood, in the world of client/server messaging, thinner is better. Budget-minded organizations desire thinner clients with more functionality, and many corporations think thin clients will become extremely important as they swap out their terminals for network computers. Four of the five products support the Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) standard on the server side; POP3 lets a signal be sent when the hard-wired link between a messaging system's proprietary client and server is severed. The holdout is FirstClass. Most of the products we tested support Intern et Message Access Protocol version 4 (IMAP4), which will supplant POP3; those that don't already support it, will soon. Support for IMAP4 makes it possible to have remote folders on the messaging server that users can manage. Dragging and dropping folders on the client to the server saves local disk space, makes information sa fer because of routine backups and lets users share folders. Users can download just message headers, saving transmission time. Since IMAP4 is an international standard, an organization can select any compliant messaging client, thus providing the same type of flexibility relished by POP3 users. To download an Adobe Acrobat .pdf format version of the Client/Server Messaging features chart, click here.

Updated April 8, 1997