It is hard to make a reasonable assessment of groupware technologies these days when the amount of vendor marketing and hype is at an all-time high. And to make things worse, the vendors themselves can't even agree on what constitutes groupware products and have trouble themselves segmenting and differentiating their particular approaches. Why is this the case? Several reasons. First off, the field is still relatively new, with major applications months rather than years old. Second, it is not as intuitive as personal productivity software such as spreadsheets and word processors, where the computer is used by a single individual for a single task. And third, the major software vendors actually have quite different agendas and software development goals, once you get close enough to examine their strategies. Lotus' Notes has been around the longest and has an active third-party developers' program, touching everything from vertical market providers of financial information to storing photographic images in its databases. Apple and Borland were relatively new to the groupware scene, delivering products late last year. Apple's offerings are called PowerShare and are part of upgrades to their System 7 operating system (called System 7 Pro) with features such as scripting, event management, and some mail-enabled tools. Borland calls its tools Object Exchange and has started selling updates to its core spreadsheet and database applications (Quattro Pro and Paradox) that take advantage of collaboration. Given these differences, let's first try to attempt a working definition of groupware: the ability of several people to collaborate using software tools on projects is perhaps the simplest and widest definition we've seen. The nature of collaboration could be as simple as two people sharing alternating drafts of a word-processed document, or adding information to a spreadsheet or database. More involved situations could be keeping track of schedules so that meetings and meeting rooms can be arranged easily and without having to repeatedly poll the participants. Or applications could be used to examine client contacts by a variety of individuals within an organization, so that wide-spread efforts can be coordinated. At the heart of these and other groupware applications lies two important principles: first, the ability of the computer software to reconcile different activities by members of the group, and present these differences in a meaningful way. Say Joe wants to schedule a meeting for today, and Sally is out of town. The software should report Sally's unavailability to Joe before he assumes things will work out for this meeting: that's just common sense. Unfortunately, it has taken software developers quite some time to incorporate this into actual, working products. Many of the first scheduling programs were intended for single individuals and had no ability to work across workgroups or wide-area links to other departments in an enterprise. These group-schedulers have just recently incorporated these features. A second groupware principle is the ability of the computer software to capture the collaborative effort itself in a way that is productive and encourages sharing of ideas. That's a hard thing to do, especially since the personal computer is so intensely personal that its very nature goes against this principle. For example, one of the more powerful features of Lotus' Notes, perhaps the oldest and best-known groupware application, is the ability to organize documents around themes, called conversation threads. Say I suggest a new design for my company's aging product line. Replies to this suggestion are automatically categorized and organized so my colleagues can easily follow the train of thought and flow of conversation. How these principles are implemented in each product are important to help distinguish differences and to decide which product is more appropriate for which kinds of collaborative efforts. How can you tell, without having to buy the product and build a sample application? You can, but first you will have to play a computer game: Sim City, in particular. Don't worry: if you don't have an actual copy of the game, you can still follow our approach. The idea behind the game is to build a city and keep it running, using natural resources, creating industries, setting up residential and commercial areas, and so forth. And in a real city, if things get too congested people start to move away, and you have to provide the right infrastructure to handle crime, basic support services like water and power, and roads. The game gives the user total responsibility for making these decisions -- while this isn't how "real life" urban planning works, it is close to how real groupware applications operate. Users of groupware applications have much more responsibility in determining their computing fate than using other types of applications, and that is both exhilarating and annoying, depending on whether users of groupware applications understand this going into the project. Choosing the right groupware approach is very similar to making these choices in building our simulated city. In particular, you have to examine the right kinds of plumbing and transportation systems and pick the people who will do the actual construction and repair work. And you have to know if you've picked the right building trades union for your project as well. Let's look at these five metrics, and then use them to measure the groupware products from Lotus, Borland, and Apple. Plumbing. What is the actual physical network infrastructure that is required to support any collaborative effort? Does the scheme require everyone in the enterprise to be connected to a particular network or internetwork? Can you support mobile users with laptops, or does everyone require a high-bandwidth direct LAN connection? What network topologies and protocols are required? Does the scheme work well with your existing electronic mail systems, or do you need to replace them with something else? What kinds of connections to the outside world, such as your suppliers and customers, is required? What kinds of servers are required to support the applications? As you