Leading The Way

Microsoft and IBM Lotus will turn a new page in their epic battle for corporate software dominance this fall when both launch a new generation of realtime communications servers and team work environments. The two software vendors, which have been sparring in the e-mail space since Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft first launched Exchange Server in 1993, are about to go head-to-head in the more complex and evolving collaboration software market. E-mail is now being complemented by software that allows users to meet, discuss and collaborate in realtime,or near-realtime.

Microsoft's upcoming Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 will act as a hub for other Office applications,a place where users or administrators can aggregate and categorize information relevant to their roles. The combination of this product, the coming Office Live Communications Server (LCS) and the underlying collaborative functionality to be embedded into the core of Windows Server 2003 will enable the creation and management of individual portals, team sites, divisional sites and enterprise portals.

The foundation technologies for the server, which were formerly known as SharePoint Team Services, were enhanced and recently renamed Windows SharePoint Services (WSS).

But Lotus isn't sitting still either. The company recently introduced an upgrade to its renamed Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing products, formerly Sametime and QuickPlace, for Linux and Unix. More significantly, Lotus this fall plans to debut its next-generation collaboration software portfolio, dubbed IBM Lotus Workplace, which includes Notes Workplace and Workplace Instant Messaging, Web conferencing, team rooms and document management components. Some say Cambridge, Mass.-based Lotus' Workplace is merely a bundle of software that it already offers under different names, but it's clear that the company,as evidenced by its historic e-mail rivalry with Microsoft,won't simply roll over with the threat of its nemesis looming.

Lotus and Microsoft both view the team workspace as just one platform on which to meet electronically. The vendors also plan to integrate their collaboration services with "utilities" such as Microsoft Office, enterprise applications and, perhaps most significantly, portals. Microsoft, for example, views SharePoint Portal Server, WSS and Windows as the playing field for collaboration, while Lotus is shifting the venue to IBM's WebSphere Portal.

Amid these coming changes, the CRN Test Center evaluated the new WSS and compared it with IBM Lotus Team Workplace in combination with Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing, as well as Groove Networks' Groove Workspace, which is offered as a service.

Microsoft came out so far ahead that the CRN Test Center believes WSS will ultimately become the dominant collaboration platform. In fact, the Test Center predicts that WSS 2.0's unmatched breadth of Office integration and operating system interactivity will reshape the contextual collaboration space for years to come.

All of the products were installed and tested on a system running Windows Server 2003. Beverly, Mass.-based Groove's Groove Workspace had the easiest client install by far, but WSS offered superlative functionality and allowed Test Center engineers to begin developing sites within minutes. All of the data is kept in a SQL Server engine that comes with WSS, so there is no need to install a separate database.

Along with the new Web Parts architecture, the Test Center believes that WSS could ultimately become Microsoft's front-end platform for business application development, Web services integration and many of its middleware servers.

The incorporation of WSS within Windows Server 2003 gives users excellent file services and direct access to WSS sites through Windows XP clients. WSS follows the WebDAV protocol, so XP clients can see sites as if they were shared files in a directory. Any file copied into a site's directory using the command line will be seen as a posted document, while any subdirectory that is created will be seen as a new document library. Applications that are not WSS-aware can also save data using the universal naming convention (UNC) directory path, which enables their content to be visible in a WSS site.

Both Microsoft's and Lotus' collaboration architectures are still dependent on centralization and securing connections across domains. This network management method cuts off users outside a corporate firewall unless they have a VPN connection. As a workaround, solution providers or administrators can place the server outside the firewall and assign passwords to users.

Because it is offered as a service, Groove Workspace offers a better solution to this problem. Invitations to a Workspace are passed using key files to each client PC. The PC encrypts and decrypts all connections between groups. A key exchange between a workspace and a user's PC will encrypt any data exchanged between them. The connection is secured and is transparent to any firewall.

Using WSS and Office 2003, users can create document and meeting workspaces on the fly. For instance, Office WSS sites can track meeting agendas, allow attached e-mail documents to point users directly to a document site and post live data from Access or any ODBC-compliant data store using a Web Part. Data also can be uploaded from Excel into WSS simply by highlighting cells.

Another service unique to WSS is its forms library. WSS allows any XML content in a forms library that's created with InfoPath to be merged or manipulated individually. Essentially, any document created with Microsoft's InfoPath, an XML form-building tool slated to be released with Office 2003, can be harvested and developed into a report in WSS.

IBM Lotus Team Workplace has a wizard-driven form-creation system that enables simple data collection from team members, but the data that's collected from forms is stored in a Notes database file and is inaccessible outside the platform unless a developer ties it to a database. Team Workplace does not integrate with InfoPath.

The new WSS endows templates with the ability to do more than simply hold structural information. Templates can now hold content and can integrate with live data through Web Parts. By using FrontPage with WSS, users will be able to attach just about any database within seconds. In fact, the CRN Test Center has seen no other collaboration platform that can create live, data-driven sites this rapidly.

Because of WSS' speed and extra functionality, solution providers targeting the SMB market will be able to offer fairly sophisticated applications and simple workflow management with FrontPage and Visual Studio .Net.

WSS' lightweight document management capabilities let users track tasks that have been assigned to them and to other people. Users can also see which lists or other files have been contributed by users of other sites. The addition and management of new members is completely controlled by users. Team Workplace and Groove Workspace offer similar features.

Unfortunately, the presence-awareness capabilities are rather basic in WSS, so customers would need to buy Microsoft's LCS to bring instant messaging to applications. As tested, WSS only works with Windows 2003 Server and can only truly compete with Lotus if LCS and Outlook/Exchange are integrated with it.

With LCS, WSS users can co-edit documents by auto-replicating files between clients and synchronizing them in realtime. WSS alone does not have this functionality. This architecture is similar to Groove Workspace's but offers better integration with Office applications.

Still, the great promise of contextual collaboration,the ability to share data directly in realtime,currently exists in only one collaboration platform: Advanced Reality's Presence-AR.

Advanced Reality, Houston, has patented a way for applications to read each other's memory space and pass data across the Internet through a P2P-centralized network. For instance, a plug-in can sit on top of Excel and monitor any changes made to a sheet or a formula. If a user makes a change in a cell, the change is instantly passed to another identical spreadsheet across a network. This technology offers an incredible opportunity for data sharing across different desktop applications.

Groove Workspace offers a more crude but still quite effective method of replicating data that's light on network traffic. The solution checks for changes in binaries and only passes the changes to a file, so complete files don't have to be replicated every time users make changes.

The CRN Test Center predicts that contextual collaboration might one day become the new desktop as more functionality is driven away from productivity tools and into the server. In some ways, the technology will come full circle to the days when hosted centralized services were the only option available to users.

PAULA ROONEY contributed to this story.