As one of the first applications to find a widespread acceptance on the Internet, electronic mail (e-mail) has gained popularity and maintained its functionality based on one central factor: simplicity. Unlike many tools and resources that have made their way into the inner sanctum of the corporate office-only to be underutilized (or ignored altogether) due to 11 1/2-inch-thick, hieroglyph-illustrated manuals-e-mail has been embraced as a godsend for both management and employees for three reasons: first, it saves time (instantaneous distribution of news); second, it saves money (fewer photocopied memos, briefs, and so on); third, it is completely easy to master, even for nontechnical people. Now, if you don't believe that the "simplicity factor" holds true for your office, try this simple test: Corner an employee and ask him or her to perform one of the following tasks.
Chances are that your employee will jump at option 2. E-mail is a fast, affordable, and effective means of communication and group collaboration-one that the developing world of corporate communication must not fail to integrate into the heart of the corporate intranet.
Once there was a time when e-mail resided in "The Dark Place," the term sometimes used to refer to the UNIX (and occasionally DOS) operating systems, due to their lack of attractive interfaces and cold, dark, command-line screens. E-mail clients were almost always UNIX-based, and they consisted entirely of text commands and ASCII characters-not very exciting. If you can remember what computers (and users) were like in the '70s and '80s, you'll understand perfectly that e-mail was developed to facilitate communication across a wide geographical region at a reasonable price and speed-not to provide online entertainment to government workers and scientists. Fortunately for everyone involved, e-mail servers and clients have evolved quite a bit in the past few years. And although you'll find that today's e-mail systems include many more exciting and useful features to enhance your company's communications, at heart the e-mail process is even easier than before, thanks to rich graphical interfaces and the ease of point-and-click technology.
The underlying functionality of e-mail rests on a protocol called the Standard Mail Transfer Protocol, or SMTP. If you're familiar either technically or casually with some of the other prevailing protocols such as HTTP, FTP, SNMP, TCP/IP, or a host of others, SMTP is simply another acronym to add to your lexicon of computer jargon. Boiled down to the essentials, a mail server accepts your outbound e-mail message, translates the text of your message into a standard character string, and routes it to the desired destination based on the address that you provided. Assuming the process goes as planned, the message arrives at another mail server at the destination, is unscrambled, and is delivered to the recipient. Voilà! What could be easier?
Now that you know how an e-mail message is transmitted from the sender to the recipient, how do you tell the computer where the message should go? Well, that's easy! All you need to direct a message successfully is the recipient's e-mail address. The e-mail address is akin to the standard address that you have been writing for years on bills, wedding announcements, and so on. In place of name, street, city, and state, though, the e-mail address is composed of something different. For those of you unfamiliar with e-mail addresses, here's how a typical address might appear:
Beavis@vandriessen.highland.edu
For starters, anything to the left of the @ (at) sign should be the name of the account that the recipient uses to receive e-mail-in this case, your friend Beavis. To the right of the @, you find the host name (the server on the recipient's end) vandriessen plus the domain name, which in the example is highland.edu. This address tells your computer to "Send this message to the user Beavis who has an account on the machine vandriessen that is part of the highland.edu domain." With all this information, your message will almost always get through.
If your company or organization wants to have a unique domain
name (such as fruitbat.com
or flyingmonkey.org) and
not simply an Internet Protocol (IP) address (for example, 206.55.46.10)
to denote your presence on the Internet, you need to apply for
one from InterNIC (www.internic.net),
a company with a mandate from the U.S. Government to manage and
regulate Internet addressing issues. This process takes about
30 minutes (you must complete a form) and costs about $100. Unfortunately,
the craze to be online, especially on the World Wide Web, has
prompted everyone and his uncle to register everything from dink.com
to sausage.com, and everything
in between. And if you're thinking about basing your domain name
on the cyber, inter,
or other such computer roots, you can pretty much forget it (unless
you're extremely creative)-they're mostly all gone. If you do
a little research ahead of time to determine what is and isn't
already taken, you can save yourself time, money, and a lot of
headaches.
