Along with the much-discussed Java, group collaboration using World Wide Web technology is one of the Web's most exciting possibilities. This is attested to not only by the fact that IBM's Lotus Notes product has been dragged kicking and screaming into Web integration, but also by the emergence of completely new products, built specifically for Web collaboration. After reviewing some simple and immediately available means of using your Intranet for group collaboration, this chapter will survey the world of Web groupware and give you some ideas of how you can put it to work on your Intranet.
It might be useful to begin this discussion by broadly categorizing the means of Web-based collaboration. Several may be defined as follows (although in practice, Web services more often than not cross these neat category boundaries):
Leaving aside fancy groupware computer applications for now, let's remember that the most basic means of human collaboration and cooperation is simple, straightforward information sharing. People tell other people what they are doing, what they've learned, and so on. Learning by listening to what other people say about themselves and their activities is one of the most fundamental means by which we are educated and socialized-and by which we grow in our professional lives. Scholars and scientists write books to share information, and information distribution is the raison d'être of journalism.
Simple information sharing can form the collaborative core of your Intranet, and its value should not be overlooked in the glittery world of groupware. Indeed, online information exchange may be your most important tool. Let's therefore take a look at some simple but potentially powerful means of Intranet information sharing, beginning with user home pages.
In the introductory chapters of Building an Intranet with Windows NT 4, I emphasized the need for customer input in the design and content of your Intranet. As you'll recall from Chapter 2, "Planning an Intranet," one criticism of the centralized model of Intranet administration is that a bureaucratic process of Web-page approval places obstacles in the way of customers getting their own information out onto your Intranet. Looking at your Intranet from a high-level viewpoint, you've perhaps not focused on how individual users' home pages can contribute significantly to its overall value.
Perhaps at this point you're thinking of some of the personal home pages you've seen on the World Wide Web, full of adolescent bravado, bandwidth-eating images of CD covers, song lyrics purporting to state a philosophy of life, self-indulgent posturing, and hyperlinks pointing to similar drivel, and you probably wonder how such things can be a useful part of your Intranet. They can't. But what a 20-year-old college sophomore thinks appropriate for his university home page and what a working scientist, engineer, or other professional might put on a professional page are two completely different matters, and we're interested in the latter.
Users can be taught basic HTML markup in half an hour. Their personal Web pages can be copied to the main Web server, or an alias directory can be created on the Web server to point back to the users' workstations. Either way, the users don't need to learn anything about Web servers to make their pages available. This makes the language an excellent vehicle for information sharing on an organization's Intranet.
Whether they're office support staff or engineers, paraprofessionals, or scientists, your customers can easily create home pages to share their work with others in your company. Fancy graphics don't usually add much to Web page substance. Here are some possibilities:
It's hard to overstate the potential value to an organization of this sort of simple information sharing. In a business research environment, for example, the linking of a few important ideas can lead to breakthrough products or services. One researcher, stuck on a project, may find just the thing she needs on some other researcher's home page. Moreover, once the collaborative ball is rolling, customers will add hyperlinks pointing to other customers' home pages on their own pages, making the combined resources of many available to all.
You're already familiar with running a mail server on your Intranet (from Chapter 8, "Serving E-mail via TCP/IP"). Let's take a moment to think about the potential collaborative value of e-mail in your Intranet. E-mail distribution lists, run manually or with automated list servers, can be an important adjunct to your Intranet by providing another means of group discussions. And since the major Web browsers all have e-mail interfaces, it's easy to integrate e-mail into your Intranet.
If you expect e-mail to become a major part of your Intranet's collaborative efforts, you'll want to set up a means of retaining and retrieving messages. (You'll want to do this with your Intranet Usenet news articles too; I'll address this later in the chapter.) This will enable your customers to go back to mailing list archives and search for old messages that might have current relevance.
