Groupware: The Cornerstone of Knowledge Management - Software Review - Evaluation

ENT, Feb 23, 2000 by Stephen Swoyer

The groupware packages that dominated the enterprise landscape of the mid-tolate 1990s were blindsisded by the advent of knowledge management as a critical business strategy. They have recovered, and as we move into the next century, groupware is poised to play a leading role in knowledge management strategies.

For the purposes of this review, we decided to look at the three leading groupware portfolios -- Notes/Domino from Lotus Development Corp., GroupWise from Novell Inc., and Exchange from Microsoft Corp. -- to see how each stacked up to the new demands of knowledge management. In particular, we investigated how each package will fit into a corporate knowledge management stratery.

We tested the newest packages from each vendor: Exchange 5.5 with Service Pack 3 installed, GroupWise 5.5, and the Lotus Domino/Notes R5.0.2a combination.

Microsoft's next version of Exchange, dubbed Exchange 2000, will be the primary purveyor of the company's knowledge management strategy but we chose Exchange 5.5 for two reasons.

First, it's available now and it wouldn't be fair to compare a beta of Exchange 2000 with the other products, both of which have been through several revisions.

Second, Exchange 2000 requires Windows 2000. Although available, the operating system is not widely deployed. So we stuck with the three products that administrators are faced with today when choosing a groupware solution.

We installed all three groupware suites on an AMD test machine, a 750MHz Athlon-based system with 512 MB of RAM and a 36 GB Ultral6O SCSI Atlas 10 K storage drive from Quantum Corp. (www.quantum.com). We used a robust Ultra2 SCSI 3950U2W controller card from Adaptec Corp. (www.adaptec.com). Our test server runs Windows NT 4.0, Enterprise Edition, with Service Pack 5 installed.

Microsoft Exchange

Using Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 for this review put Exchange at a disadvantage. Both Notes/Domino and GroupWise offer comparatively more robust knowledge management and collaborative capabilities than Exchange.

Due to its tight integration with Windows NT and the rest of the BackOffice components, Exchange is by far the easiest of the three suites to install. We installed Exchange onto the same Windows NT 4.0, Enterprise Edition, box that functioned as the primary domain controller (PDC) in our test enviromnent. Exchange's directory service must synchronize user information with a Windows NT PDC to function properly.

Exchange is managed through Microsoft's Exchange Administrator console, which is a powerful tool that provides all-in-one management of the Exchange environment. We found Exchange Administrator to be the most intuitive and easiest to use of the three tools.

Exchange's capabilities as an enterprise mail server are impressive because of its ability to combine raw speed with the groupware amenities of traditional LAN-based messaging systems. That said, Exchange offers a number of e-mail options, including the ability to track messages and provide receipt, read, and delete message confirmations.

We found Exchange's POP3, SMTP, and IMAP services to be on par with other Internet standards-based mail server platforms, such as Netscape's Enterprise Mail Server. Of the three groupware packages reviewed, Exchange is by far the speediest in terms of message routing, delivery, and information store access.

As mentioned above, Exchange gets a bit thin outside of its messaging capabilities. On the groupware side, Exchange provides traditional groupware functionality such as scheduling, intranet and Internet newsgroup support, chat services, and contact management. But it lacks native support for document management, workflow, knowledge management, or the ability to write applications custom-designed to interface with it. In these areas Exchange is a poor cousin to both GroupWise 5.5 and Notes/Domino RS.

Group Wise

In the past, GroupWise was regarded as a top-notch messaging and collaboration platform. It was, however, hobbled by its singular reliance upon Novell's NetWare operating system. Even organizations that deployed Novell Directory Services (NDS) in conjunction with platforms other than NetWare were required to have a NetWare server somewhere in the mix to effectively implement GroupWise. With the unveiling of Novell's revamped NDS eDirectory product in late 1999, this is no longer the case. Suddenly GroupWise went from being a strong contender in homogeneous NetWare environments to a strong contender challenging Lotus' Notes/Domino as the best cross-platform groupware solution available.

Installing GroupWise was the most complex undertaking of the three packages. For GroupWise to be configured effectively, an NDS eDirectory -- or vanilla NDS -- has to be installed. This can create problems for administrators unfamiliar with the inner workings of Novell's enterprise directory services.

We installed and configured NDS eDirectory on our Windows NT server, which went off without a hitch. Defining the NDS forest and configuring manageable NDS resources and volumes took the better part of an hour, and then we were ready to install GroupWise.