| Tip |
An easy way to find out if a domain name is taken is to use the UNIX command whois. Simply log onto a UNIX machine that is connected to the Internet and type whois domain name. The InterNIC database is then queried to look up information on the domain name specified. For example, if you do a whois search on intraactive.com, InterNIC replies with the following: (dave_huka)/usra/dave> whois intraactive.com The InterNIC Registration Services Host contains ONLY Internet Information (Networks, ASN's, Domains, and POC's). Please use the whois server at nic.ddn.mil for MILNET Information. However, if you were to type whois matzohballs.com, you would see the following: (dave_huka)/usra/dave> whois matzohballs.com No match for "MATZOHBALLS.COM". The InterNIC Registration Services Host contains ONLY Internet Information (Networks, ASN's, Domains, and POC's). Please use the whois server at nic.ddn.mil for MILNET Information. As you can see, this particular domain name has not been taken. You can even do a whois on people. Typing whois garrett produces a list of several hundred Garretts on the Internet. |
You may be wondering what the .com,
.org, and other extensions
mean on e-mail or Web addresses. To keep track of everything and
provide enough unique addressing possibilities, addresses are
subdivided based on the type of the organization that maintains
the address. Called the "top-level" domain, the letters
(in the United States) indicate the following:
| For-profit company | |
| Nonprofit organization | |
| Government institution | |
| Site with computers used to maintain the Internet | |
| Four-year educational institution | |
| U.S. military site |
As I've mentioned, domain names are used in place of the unfriendly and difficult-to-remember IP addresses, which took the form of four sets of up to three-digit numbers, such as 204.157.203.11. Originally, to send me e-mail, you would have had to send mail to dave@206.55.46.10. This manner of dealing with e-mail certainly would be cumbersome (remember, the keyword is simplicity), so the wonderful designers came up with the easy-to-use and catchy domain name option to help users remember addresses quickly and efficiently. These days, you can send my e-mail to dave@intraactive.com, no fuss, no muss!
In the corporate environment, the ability to send messages quickly and easily to any of a number of users, clients, and managers is a fantastic benefit, but it is an extremely broad and unimaginative application of the technology. I'm not saying that it is not a perfectly valid one, but with just a little more imagination and forethought, the integration of advanced e-mail messaging functionality can bring extraordinary gains to the richness and productivity of your system.
Suppose that your company has a technical support office with a number of highly skilled employees. Generally, the nontechnical employees either befriend a particular person in the support department and rely exclusively on that individual for support, or they randomly e-mail people in the corporate directory whose names happen to fall under the "tech support" category. This approach is both counterproductive and frustrating for both the user and the support personnel.
Using aliasing (not the same as the UNIX command), you can create a "virtual" account-for example, support@fojfo.com-that can be used as the standard tech support address, collecting all messages and directing them to a specific user, say david@fojfo.com, until such time that he is on vacation or leaves the company. This method saves a good deal of hassle in that you don't have to publish new contact information for the department. It also maintains the flow of work requests, questions, and so on, and generally enhances corporate productivity.
With companies and their employees constantly on the move-dealing with clients, closing million-dollar deals, updating documents on remote machines-ensuring that employees are never out of touch with their support staff, managers, and clients is more important than ever. E-mail can facilitate this communication, especially when coupled with two other high-tech solutions: namely cellular phones and alphanumeric pagers. When e-mail is coupled with software that can forward incoming e-mail to appropriate services (gateways), companies can enable their employees to send mail to pagefrank@fruitbat.com, for example, and have those messages appear on a PCS handset, cellular phone, or pager screen. These messages inform technical support people of malfunctioning servers, allow dispatch centers to schedule service calls more efficiently, and so on.
