SAN MATEO (08-26-95) - IS managers beleaguered by user demands for more sophisticated tools to mine World Wide Web servers may soon get relief as software vendors gear up to integrate sophisticated browser technology into PC applications during the next 12 months.
Once implemented, these second-generation Web applications promise to give corporations the capability to leverage global Internet environments for collaboration and information sharing. Leading the pack of integrated Web applications is a new round of PC productivity applications from Microsoft Corp., Novell Inc., and Lotus Development Corp.
As corporations begin to discover the limitations of traditional Web surfing, a number of pioneering companies are already integrating Web technology on an ad hoc basis with desktop applications to create low-cost groupware environments.
But in the next year, a flurry of new products, driven by object- oriented Web development toolkits from companies such as Oracle Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Next Inc., will make it possible for the Web to evolve beyond simple surfing applications.
Traditional Web surfing tends to be a diversion from, rather than a facilitator of, work, says Daniel Johnson, product manager at Spyglass Inc, a Naperville, Ill.-based company that has sold its Enhanced Mosaic Web browser and server code to OEM customers such as Microsoft and Oracle.
"We have to get past this [Web] surfing fascination," Johnson says. "Some of our customers are in that market. But [companies] aren't going to make any money surfing. There's no productivity there."
Spyglass emphasizes that Enhanced Mosaic is a general purpose Web client -- not a just a browser -- and it can be embedded into other applications that require on-line connections.
For example, Cisco Systems Inc. uses Enhanced Mosaic code as an interface for technical support information on a CD-ROM. Using a search engine from Verity Inc. loaded on the CD-ROM, users can search for data on the disc and on Cisco's Web site, says Charles Baugh, director of knowledge products for Cisco.
"The demand was, `Give us one application we can use to get to all of our information,'" Baugh says. "That's what is compelling about Web technology."
Similarly, users of the next version of Lotus' WordPro will find customer support only a mouse-click away. By clicking on an icon in the application's toolbar, WordPro takes users to the company's Home page on the Web. From there, users can submit search queries or navigate to other Web pages.
In addition to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the next version of WordPro will support File Transfer Protocol (FTP), enabling users to download and upload files to an FTP server on the Internet. WordPro will also offer Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) editing capabilities and support for on-line GIF and JPEG images.
Other applications in Lotus' SmartSuite will include Web-related features when the Windows 95 version of the suite ships in the fall. Among those Web features will be a Save As HTML option for Freelance presentations and Internet connectivity for Approach databases.
Lotus' two main competitors in the Windows application suites arena, Microsoft and Novell, also offer Web-related features in their word processors.
Internet Assistant is a free add-on to Microsoft Word that turns the application into an HTML editor as well as a fully functional Web browser.
Other Microsoft Office applications will include Internet connectivity in the future, says Michael Hebert, group product manager of Office applications at Microsoft.
"The Internet Assistant can be viewed as a first step that we want to apply to all of the applications in the Office family," Hebert says. "We want to make it easy for users to get access to different types of data."
Novell also offers a free HTML editor add-on to WordPerfect called Internet Publisher for Windows, though the product doesn't yet offer browsing capabilities. Last week, the Provo, Utah-based company shipped an enhanced version of the add-on that includes improved font and table support.
But these applications are only rudimentary examples of what's possible.
"The future of Web browsers is fairly mundane. There's going to be more multimedia, more types of documents, more sophisticated kinds of tags," says Nick Arnett, World Wide Web product marketing manager at Verity, in Mountain View, Calif. "What's more interesting is the integration of Web protocols into applications."
Some applications are already exploiting the Web in this manner.
Users of Mathcad 6.0 for Windows, a mathematical analysis application from Cambridge, Mass.-based MathSoft Corp., can embed hyperlinks into a document that point to other Mathcad documents on Web servers or, using OLE 2.0, Lotus Notes servers.
Without launching a separate Web browser, users can click on a reference and download the document into Mathcad.
These capabilities have left many IS managers debating the respective merits of Web servers and products such as Notes in groupware environments.
Lotus' response to this debate is to pursue a dual strategy. Company officials say they are confident that Lotus' groupware package provides more robust applications, security, and scalability than what is available for the Web.