can see, many of these infrastructure questions have little or nothing to do with the actual collaborative effort, but they could easily overwhelm building the actual application. When it comes to plumbing, Notes has the most difficult requirements. The first appearances of Notes were based on NetBIOS, a creaky and unreliable protocol. More recent versions of Notes have added others such as X.25, and perhaps Novell's own IPX protocols will finally be available by the time this article is published. While users do not have to program to NetBIOS or X.25 APIs, they do have to support these protocols throughout their enterprise. Early Notes users were plagued with all sorts of NetBIOS problems, which for the most part has been solved with more recent versions of software. Notes requires all of its users to have high-bandwidth connections. While you can run Notes on a powerful laptop and dial up to your server, you will want to come back to your office LAN and get a full Ethernet or token-ring pipe to do more productive work. This means that you might have to build more infrastructure than you planned if you will enable Notes desktops in many distant locations: we've heard from many Notes administrators who spent the first several months improving their remote links and adding new communications lines to connect their far-flung offices to headquarters. Borland has taken an opposite approach: their products require very little in terms of new plumbing to make their applications work. Borland, in fact, is the only vendor of the three that will work with disconnected users well, and move data over third-party switched electronic mail networks such as MCI Mail. Apple has the middle ground: there is some upgrades required to the plumbing, but most of it is relatively familiar. You will need to upgrade the operating system on each and every Macintosh in your enterprise, which could be expensive if not cumbersome. PowerTalk also has the ability to mix a variety of transportation methods, but require an additional gateway from third-parties to make this connection. Borland has the MCI Mail connection built-in. Apple's approach has both advantages and disadvantages: while many third-parties have signed up to support PowerTalk, you end up becoming the systems integrator and making all these various products work. But at least you don't have to wait for one vendor to add features or functions to a product, as you do with Borland. What about servers? Notes runs presently on OS/2-based machines, which can be a blessing or a curse depending on how familiar you are with this operating system. Lotus has released a version for Windows, but it is more for prototyping applications among a few people than an industrial-strength application. Borland doesn't use servers at all and is more of a peer-to-peer application. Information is stored either on individual desktops or on existing networked file servers. And Apple can operate in either mode: a US$ 1000 PowerShare Collaborative Server can be dedicated to keeping group applications, or these can be stored on desktops. Again, the more industrial-strength applications will require the dedicated server, and perhaps several. Transportation. By this we refer to moving data, not people, around your enterprise. If you have several applications, such as accounting and a customer database, can records between the two be easily linked, or do you have to build some type of connection on your own with custom programs? How easy is it to implement software that takes advantage of the programming interfaces in these applications to move this data around your network? And do you require trained drivers or can ordinary users do this work? Lotus' Notes requires its own transportation services. It has its own series of application programming interfaces (APIs) that application developers use to move data around the enterprise. However, it has picked some ungainly lorries rather than a sleek new transportation system to move its data, as we mentioned earlier in regards to NetBIOS. With Notes, the principle transportation tool is the replication of its databases. This is a very elegant system, but you have to be prepared to have the bandwidth to support these replications. Say for example your vice president is about to go on a trip to Gigantic Enterprises. She'd like to take with him all the references to Gigantic on her laptop, so that she is prepared to discuss any matter and can examine the historical record. Doing this on Notes would be difficult or tedious to do over a dial-up line, so our VP might be better served doing so while she is still in the office and LAN-connected. Borland's products fit in the easiest to an existing transportation system, and are designed to easily move information around among users. They run on higher-layer protocols than Notes, including Microsoft's Mail APIs, Novell's MHS and MCI Mail: three of the more popular electronic mail systems. (An upgrade will eventually include Lotus' ccMail programming interfaces as well.) Apple's uses its own AppleTalk protocols, which is fine if your enterprise is an entirely-Macintosh shop. If it isn't, then your groupware application might be best confined to the Mac users. Construction workers. Can some of the work building these applications be done by unskilled laborers (such as ordinary end-users) with little or no training, or do we have to call in expert carpenters, such as C programmers and information systems professionals? Consider how easy it will be to change your original application design and the expense involved carefully here. Another way to ask this question might be: how far can a developer get using the built-in tools and software before she or he has to get down and dirty and write some custom code? With Notes, you can get fairly far down that road: while building applications will require some skills, you can develop fairly sophisticated applications without having to resort to C programming. That isn't the case with Borland's applications: you'll have to become an expert to do more than mail-enable your spreadsheets. Apple's technology has made getting your electronic mail easier from within each application: that's the good