There are several ways you can archive e-mail messages:
In the latter example, you can then use news-indexing tools to index everything, since your e-mail traffic and netnews traffic will be merged into a single database. The Pro version of Eudora, as well as the enhanced version of the Microsoft Exchange client, include filtering features that can be set up to read all incoming mail to a user and automatically dispose of it in some way (based on criteria you determine). In this situation, you'd want the filter to automatically save all incoming messages on a mailing list to a file or directory, which can later be indexed.
The popularity of the World Wide Web, with thousands of new pages coming online every day, has generated the need for individual users to share new Web resources they've found or created. Since most Webmasters are busy people, often having job responsibilities over and above their Webmastering, ordinary users need a way to post hyperlinks to useful Web resources in a public place for others to see, without having to rely on a Webmaster or other system administrator to do it for them. (This is quite a different thing, of course, from users placing new hyperlinks on their own home pages.)
However, it doesn't take much thinking to come up with several significant reservations about implementing such a free-for-all Web resource. Leaving questions of appropriate content aside for the moment, the idea of a Web page that allows just anyone to add anything they want should bring shudders to anyone with the faintest sense of network security. Nonetheless, a large number of such services (and the CGI scripts to implement them) have sprung up across the Web. Major Web search services (such as Lycos, Yahoo, eXcite, and the others) allow users to fill in forms to have URLs added to the service.
Even taking these security concerns into account, though, there are good reasons for implementing a free-for-all page on your Intranet. Not everyone wants to create a home page of their own, but such people may still find useful resources they want to share with other customers. The ability to add URLs to such a page may, in fact, inspire these people to eventually create Web pages of their own as a contribution to your Intranet; certainly, these people shouldn't be discouraged from doing so.
From a collaborative point of view, browsing customers may want to be able to suggest links to those who do have home pages, complementing the information already there. If these folks can add a URL to a free-for-all page easily, they'll do so; if they can't, they may not bother to share their ideas. In any case, giving your customers free rein to add URLs to a free-for-all page can improve overall collaboration and communication on your Intranet. The question of appropriate content on a free-for-all Web page is, in this author's opinion, a management issue, not a technical one, and should be dealt with as such.
You'll find a long list of Web free-for-all links at http://union.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HyperNews/get/hypernews.html.
This and several other such lists mentioned in later sections
of this chapter are maintained by Daniel LaLiberte of ncSA, who
may be the Web's foremost collaboration guru.
| Note |
Web pages that collect votes of some kind or take surveys are a special kind of free-for-all page, as are pages that enable you to access some service or enter in a raffle after you've filled in a form with personal information such as your e-mail address or phone number. On the World Wide Web, many of these are thinly disguised marketing ploys, aimed at generating sales leads. |
Almost as soon as the first World Wide Web servers and browsers came into use, people wanted some way to use these new tools for interactive conferencing. Being able to post documents is one thing; being able to respond to them in some way is quite another. Let's look at a couple of the results.
One of the earliest efforts at developing such a resource was the Ari Luotonen/Tim Berners-Lee project called Web Interactive Talk, or WIT, which was developed when both were at CERN. In WIT, discussions proceed according to traditional dialectic methods, with general topics and subsidiary proposals. Someone posts a document proposal, and then others are invited to post comments about the proposal in the form of agreements or disagreements.
WIT is primarily valuable as a pioneering work in the area of annotation and conferencing (and it's no longer being maintained by the authors, both of whom have left CERN), but you may want to look at it anyway. You can do so at http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/WIT/User/Overview.html.
