Content area
Full Text
Are you prepared to consider Netscape a serious contender in the groupware market, alongside Lotus, Microsoft and Novell?You should be.
With its recent releases of Communicator 4.0 and SuiteSpot 3.0, Netscape has elevated itself into the groupware market with a strong, integrated product line. If Netscape fails to penetrate this market in a big way, it will be due more to failure to position itself in users ' minds as an alternative to Domino, Exchange and GroupWise than as a result of any shortcomings in its products.
Netscape's standards-oriented product architecture makes its Web-based groupware offerings competitive from a cost-of-ownership and enterprise-scalability standpoint. However, enterprise users still tend to view Netscape as a purveyor solely of HTML/HTTP-based Web browsers and servers.
The company's reliance on purely Web-based solutions has become less of limitation as most of the corporate world rolls out intranets based on HTTP and TCP/IP. Every groupware vendor has placed the highest priority on adapting its environments to be accessed from browsers and to hook into HTML-based file stores.
From a feature standpoint, Netscape's offerings are fast approaching parity with the leading groupware environments. This is not to deny that...