Developing messaging systems is a complex endeavor. Companies such as IBM and Digital have spent decades building e-mail and messaging systems, but life shows that managers of large enterprises do not want to spend their entire lives running the same system. One of the articles in this review covers products that could be tentatively called “proprietary but open” PC-based messaging solutions from Lotus, Microsoft, and Novell. As a rule, in addition to e-mail in these products can be found and tools for organizing collaboration and development of application programs. However, now they have competitors: a new generation of technologies designed exclusively for the Internet and focused mainly on e-mail. The work of many people in various companies, whose guiding star was the Internet standards projects, has resulted in promising and high-performance e-mail systems and collaboration services.
The zealous proponents of the Internet seek to replace file servers with Web servers and to make the browser the primary tool for all desktop PC operations. Their goal – to give the user the opportunity to choose email clients and servers, not interested in the names of companies – suppliers of these programs. They believe that the user should be able to gradually build up and enhance workgroup services as they see fit. Their e-mail systems are based on widely discussed protocols (evolving too quickly to become official standards) such as IMAP4, MIME, and LDAP. Their products provide other services, such as “sequential” discussions (on a chain), based on the NNTP protocol.
Vendors of proprietary open source products have promised to endow their messaging servers with the means to recognize and respond to requests from e-mail clients using Internet protocols. For example, Lotus recently released the Domino program, an HTTP interface to the Notes suite that allows a Web client to access Notes databases and application programs. Microsoft’s Exchange Web Access Connector, scheduled for release in late 1996, will provide access to Exchange data through a browser, and the GroupWise 5 package will continue to retain the WebAccess features designed to provide e-mail services to Web-browser users. But will the messaging servers from Lotus, Microsoft and Novell be able to provide Internet-oriented clients with a level of service comparable to that to which clients of the proprietary packages are accustomed?
When these questions were posed to the developers of open proprietary products, all of them unanimously answered that no. Of course, they plan to equip servers with means to respond to requests from clients using HTTP, POP, IMAP and MIME protocols. But there is no hope that the services will be on the same level as those of embedded e-mail programs. According to these developers, in branded clients and servers can be better than in products based on Internet technologies, to realize the advantages of server rules of message processing and directory organization, to apply improved models of replication of message storage from server to server, as well as more reliable means of information protection.
Of course, developers of products based on Internet messaging technologies disagree. According to them, with the forces thrown around the world to prepare products for the Internet, no single company can compete.
It seems that such a product for the Internet, such as IMail for Windows NT by Ipswitch, serves to confirm this opinion. IMail users can tell the server addresses for relaying messages and choose to process mail one or another of the many rules based on the analysis of words in the subject line, the sender ID of the message, attached files, the size of the message and other criteria.
However, messaging products such as IMail are designed to have the entire TCP/IP infrastructure in place. For starters, you need a DNS (Domain Name Service) server and each client and server must have TCP/IP facilities. The cost of a TCP/IP infrastructure can significantly increase the cost of e-mail. In addition, a counter argument can be made that by far the most impressive software tricks in the IMail client are just as proprietary as the Notes and Exchange tools.