Groupware is growing rapidly in many businesses. We at IBM believe there will be more than 250 million groupware users worldwide by 1999. IBM is making a significant investment in the AS/400 to ensure that it will be one of the premier groupware servers for those millions of users.

A groupware server has five fundamental components:

•  Document management — In general, documents can contain text, graphics, images, voice, and even video. The groupware server manages these multimedia documents — it can store, index, compress, retrieve, and move documents around to optimize cost/performance tradeoffs among various storage media. Clients can access the documents to review, annotate, change, print, or fax them.

•  E-mail — A groupware server can act as an e-mail server. E-mail is one of the fastest growing areas for many businesses because it provides an easy way for people to communicate, within a local organization or across the world. An e-mail server needs to provide support for the various PC-based mail systems (such as Lotus cc:Mail, Microsoft Mail, or Internet Mail). The server usually accomplishes this function through the support of industry-standard mail APIs, as we saw in the last section about network computing. An e-mail server also must provide gateways to the various mail systems a business needs to access.

•  Conferencing — A rapidly growing area for many PC and NC users is conferencing. Millions of people are conferencing via electronic bulletin boards provided on CompuServe, Prodigy, America Online, and the Internet. Using these bulletin boards, people can participate in ongoing group discussions any time they want. We can call this type of conferencing asynchronous conferencing, because people can join and leave any time. In another form of conferencing, which we can call synchronous conferencing, participants interactively collaborate on a joint project in real time using instantly refreshed documents, electronic whiteboards, voice, and even video images of one another. These “electronic meetings” also have become popular with many businesses.

•  Scheduling — Scheduling, or calendaring, as it is sometimes called, permits electronic scheduling of meetings as well as sharing of calendars and “to-do” lists. The server’s responsibility in this environment is to maintain the shared information, and it may even use functions such as database triggers to manage and schedule group activities.

•  Workflow — Many businesses are looking at the technology known as workflow as a means to help them improve responsiveness of various business processes, such as receiving an order from a customer and fulfilling that order, or managing the computer Help desk. As businesses are “re-engineering” or redefining these business processes, many are starting to incorporate workflow ideas. They can use workflow technology to automatically route work from one program to the next. Workflow defines the operations that must be performed at each step and what needs to be done when exceptions occur. Workflow started in the world of computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) to optimize and automate the flow of work in a manufacturing facility. Workflow now is being applied to many other parts of a business as well, such as an office environment that includes lots of paper processes. For example, an insurance company office must process insurance claims for customers. Like a manufacturing line, this claims process has many steps with many people involved; the difference is that the claims process is handled with paper rather than product moving between the people. As this paper becomes an electronic image, a computer can automatically handle the movement of documents from one process step to another. In such a system, the server receives requests and events from the clients and interprets them according to the rules of the user-defined workflow. The server then routes the work to the people who can act on it. The server also tracks progress to make sure the right people do the work.

A groupware server combines all five of these components to provide a synergistic environment. For example, when the workflow component determines that some additional person needs to be brought into the loop for a particular process, the server can use the E-mail component to notify that person. Add to this strong Web support so the server can be accessed through any Web browser from anywhere in the world, and you have a modern groupware product, such as Lotus Notes, Netscape’s SuiteSpot, and Microsoft’s Exchange.

In the industry today, Lotus Notes is probably the premier groupware product. The server portion of Lotus Notes, called Domino, is available for the AS/400. Domino is fully integrated with other components of the AS/400, including DB2/400 and AS/400 mail; it is one of the best Web delivery engines available that can be accessed from any Web browser without the need for a Notes PC client. Domino is available on the Integrated PC Server (IPCS) for all AS/400s. Other groupware and workflow products are also available on the IPCS, which we look at in more detail in a later section.

Native support, known as Domino for AS/400, is available only on RISC models as part of Version 4. Even though it is possible to incorporate up to 16 IPCS cards within an AS/400 with each running Domino and supporting approximately 150 Notes users, the native implementation has higher performance and can support thousands of Notes users. The native implementation also provides tighter integration with AS/400 data. For example, a native driver from Domino to AS/400 data eliminates the need to use ODBC or some other batch interface to access AS/400 data. Native Domino also uses many of the AS/400 facilities, including a shared security and shared directory maintenance. In short, all the business strengths for which the AS/400 is well known are now available to Domino.

Simplified Client/Server Computing

Although we have been talking about client/server computing, I haven’t really defined client/server. Businesses should have a clear understanding of the client/server model of computing with applications split across servers and PC clients by now, but they often don’t. So let’s briefly review the client/server model then look at IBM’s efforts to simplify it in Version 4.