When I bought my iomega Jaz drive a couple of months ago, I was looking for the right SCSI device drivers for Windows NT. A friend of mine by the name of James Kirst, who knows all about SCSI and all about finding things on the Web, told me to check out the unofficial iomega Web page for threaded conversations at this URL:
http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~jwu/wwwboard/wwwboard.html
Not only did I find useful information about Jaz drives, but I also came away extremely impressed by the software used to run the board. The software is called WWWBoard. It is a Perl script written by Matt Wright. You can find more information about WWWBoard, and download the source code (as far as I can tell, it's free) at this URL:
http://worldwidemart.com/scripts/
This section would not be complete without some mention of DEC's new collaboration package which runs on NT and DEC UNIX. pcWeek magazine gave version 1.0 of Workgroup Web Forum the Analyst's Choice Award in the February 26, 1996 issue comparing Web-based conferencing servers. Check out this URL for more information:
http://www.digital.com/info/internet/resources/applications/29.html
Microsoft just recently announced a new product that could prove useful for remote teleconference meetings. NetMeeting 1.0 is designed to let several participants mark up documents in whiteboard fashion over the Internet. Microsoft used their own ActiveX Conferencing Software Development Kit to build NetMeeting. You can get more information about NetMeeting and the ActiveX Conferencing SDK, and download both of them for free from the Microsoft Web site:
http://www.microsoft.com/intdev/download.htm
A sample version of Allaire Forums is included with Cold Fusion on the CD-ROM with this book. Cold Fusion is a popular database interface to Windows NT Web servers all over the Internet. Allaire Forums is their new product which provides Web-based conferencing and threaded discussions. As usual, the clients only need to run a Web browser. Check out their Web site at
http://www.allaire.com
The commercial About Server product (http://www.aex.com) provides forums for group discussions, much like Usenet news and other commercial groupware packages such as Lotus Notes, but at lower cost and with what AEX calls "tighter integration" with the World Wide Web. The product is available for several UNIX platforms, and they claim a Windows NT version will be available soon. Here are some descriptions of the forums in the About server:
Demonstration versions of About Server are available from the AEX Web site. The user interface appears quite self-explanatory, with individual article hyperlinks, and indentations indicating article threads.
A discussion of Web-based conferencing/annotation systems would not be complete without a brief look at the United States government's Open Meeting on the National Performance Review, reachable on the Web at http://www4.ai.mit.edu/npr/user/root.html. Here you can read various findings and recommendations of the NPR, which has been led by Vice President Al Gore, a major influence in the federal government's all-out plunge into the Internet/World Wide Web in the past four years.
As shown in Figure 27.1, the service is interactive, and you can add your own comments and questions. It's a bit clumsy, though, requiring you to enter your Internet e-mail address in a fill-in form, after which you're e-mailed a comment form to fill in and send back, also via e-mail. Moderators review submitted comments and questions, and not all of them are posted.
Figure 27.1: The Open meeting on the National Performance Review lets you post ideas on the Web.
There are a large number of collaborative groupware art services on the Web. The basic idea behind all of them is that anyone can add Web resources to the picture, the work of fiction, or some other piece of creative work-in-progress. Image collages, for example, can be augmented by adding the URL to your own image on the Web; the next user will see the modified collage with your image added.
As another example, a novel can be entered at any page using a clickable imagemap. Once you're in, you can browse about the work or contribute to it by inserting your own text. Other collaborative groupware on the Web comes in the form of interactive single- or multi-user games or other creative add-a-link pages. The latter are modified free-for-all pages that have a theme of some sort. Users are free to add URLs (for images, other Web pages, and so on) that somehow advance the interactive fiction, enhance the art object, or otherwise contribute to the evolving entity that is that particular Web page. The beauty, if any, is in the eye of the beholder.
These examples, and others like them (again, see http://union.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HyperNews/get/hypernews.html) are useful not so much in their substantive content as in the possibilities they represent. After all, the World Wide Web is the world's largest vanity press, where anyone can post anything they want with no evaluation of its actual value. While you or your customers might not be interested in these particular endeavors, there is a wide range of possibilities for collaborative groupware for your Intranet, and these may be instructive as examples.
The demarcation lines among free-for-alls, conferencing/annotation systems, and the more full-featured Web groupware are indistinct. Nonetheless, let's take a look at the latter. As with the previous sections, I'll start with some very simple ones. This will lead up to the more complex, full-featured groupware packages.