When was the last time you had a telephone conversation (especially since the advent of conference calling) that you hung up with the feeling that you had a thorough grasp of every detail that was covered during the course of your discussion? If you answered "never," give yourself a point for being honest-or at least not overstating your capabilities. With e-mail, every employee can keep an exact record of important as well as trivial correspondence for later review, allowing employees "total recall" and (theoretically) the ability to never overlook minor details for lack of not having a particular memo on hand.
Unlike some of the other popular features on the Internet, such as the graphical and lively World Wide Web, e-mail is not a "pipe-hog," that is, a resource that is bandwidth-intensive. Bandwidth is simply the amount of data that a particular pipe (the cable connecting you to the Internet) can transport. If you want to connect a large company to the Net and give each employee desktop access to the Web, FTP, and so on, you'll most certainly need a large pipe, say a T-1, unless you want your users to lay siege to your IS department because of the slow, frustrating access times that would result from a smaller line.
E-mail is a great feature because it requires only a minimal amount of bandwidth to work at an optimal rate. If you work in a small office, say up to five people, a 28.8 Kbps modem or ISDN may suffice. A larger company, however, can also rely on ISDN or perhaps a fractional T-1 if e-mail is the only service you want. This benefit is fantastic because it is a goal that can be accomplished with minor financial investments and can be altered to accommodate high growth or more conservative trends.
Of all the technological revolutions that have occurred in the office environment over the past 15 years, e-mail has had the most significant impact on the daily functions of office life. Radically changing many of the most basic and traditional tasks of the corporate machine, perhaps the biggest change has taken place within the realm of the office "memo." In the past, to circulate an announcement, policy change, and so on, a manager had to go through a number of steps to make sure that all relevant employees were informed. From drafting and editing to copying and circulation, the creation of the memo involved a number of time-consuming, labor-intensive, and costly steps. Today, a manager needs simply to write the memo in his or her e-mail client, quickly spell-check it (to avoid looking like a buffoon in front of employees), and fire it off. This whole process greatly facilitates information distribution.
Sending memos, however, is not the only manner in which e-mail can facilitate interoffice communication. By examining your company's day-to-day activities and needs, you can probably identify many more. For better or for worse, e-mail has dramatically decreased the number of phone calls, voice mail messages, watercooler meetings, and sticky-notes on keyboards. Companies today have implemented intranet e-mail systems to conduct multiparty conversations, schedule meetings, order office equipment or other supplies, or to submit time sheets and sales reports. E-mail allows your company to have an almost paperless office, with much less need to spend valuable time filing volumes of paper in space-hogging file cabinets.
E-mail is an ideal method for coordinating among an entire staff or department. With e-mail, you can be assured that everyone receives the original message firsthand and that the content of the message is not distorted by office scuttlebutt. E-mail lets employees forward information to colleagues, delegate tasks to subordinates, or quickly respond to a directive and request further information. As shown in Figures 30.1 and 30.2, telephones and "While you were out" message slips seem almost archaic when compared to the wonders of modern e-mail, such as the Eudora e-mail client.
Along with the ability to transfer text messages, users can utilize e-mail as a means to share files between one another, including word processing documents, programs, or any other type of computer file. Instead of making multiple floppy-disk copies of the particular file-or more recently making such a file publicly available on a file server-an employee can attach a file to an e-mail message, address it to the appropriate people, and send it off almost immediately. Using collaborative editing tools such as MS Word for Windows, many people can edit or review a single document either simultaneously or in succession. Press releases, newsletters, proposals, logos-anything that requires input and approval from a team-are all excellent candidates for e-mail collaboration.
You can also exchange documents using e-mail with people outside your organization's particular local area network (LAN) or wide area network (WAN). Even though any documents attached to e-mail messages must be encoded by your e-mail client prior to transmission, most e-mail clients can code and decode any document, so compatibility is not an issue.