news. The bad news is that many of these applications are not yet available from Apple's partners. Once you go through the pain of upgrading all your system software, you can do a lot from the actual applications. Do you have to join the union? Groupware applications are particularly fussy about the kind of company they keep. Some applications will only work with particular programs, particular versions, particular platforms. On the other hand, some unions are particularly strong and provide lots of benefits for their members, making it easier to build applications. Make sure you understand both the limitations and the benefits before you get too far into the project. Notes has the biggest and strongest union of the three, but that is expected, given that the software has been around the longest and gathered lots of attention from third-party developers. There are application add-ons from a variety of vertical-market companies and more general enhancements such as the ability to record images as one of the document types in a Notes database. Having such a large following means that there are plenty of specialized consultants willing to help you build your Notes application, if that is what you decide to do. However, like the American Teamsters, all this power can be a bad influence as well. The best example of this is the interaction between two warring Lotus camps: Notes and ccMail. Users who have both products are caught in a battle that isn't of their choosing. And getting mail to flow between the two is still cumbersome, years after Lotus has promised improvements. Apple is less further along, although many companies have pledged their support for PowerShare and System 7 Pro's workgroup features. Some of these products are actually shipping, too. This support is limited to the Macintosh community, although a few non-traditional Mac supporters (such as Beyond Inc. and Banyan) have jumped into the fray. Borland is at the back of the pack and is still gathering both market share and interest in its Object Exchange. Its development partner Word Perfect has made some promises, but still hasn't delivered on any particular product that works with the Borland workgroup products. And Apple is also working on gateways that will work together with its groupware offerings, although no date has been set as to when we can actually see products. We have yet to see any non-Borland products available with Object Exchange included. Repair crews. Finally, who fixes things when they break? Have we designed something close to Buckingham Palace (splendid to live in but expensive to maintain) or more like a common block of walk-up flats (with easy and cheap replacement parts)? All three approaches will require skilled labor of one sort or another to fix broken applications or to debug prototypes. Part of the issue here is that the notion of debugging tools for groupware applications is not well-formed: do you look at the protocols, the electronic mail network, the operating system, the software application itself? How you test the wide-area link between two Notes servers is one good example of this quandary: do you use specialized network analyzers such as Network General's Sniffers, do you write your own test tools, do you try to send electronic mail messages between the two machines, or some combination of all three? Notes is the ultimate prototyping tool: the prototype becomes the application with little incremental work. However, fixing a broken Notes application will require a specialist: you may end up having to rebuild your entire house and recable your communications lines as well. So let's review. Notes has been around the longest, has the biggest and best union, but will require some careful planning in terms of networking infrastructure and plumbing to keep your applications running. It is the only cross-platform application currently shipping, and by cross-platform we mean support a combination of PCs (running Windows and OS/2), Macintoshes and Unix workstations. Apple is still thinking that the world is entirely all of its own design, and Borland (who has ignored the Macintosh entirely up to now) is just getting started gathering support for its efforts. What about support for non-traditional data types, such as video and audio? It is the brave new world for each of the three vendors, unfortunately. Lotus is just getting started in this area, although give them some credit for recognizing the problem and moving forward. (Notes has a "Document Imaging" module which it developed jointly with Kodak, a company one hopes understands how images are stored digitally.) Borland is still at the starting gate and wouldn't be a good choice if your applications will make use of these data types today. Apple is relying on various third-parties to provide this support to PowerShare, including companies like Axion and Crosswise that have various multimedia enhancements to the basic system services. Give Apple credit though for making groupware part of their system software offerings: while it may be a short-term pain to upgrade every desktop with new operating systems software, in the long run it can make for a very potent platform since third-party developers will begin taking these groupware services for granted and using them. However, that process could take several years. ------------------------------------- David Strom is contributing editor to US-based Infoworld and Communications Week. He has been active in the American computer trade press since 1986, including the founding editor-in-chief of Network Computing magazine. He presently runs his own consultancy in Port Washington, NY. He can be reached via the Internet as david@strom.com. ------------------------------------------------- Proposed chart: Attribute Lotus Borland Apple Plumbing Substantial new investment required Great for disconnected users Great for all Mac groups Transportation Its own neighborhood Uses existing network Only AppleTalk Skill set for construction Medium High Very High Skill set for repair High High High Third-party support High Low Medium
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David Strom
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