Almost from the beginning, the World Wide Web has been called, among many other things, "the Lotus Notes killer." You can see from the examples given so far in this chapter how this quip came about. After all, many of the Web tools about which you've learned in this book replicate some features of Notes. Whether it's simple information sharing via home pages, conferencing with Usenet news using a Web browser, Web-based e-mail, or Web-based annotation systems like WWWBoard, artful Webmasters can in fact provide their customers with most of Notes' features, at a tiny fraction of that package's considerable cost.
The downside of this replication is the lack of Notes' tight integration; however, being able to access the wide range of services Web browsers support may be integration enough for many. Making the choice between home-grown collaborative and commercial groupware on your Intranet can boil down to the following choice: Is the 10-15% of Notes' capabilities you miss with a homegrown set of applications worth the very substantial cost of the package?
IBM (the new owner of Lotus) thinks not. In early 1996, version 4.0 of Lotus Notes was released, outfitted with a whole raft of new capabilities, including World Wide Web browsing and authoring support, Usenet news access, and a lower (though still pricey) per-seat cost. Let's take a look at Notes R4, as it's called; you can be the judge of its potential value on your Intranet.
Notes R4 is, in essence, a document database. Users can search the database according to everyday criteria, and can also browse the database. Browsing can be done based on different views of the database, with the ability to step back and see high-level organization or dig in and see the details. Notes R4 databases can be replicated across an organization, over multiple servers, so all the employees in a far-flung company, including those on the road, have access to the same consistent information.
Integrated e-mail, group document annotations, collaborative functions, workflow management, and group scheduling are also featured. Built-in security features enable you to control access to authorized users at all levels of the database. Links in documents can be followed by pointing and clicking to other related documents. Users can create altogether new Notes applications using a set of graphical tools.
Finally, with Notes R4, IBM/Lotus jumped into the World Wide Web with what it hopes will be a "Notes-killer killer." Consider these features:
| Note |
You may want to look at Lotus' Web site, http://www.lotus.com/, where you'll find several detailed white papers about Notes R4, as well as some ScreenCam recordings. |
Among Lotus Notes R4 competitors, Collabra Software Inc.'s Collabra Share stands out. Despite the fact the package is a direct Notes competitor-providing integrated, collaborative groupware, with document-databases, e-mail, database replication, access to Usenet newsgroups, and even a Notes-compatible client for both Windows pcs and the Macintosh-this isn't the real reason the product has become important in the past year.
The real reason this upstart company has suddenly become worth mentioning here is not even that Collabra Share won the pc Magazine Editor's Choice award in late 1995 (although that must have been a big boost for the product).
No, what's really important is that Collabra Software, Inc. has been acquired by the Netscape Communications Corporation juggernaut, which has announced plans to integrate all of Collabra Share's features directly into the Netscape Navigator Web browser. Although Netscape says there will continue to be a stand-alone Collabra Share product for Windows and the Macintosh, and a Collabra server, and those products will continue to evolve, the next major release of Netscape Navigator will "incorporate fully the Collabra Share functionality." Given Netscape's dominance of the Web browser market, building in Collabra Share client support will undoubtedly provide a major boost to the Collabra server products, potentially to the detriment of Lotus Notes R4.
The acquisition should also help Netscape itself. Collabra Share
supports integration with both Microsoft Mail and Lotus cc:Mail.
The ability to use these popular and mature e-mail products within
the Netscape environment should go a long way to help Netscape
compete against the broad solutions these other vendors are pushing.
It can be hoped that Collabra's Usenet news reader will be a major
step forward for Netscape's netnews interface.
| Note |
From the Collabra Web site (http://www.collabra.com), you can download Lotus ScreenCam recordings of Collabra Share in action as well as evaluation copies of the Collabra Share client software itself. |
The long-awaited release of Microsoft Exchange Server finally happened in the Spring of 1996. It includes a very powerful Exchange e-mail client that goes far beyond the capabilities of the free Exchange client included with Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.