If you've ever received the unofficial title of "office expert" on anything having to do with your organization's mission (or anything, for that matter), you're bound to appreciate the functionality that mailbots provide. A mailbot is an automatic response site; it provides a way to disseminate simple answers to simple questions (such as setting up Netscape on a desktop computer or requesting vacation time). You can compile a FAQ (frequently asked questions) sheet with step-by-step instructions on any subject and put it in your mailbot. If a staffer at the White House needs information on setting up Netscape, for example, she could send e-mail to netscape-setup@whitehouse.gov. The server would then automatically return the FAQ to her.
What's more, you can create mailbots for a wide range of questions, including everything from standard templates for press releases to health insurance plan options. You can even link a mailbot to a database to provide current prices and other information that changes frequently. The mailbot can search the database automatically and return the requested data, with no human interaction required.
Mailing lists (also known as listservs) are programs that sit on a server and take and broker requests. Mailing lists are commonly used to carry on a conversation among a large number of people, but they also are useful in the corporate environment for disseminating information.
A listserv consists of two addresses: an actual mailing list address and an administrative address. Any individual can send a message to the administrative address and ask to subscribe to the mailing list. Any message that is sent to the mailing list address automatically gets sent to all subscribers.
In addition to subscribing, you also can unsubscribe or perform other functions such as requesting the last nine messages, the first three messages, or any message that has a particular word in it. If you are on a mailing list that gets a lot of messages, you can make a digest of the list so that it sends you all the messages at once (daily or weekly) rather than as they come in.
There are two kinds of mailing lists: moderated and unmoderated. David Letterman's Top Ten List, for example, is a popular moderated mailing list. Only one person, the moderator, can send information out to the mailing list. In unmoderated lists, anyone can send mail to the list, and the mail goes out to everyone.
Companies use mailing lists to keep employees abreast of frequently changing information-price changes, for example. A database could keep this information, but then employees would need to check in periodically to verify prices. A mailing list immediately alerts employees to changes and new information.
Businesses also subscribe to mailing lists for news and information from outside organizations. You can find a mailing list for just about any topic imaginable. The University of North Carolina's Edupage is a "summary of news items on information technology and is provided three times each week as a service by Educom-a consortium of leading colleges and universities seeking to transform education through the use of information technology." Edupage is one of the most widely read mailing lists on the Internet. To subscribe to Edupage, send e-mail to listproc@educom.unc.edu and enter the message subscribe edupage your name.
Mailing lists don't have to be large to be useful, however. You can set up a mailing list for a single department, allowing mail to be sent to everyone in the department quickly and easily. Mail sent to art@intraactive.com, for example, would be received by everyone in the art department at IntraActive, Inc.
For companies with offices in different locations, e-mail has become practically a necessity. Before e-mail, if you had a document that someone in another location needed to review, you had four choices: postal mail, express mail, facsimile, or if local, courier. Postal mail takes three to four days with the possibility of getting misrouted or even destroyed while en route. A fax is quick but incurs long distance charges and is often printed on paper that fades in a few days or can't be easily manipulated. Express mail offers overnight delivery but at a premium cost. If the document is just headed across town, a courier is an option, but this choice also has its price.
With a WAN, you can attach a file to an e-mail and send it to
another office in minutes. The organization saves on long distance
telephone charges, postage, and delivery fees, which is sure to
be a help in today's budget-conscious office environment. E-mail
is fast and free, and if the recipient prints it out, the quality
is better than that of a fax. Table 30.1 shows cost and time comparisons
of these different methods.
| Method | Cost | Time |
| U.S. Mail ("snail mail") | $.32 or more | 2 to 3 days |
| Federal Express | $12 to $20 | 1 day |
| Free | 10 minutes |
With an Internet gateway running on the organization's computer system, you can send e-mail to virtually anyone with an e-mail address-associates, customers, vendors, suppliers, accountants, lawyers-outside the organization's WAN or LAN. E-mail eliminates the frustration of "phone tag" or waiting for a fax or package to show up. And because e-mail is free, employees can send as many personal e-mail messages as they want without racking up the company's long distance phone bills. (Not that I'm condoning personal e-mail while on the clock!)