But at the same time, Lotus is preparing to integrate Web browsing capabilities into Version 4.0 of its Lotus Notes client in an effort to make Notes a highly integrated front end to the Web.
The Web and Lotus Notes are complementary, not competitive technologies, says Allison Parker, product manager for InterNotes at Lotus. But, she adds, Web browsers are not the best way to integrate the wealth of on-line information into a user's workday.
"The Web is fabulous; there's tons of information out there," Parker says. "There's a lot to be said about one dashboard, but we don't think the Web browser is the dashboard that will take you there."
In addition to the integrated browser in its Notes client, for which the company has not set a release date, Lotus offers InterNotes Web Publisher software that links information on a Notes server to a Web server.
The company is also moving in the direction of enabling native HTTP capabilities in Notes servers, according to sources.
The Lotus approach is expected to be mirrored by both commercial and corporate developers.
"The Web browser is becoming a conduit through which helper apps run," says Alan Weiner, an analyst at Dataquest Inc., a market research company in San Jose, Calif. "Helper apps ... are turning the Web browser into a multimedia TV set."
But whether PC applications or expanded Web browser environments dominate the desktop remains to be seen. In fact, some sites are using browsers as their primary client environment.
"We're combining a lot of applications with a single user interface under Netscape [Navigator]," says Jay Schaefer, senior research engineer at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space, in Sunnyvale, Calif.
Lockheed has deployed an extensive internal Web where many of the browsers -- the company has a 150,000-user site license for Netscape Navigator -- are configured to work in conjunction with helper applications, including spreadsheets and whiteboard software.
Even as stand-alone applications, Web browsers are becoming more interactive and functional, with growing native support for different media types.
Netscape Communications Corp., which claims roughly 70 percent of the Web browser market, has in the past year licensed more than five new media types for Netscape Navigator, including Macromedia Inc.'s Director, Progressive Network Inc.'s RealAudio sound format, and Adobe Systems Inc.'s Portable Document Format.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Netscape officials say its browser will support the new file formats by the end of the year.
Netscape this year also announced it would offer support for Sun's Java, an object-oriented, portable programming language that will enable small applications -- called applets -- to be executed on the Web client.
Java will provide users with a richer, more functional environment than static HTML pages, says Jakob Nielsen, a distinguished engineer at Sun. Developers will be able to write Java applets for anything from a spreadsheet to a real-time stock ticker, he says.
An alpha version of Java for Windows NT and Solaris can be downloaded for free from Sun's Home page. Beta versions for Windows 95, Windows NT, Solaris, and MacOS 7.5 will be available in the next few months.
HotJava, Sun's Java-enabled Web browser, is available in beta release for Solaris.
Other companies preparing to tap in to the growing demand for more functional Web applications with their own object-oriented development environments include Oracle, Next and Novell.
Oracle will preview in September a comprehensive set of Internet products, including an integrated Web server and Oracle7 database, a programmable Web browser, and a developer's toolkit, the company says.
According to users and experts who have been briefed on the products, the toolkit will enable developers to rapidly add Web browsing capabilities to existing applications. Some of Oracle's Internet products will ship by November, company officials said.
Earlier this month, Next announced WebObjects, a developer's toolkit for creating more sophisticated server-based applications that work through existing Web browsers.
With WebObjects, Next is targeting the internal corporate webs that require more robust applications, the company says.
Novell, meanwhile, plans to deliver in October a developer's kit for Corsair, a technology that will enable advanced Web search and retrieval capabilities from within applications.
According to Mark Griffiths, director of marketing for the Advanced Applications division at Novell, these efforts will help make the Web a de facto standard for distributing information.
"Let's say I'm building a business model on a spreadsheet," Griffiths says. "Wouldn't it be nice to have a link to a server with a shared spreadsheet on it?"
For IS managers, this means the standard Web browser currently in use, which has its roots in dumb terminal Unix applications, is set to evolve into a dynamic environment capable of accessing any major back-end PC server.
"Web clients and servers could be a Trojan horse into traditional groupware markets," says Karl Wong, an industry analyst with Dataquest. "The lightbulb went off [in IS], and everyone said we can use this stuff internally."
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