Naturally, the Exchange Server only runs on NT. Microsoft expects
to use Exchange as a key piece of the overall BackOffice suite
to demonstrate the viability of Windows NT for enterprise-wide
solutions. Microsoft believes that BackOffice can take corporate
networking the next step beyond what is possible today with NetWare,
and that NT-based solutions are much easier to administer than
UNIX. The May 1996 issue of Byte magazine features a cover
story by Tom R. Halfhill comparing Windows NT to UNIX. One of
the conclusions the Byte author reached is that Windows
NT is clearly "off probation," given the continued advancement
of its features, stability, and market acceptance since its release
four years ago.
| Note |
Speaking of magazines, another reference you will want to check-out is NT Magazine. The December 1995 issue carries the first of a two-part article by Tim Daniels comparing Collabra Share, Lotus Notes, and Microsoft Exchange. The article continues in the January 1996 issue. Further, the April 1996 issue includes two articles about Microsoft Exchange: "Migrating MS-Mail to Exchange" by Spyros Sakellariadis on page 66 and "Exchange SDK" by Tim Daniels on page 81. |
In case you don't already know, BackOffice 2.0 (also just released) includes the following core components:
Another powerful feature of Microsoft Exchange, and part of the
reason that it is a competitive groupware solution for an enterprise,
is the capability it gives developers to create GUI electronic
forms tied to Visual Basic code. The true potential, and ease
of use, of this feature is yet to be discovered by many organizations.
If you get a chance to see a demo at a Microsoft-sponsored seminar,
you might walk away wondering why anyone would want to develop
client/server applications on any other platform. As a C++ and
Visual Basic client/server developer myself, I can tell you that
it is very impressive. (The only catch is that if you are thinking
about building an application on top of Exchange, you will be
subjected to criticism from plenty of potential customers who
are already very happily committed to Collabra Share or Lotus
Notes.)
| Note |
For more information about Exchange Server, and all of the BackOffice components, see http://www.microsoft.com/BackOffice/. |
Besides electronic mail, Usenet news was probably the first groupware tool to be invented on the Internet. It's still a great means of online collaboration and discussion. Netnews might be called the Mother of All Computer BBSs, so great is its reach and breadth.
The idea was first developed in the 1970s, when computer researchers at a couple of universities in North Carolina wanted an open means of discussing and sharing ideas. The basic idea of Usenet, which is still pretty much what it's all about, is that people can post articles for others to see. Articles is a formal word, but you shouldn't think of netnews articles in any way like magazine or newspaper articles. Rather, an article can be anything anyone considers worthy of posting in an electronic forum.
Netnews articles range from treatises on TCP/IP networking to discussions of upcoming flying disc tournaments (rec.sport.disc) to comparative reviews of 4x4 truck tires. Once posted, a netnews article is available to anyone on the local computer system who might want to look at it. Article readers can also post follow-up articles in response to other articles, possibly starting a dialog or group discussion. The follow-up articles are also available to everyone on the system to read and, of course, respond to with further follow-ups.
Netnews articles may also be sent out from the local system to remote systems, where remote users can read/respond to them. Using a flooding algorithm, news articles that aren't purely local are distributed all over the Internet very quickly to thousands of systems serving thousands (possibly millions) of people who can read and respond to them. Usenet is almost infinitely divided, with more than 20,000 newsgroups in seven major categories:
Each newsgroup category is the tip of a vast iceberg of related newsgroups, subdivided into thousands of very specialized topics. Besides the major groups, you'll find biz (business), bionet (biology), misc (miscellaneous), and various local groups. Major Web browsers, such as Navigator, Explorer, and Mosaic, include the ability to post, read, and respond to Usenet news articles. You saw in Chapter 11, "The Web Browser Is the Key," how Netscape Navigator easily handles the job.