Running a mail server is certainly not the most difficult task that you will encounter when you design and implement your intranet. If you've never dealt with e-mail services before, however, you need to understand some basic concepts, terms, and features so that you can be in the best position possible when evaluating your company's needs in relation to the resources available to you during your design stage.
If you are able to send and receive e-mail either across the Internet or simply through a company's internal communication network, you most certainly have an e-mail account on a server somewhere within your organization. Whether it's on a LAN, a WAN, or the Internet, a machine somewhere maintains a list of your name, aliases, and other pertinent information to be able to broker your requests to send e-mail, as well as receive and process incoming messages and files. Several types of mail servers are available. For a corporate LAN or WAN environment, you can use commercially available servers such as GroupWise, Microsoft Mail, and AppleTalk. GroupWise is available for most PCs and Macs. But because these servers don't use open standards, they cannot communicate with e-mail servers on the Internet. LAN and WAN servers use their own protocols instead of SMTP or POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3) for sending and receiving mail. LAN servers such as Microsoft Mail or GroupWise can be integrated into Internet e-mail by upgrading the software.
POP3 is the standard for receiving mail. Using this protocol, the server talks to your e-mail client software. If you have a mail account on a server, your mail sits in your account on that server until you sign on and retrieve it. Although POP3 is the most widely used protocol, it does have one serious drawback. POP3 functions well only from the client side. Your mail goes to your client machine and can be saved and manipulated only on that machine. If you're traveling, or your computer goes down and you need to use another computer, you're out of luck. You can't retrieve your mail.
With Interactive Mail Access Protocol (IMAP), however, you would be in luck. IMAP is a new post office protocol for receiving mail; it functions from the server side. With IMAP, you can log on to your mail account and review your mail from any machine, at any location.
SMTP is the standard for sending mail. Every mail host has an SMTP server, whether the server for receiving mail is POP3 or IMAP. An SMTP server sorts mail and routes it to the proper address. If you use a server-side client such as Pine or Elm, you usually log in to your SMTP server rather than your POP or IMAP server to get your mail. Because POP3, IMAP, and SMTP are open standards, they are available for any kind of platform.
Although literally hundreds of options are available when you're searching for new e-mail client applications, the arena for e-mail (SMTP) servers is not quite as populated. A number of excellent choices are available for a variety of platforms, though. Just remember to do your homework before committing to a particular server.
Post.Office, a powerful new e-mail server available for the Windows NT and UNIX environments, has been developed based on the open standards and protocols of the Internet community. The designers had a couple of very important goals in mind when they built the system: efficiency and reliability. Of course, Post.Office has been designed to accommodate the ever-increasing demands of e-mail messaging that exist in the corporate messaging sphere. To alleviate any problems, Post.Office includes excellent administration and security features.
Post.Office does a lot of things right, and not many wrong. It includes a number of tools that make it an excellent choice as the facilitation tool for office communications. Specifically, Post.Office includes new utilities such as remote configuration, auto-reply, and integrated POP3, SMTP, and Finger servers, which should allow you a lot of latitude when configuring and enhancing your intranet's communications capability. Probably the best feature of Post.Office is the Web-based remote administration tools, which allow you to change each and every aspect of the server's functionality-from forwarding to signature files to security, queues, and processor intervals-from any location that provides Web access.
You can find more information on Post.Office and can even download a fully functional 45-day trial copy by visiting www.software.com.
The Netscape mail server is, according to Netscape Communications, "…a native SMTP/IMAP/MIME messaging solution that interoperates with other SMTP compliant messaging systems, providing faster, higher-quality message delivery. It offers enterprise customers a robust, high-performance corporate messaging backbone they can rely on." And, boy, they're not kidding.
While not scheduled to be available to the general public until mid-to-late 1996, this UNIX and Win NT/Alpha-based server will support Internet Mail Access Protocol (IMAP4) and will also feature extensive server management and centralized network administration to make the IS department's life much easier than has traditionally been the norm. This mail package will also integrate with Netscape's SuiteSpot, which means that it will support the Java and JavaScript programming languages for creating, managing, and deploying enterprise applications on corporate systems, adding yet another level of functionality to your services.
For more information on features and availability for Netscape's mail server software, visit
http://www.collabra.com/products/index.htm http://home.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease124.html
Microsoft's strength in the Internet/intranet business is twofold: their first strategy is to make top-flight, exciting software packages to entice IS managers and Joe User to adopt their software as standard. The second is a little more exciting: they tend to give it away. Now, although this isn't the case with Microsoft's Exchange 4.0 mail server, the power and flexibility that this system offers is quite compelling. Because Exchange supports a variety of standards, including X.400, SMTP, MIME, MAPI, TCP/IP, PPP, SLIP, and X.509, it's a safe bet that you'll be able to integrate Exchange 4.0 into any system that you currently have installed within your corporate intranet or will be able to replace current systems completely in favor of an all-Exchange system, should you so desire.
You may have noticed a lack of support for some of the more popular features such as POP3, HTTP, NNTP, and LDAP. According to Microsoft representatives, support for these services is currently in the works and is scheduled to become available in versions sometime later in the year. Although this lack of support is somewhat of a stumbling block if your goal is to enable POP3 service in the immediate future, waiting for a later version (assuming it is on schedule) may be a good idea, especially if you can maintain an all-Microsoft platform, which eases administration and support burdens immeasurably.
For more information and technical data on the Exchange server, visit
http://www.microsoft.com/Exchange/InetExch.htm
An ideal choice if your company is very small or is hesitant to invest large amounts of cash at the start, Seattle Lab's Windows 95-based SMTP/POP3 server is an affordable and popular solution that offers lots of functionality for a small investment of around $180. With a somewhat snappy interface, Slmail95 allows you to create mailing lists, establish auto-responding bots, maintain aliases for user accounts, forward mail, use finger user accounts, and even work with gateways and from behind security firewalls-which means that you don't have to sacrifice security in the name of enhanced communication.
For more information on this 32-bit Windows 95 mail server, visit
http://www.cloud-nine.co.uk/slmail95.htm
Hundreds of different kinds of e-mail clients are available, including freeware and shareware. You could spend years trying them all. Fortunately, most of them do basically the same job, so the following sections give a rundown on five of the most popular but distinct client tools.
Pine, an e-mail client, was developed at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1989. It is used mostly by people who have direct access to a server (Pine is popular among programmers). Although Pine does not provide a graphical interface, it is a feature-rich client. It's also relatively easy to use. With Pine, shown in Figure 30.3, you can reply to mail; forward mail; send copies to, or "cc," other addressees; create custom mailing lists; create nicknames; and set up as many folders as you want. And because Pine operates on the server, you can retrieve your mail from anywhere. Pine does not use POP3.
Figure 30.3: A closer look at the Pine interface. It's not pretty, but it does a great job.
Eudora, which also is loaded with features, comes in both PC and Macintosh versions. Eudora, shown in Figure 30.4, is an easy-to-use, intuitive mail client. It is available in commercial, freeware, and shareware versions, with the commercially available version providing extra features such as spell-check. The downside to Eudora is that it is client-side mail, meaning you can manipulate your mail only after you've downloaded it. You can't access your mail from any machine other than your own.
Figure 30.4: The Eudora e-mail client.
SPRYMail has one nifty feature that deserves a mention. With SPRYMail, you can read the messages in your mailbox before downloading them from the server. This feature lets you delete any messages you don't want to read, or you can reply immediately to a message. You can also leave messages on the server so that you can retrieve them from another location. Other mail clients can perform this function, but none as cleanly as SPRYMail, which is shown in Figure 30.5. SPRYMail, however, does not have the flexibility of Pine or the intuitive design of Eudora.