Netscape's netnews interface is substantially different from Mosaic's, and has gone through a number of recent changes; you may see something different by the time you read this book. An interesting feature of Netscape Usenet news interface is its capability to resize any of the three panes of the netnews window.
If you've spent any time reading Usenet news, you know how discussions
often seem to pick up a life of their own. They often last for
weeks as multiple readers post follow-up articles, then respond
to the follow-ups of others. Although they frequently degenerate
into personal insults, Usenet news threads (articles in a single
discussion thread) can often be an important means of collaboration
as consensus is hammered out in public discussion. You can use
the same process to enable collaboration on your Intranet, with
your customers using their Web browsers as news readers.
| Note |
Early in the book you learned about Internet Requests for Comments (RFCs) as part of the development of today's TCP/IP networking standards. The consensus-building that led (and still leads) to Internet RFCs is a good example of netnews collaboration through discussion. |
Because you're running (or considering running) a netnews server on your Intranet, you need to know some basics about how newsgroups work. This background will allow you to set up Usenet-related facilities in your Intranet.
You'll recall the list above of the seven major netnews newsgroup categories (comp, sci, rec, soc, talk, news, and alt). Besides these major categories, there are many others, including regional newsgroups and, most important for your Intranet, local newsgroups. Before going into the details of creating and using local newsgroups, though, let's look at the way newsgroups in general work, using the seven major categories as examples.
As noted previously, there are major subcategories within each of the top-level newsgroups, and many of the subcategories are recursively subdivided into more categories. Eventually, the subdivision stops and individual newsgroups begin.
Given the penchant among netnews readers to want more and more specifically focused groups, you can imagine the near infinite subdivision of subject matter. Let's take a look at just one subcategory of the comp newsgroup category, where we will find newsgroups dealing with the World Wide Web. You'll find this subcategory within the comp.infosystems category (one of 70-odd first-level subdivisions of the comp category). Its name is comp.infosystems.www. You're probably already catching onto netnews' nomenclature, with newsgroup categories and subcategories named using periods to separate the levels. Thus www is a subcategory of the infosystems category of the comp top-level newsgroup category. Within the www newsgroup subcategory, there are eight further subdivisions (advocacy, announce, authoring, browsers, misc, providers, servers, and users).
Let's follow the comp.infosystems.www subcategory down one more step into the browsers category, where you'll find yet another four subdivisions, mac, misc, ms-windows, and x. Here, you've finally touched bottom and reached the last subdivision of this branch of the comp.infosystems.www newsgroup tree. Each of these is an actual newsgroup, devoted to Macintosh, miscellaneous, Microsoft Windows, and X Window World Wide Web browsers, respectively.
Your customers' view of the Usenet system reflects the way newsgroups are named. Figure 27.2 shows ncSA Mosaic's display of the newsgroup comp.infosystems.www.browsers.ms-windows. As you can see, this is a pretty plain, mostly text display of a list of news articles. Each article entry is a hyperlink, so clicking on one selects the article for display.
Figure 27.2: The ncSA Mosaic newsreader.
Rather than using a separate window to display a selected article, Netscape attempts to display all newsgroup information on a single screen, as shown in Figure 27.3. This busy screen is divided into three panes. The panes show:
Figure 27.3: Netscape Navigator news window.
The list of newsgroups in the newsgroup pane shortens the (often
very long) newsgroup names, placing ellipses in the names. Unfortunately,
the contraction method makes most newsgroup names unrecognizable,
even to experienced readers. Even though you can resize the newsgroups
window (click on the double vertical line, just to the right of
the scroll bar and drag it to the right), the newsgroup names
aren't expanded.
| Note |
The other two panes of the Netscape news window can also be resized by grabbing the double lines with your mouse and sliding left or right or up or down. |
It's important to note that Usenet news server (also called NNTP, for Network News Transfer Protocol) software provides for the creation of local newsgroups. You need not be a part of the Internet's Usenet system to run a news server. On the contrary, your netnews server can be entirely local, with your news articles not being sent anywhere outside your organization. All your customers can have access to your local Usenet news, and can use their Web browsers to read and respond to local news articles.