Figure 30.5: The SPRYMail e-mail client.
GroupWise is an e-mail client that is commonly used in LAN environments, but it can be easily upgraded to Internet mail compatibility. GroupWise is not as feature-rich as Eudora. It also lacks some features that Internet users prefer. For example, Eudora allows you to change your mail password, a task that Internet users are encouraged to do frequently. With GroupWise, your mail password is the password to your computer.
Netscape Mail, shown in Figure 30.6, is a cutting-edge client that can imbed multimedia into your e-mail messages. It's not perfect, but it is as close to perfect as anything that has been released in a number of years. Plus, because Netscape Mail is integrated into the galaxy's most popular Web browser package, it's fairly certain to have a wide install-base quite soon, which will make it easy to troubleshoot, train, and so on.
Figure 30.6: Netscape's top-notch e-mail client.
The one feature of Netscape's mail client that is so wonderful is that you can embed sound, video, text-anything that you can normally place within an HTML document-right within the mail message. If you're marveling at this bit of technology, it's not really that big a deal, though the idea was a great one on Netscape's part. Basically, they took the same technology that enables their Web client to dominate their market and extended it into their mail system. So, all you need to do is create a mail message that includes either standard (or Netscape) compliant HTML tags, and you'll be well on your way to reaching new heights of creativity in your electronic communication.
To find the mail program that's best for your company, you should
first decide what you plan to use e-mail for and then try out
these five "biggies." If you anticipate a need to include
sound or images in your e-mail in the future, you might want to
go with Netscape Mail. If you prefer a solid, easy-to-use client,
Eudora may be your best bet. Table 30.2 gives you an easy comparison
of features for these five clients.
| Feature | |||||
| POP3 | |||||
| IMAP | |||||
| Nicknames | |||||
| Folders | |||||
| Filters | |||||
| Remote access | |||||
| Spell-Check | |||||
| Offline use | |||||
| Searching | |||||
| Sorting | |||||
| Attachments |
| McKeon & Jeffries has been using interoffice e-mail for several years through Novell's Groupwise software and a special patch obtained on the Internet that allowed Groupwise to talk to other SMTP servers on the Internet. The accounting firm's employees can not only send mail to users on their WAN, but they also can send to anyone on the Internet. Although Groupwise might not be the most robust e-mail client for M&J, it is an easy solution because users were already familiar with it. Also, by using Groupwise, the firm didn't have to purchase, install, or configure a new mail server. |
| The SGAA decided on Eudora Pro for its employees and recommended Eudora to its members who didn't already have a mail client. The SGAA picked Eudora because of its many features and because it is available for all versions of
Windows and MacOS. Eudora also has a freeware version that was bundled with the software package sent out to members.
The SGAA also purchased Netscape mail server to serve mail for the group. They picked Netscape because it was easy to install and configure and because the association didn't expect a large volume of mail. Also, the only machine on which the mail server could be installed was the Sun server. Netscape mail is available on the Internet for the Solaris platform. |
Because e-mail is one of the most useful, functional, and easy-to-master services offered on the Information Superhighway, you should embrace wholeheartedly some level of e-mail connectivity for your developing intranet. Whether you administer your own in-house SMPT server or have remote accounts that you access either through a Telnet or POP3 client, the benefits that can be reaped by office communication demand that you explore all the possibilities.
Although to date most e-mail consists almost entirely of standard, somewhat boring ASCII text-lacking the whiz-bang features that have made WYSIWYG applications and the World Wide Web so famous, such as boldface, italicized text, underlining, and graphics-the future of e-mail communication is certainly a bright and prosperous one. With the beginning of a trend toward embedded multimedia features within e-mail messages, including sounds, video clips, .jpegs and .gifs, and so on, you can be sure that you'll be in for a wild, exciting ride in the world of corporate communication.