Normally, netnews articles get sent to the outside world, via your upstream newsfeed, from where they are sent on to netnews systems all over the Internet. Since you're using netnews as a local communication and collaboration mechanism on your Intranet, however, you'll agree it's not appropriate for your purely local newsgroups to get handled this way. Instead, you want them to stay inside your Intranet, where confidentiality and privacy are protected.
If you would like to try running your own NNTP server on Windows NT, you can download either a freeware or a commercial trial version at this URL:
http://www.netmanage.com/netmanage/nns/
NetManage also makes available the documentation for the freeware NNTP server, called NNS. They have enhanced the widely available NNS package and included it as part of a new commercial product they call the NetManage IntraNet Server for Windows NT. The server technologies they include in the package are
| Note |
By the way, the NetManage Web site is also quite interesting from the standpoint that they build a very competitive Web browser and now have a free package of ActiveX controls for use by Web designers and VB programmers. Be sure to check out this URL: http://www.netmanage.com/ |
Your Usenet news server stores news articles in a file tree that parallels the newsgroup subdivisions, with subdirectories for each category, subcategory, and individual newsgroups. Thus, the filesystem path to the comp.infosystems.www.browsers newsgroups, beginning at the top of your Usenet news spool, is comp/infosystems/www/browsers. The tree-structured system of directories and subdirectories parallels the subdivision of Usenet newsgroups. Within the bottom-level subdirectories, you find the actual netnews articles.
Files are named with a consecutive numbering mechanism, so when you do a directory listing of one of your netnews article subdirectories, you'll just see a list of numbers. The first article that created on your local system is placed in a file named 1, the second, in the file 2, and so on. These filenames are unique to your system, as they're created when users post articles or your system receives articles from other systems. The file named 7835 on your system will most likely not correspond with the file 7835 on any other system.
All Web browsers require some initial setup for netnews. First, users need to define the Usenet news server to which they'll connect. Second, users need to select the newsgroups they want to read. The first of these is a quick, one-time thing, but the second is a potentially tedious process.
The major browsers use an essentially similar process for defining your netnews server. In Microsoft Explorer, for example, choose View | Options | News to configure the browser for your Usenet news server. You'll see the tabbed dialog as shown in Figure 27.4.
Figure 27.4: News server configuration in Microsoft Explorer.
There are several configuration items here, but you're concerned for the moment with only one of them, labeled News server address. Fill in the box with the name of your NT Server running NNTP (or NNS), or the name of your Internet Service Provider (ISP) news server (if you want to try out the real Usenet before running your own).
Click OK to return to the main window. To try the news service
in Explorer, choose Go | Read Newsgroups. The resulting long list
of newsgroups is rather poorly presented in Explorer 2.0. However,
you can filter the list down to a more manageable level by entering
a URL with an appropriate mask. For example: news:comp*.
| Note |
Be sure to check out the new Internet Mail and Newsreader applications from Microsoft for Windows 95 and Windows NT 4. These programs are currently available as free beta downloads from the Microsoft Web site (www.microsoft.com) and we can expect them to be well integrated with Internet Explorer 3.0 when all three are officially released. The Newsreader program is much nicer than the News feature, which is currently built into Internet Explorer 2.0. |
In this chapter, you've learned how to put Usenet news to work on your Intranet. We also discussed several means of enhancing your Intranet through collaboration, and the tools you can use to make it happen. In summary, here's what this chapter has covered:
In Chapter 28, "Connecting the Intranet and Internet," you'll learn how to expand your Intranet services globally. This can be useful for your non-local customers who need to take advantage of the same facilities that are available on your local network.