Intranet whirlwind

Web servers don’t get much simpler than Compact Devices, Inc.’s Twister. In a box no bigger than a pair of modems comes all the software you need to set up and customize a department Web server. Twister’s virtues are its simple installation and maintenance. Its main drawback is its inability to do more than file serving.

Twister comprises a 1G-byte SCSI hard drive and utilities to quickly turn it into a Web server.

Hardware setup is simple. Plug in a power cord, connect the unit to a 10Base-T cable and you’re done.

Software installation isn’t much more complex. Compact Devices includes a diskette with a BOOTP utility called Instant IP that you can install on any Windows 95 or NT workstation.

With it, you specify the media access control address of the Twister server and the IP address you want to assign it, turn on the machine and watch a status field as the server configures itself. You can also specify an IP address via Reverse Address Resolution Protocol or on a command line via serial connection.

You now have a working, albeit not yet terribly useful, intranet server. When you first access it, you see a home page and a setup wizard for configuring the box.

Here you specify a supervisor password and choose a basic security model. You can let anyone read and write Twister directories, or you can reserve write privileges to the supervisor.

This doesn’t prevent you from setting up individual accounts whose users can write to their own directories. When you do so, still within the setup wizard, Twister automatically creates a subdirectory for each user.

At the end of the setup process, you can customize Twister’s default home page to give it many different looks.

If you’re an experienced administrator who disdains wizards, you can access a main configuration page that lets you zoom to the task you want to perform.

In addition to any files you create, Twister comes with a number of graphic elements and sample sites you can use as templates for creating your own pages.

With the hardware, Compact Devices packages Claris Corp. Home Page, a basic page authoring tool, provides a hyperlink to and license key for Net-It Software Corp.’s Net-It Now document publishing tool.

If you need more storage, you can expand Twister by connecting another SCSI device to the provided Centronics SCSI connector.

You can add only one additional read/write drive; other storage must be read-only.

Any SCSI drive you add must be formatted with a Twister configuration utility before use, so you can’t simply add preconstructed content. You can also add as many as five CD-ROM drives to the SCSI bus.

The information can then be accessed from a browser or File Transfer Protocol (FTP) by specifying a device name.

Twister does a good job of serving up intranet files via HTTP, FTP and Trivial FTP, but because it uses a proprietary Web server/operating system stored in flash memory, you can’t add third-party executables. That means no proxy server or client/server audio or video software.

Still, at $1,095, Twister is an affordable, speedy way to quickly get a department or workgroup sharing files.

Communicator sets a new standard

Forget the Netscape vs. Microsoft religious wars. The time for talking is over. Now it’s crunch time because the first of the companies’ ambitious new Internet client packages – Netscape Communications Corp.’s Communicator – hit the market last week.

Communicator is more than the next version of Navigator – it’s a whole suite of tools that addresses browsing, messaging, discussion groups, content creation, push/pull technology and more. We found it excellent in some areas – notably Navigator and the Netcaster push/pull facility – and adequate in most others, but overall a superior value.

The $59 Communicator client Standard Edition includes six applications that aim to handle all your Internet collaboration needs, while the $79 Professional Edition adds enterprise features for calendaring, host connectivity and administration. Netcaster is still in beta testing.

Netscape Navigator is still at the top of the list of Communicator applications. Usability is improved with features such as the ability to drag a URL to a subfolder within the bookmarks folder, collapse and expand toolbars with a click and access a Personal Toolbar that lets you click on frequently used URLs.

Netscape has added support for the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, which helps integrate Communicator neatly with other LDAP-compliant services, including Internet white page sites such as Four11.

LDAP is also supported by Messenger, the enhanced e-mail component, which offers hierarchical folders and address books. We found Messenger’s interface to be a little funky – it has a tabbed toolbar for specifying the recipient’s address, with separate tabs for attachments and new options such as encryption, digital signature and return receipt.

But Messenger now includes a healthy set of filters that lets you take action on received messages. It also supports Internet Message Access Protocol 4, which enables you to leave your messages on the server where you can access them easily wherever you are. Features like these make Messenger a viable alternative to a separate mail client.

Communicator also covers conferences with Collabra discussion groups. The Collabra client has been rewritten to use the Network News Transport Protocol. So you can use it as a Usenet newsgroup reader. You even can create virtual discussion groups that are subsets of larger groups or read messages on your own intranet conference server.

These three applications are the core of Communicator Standard Edition. But for the same price, you also get Netscape Composer, an entry-level Web page composition program, and Netscape Conference, which lets you use voice, text chat and a shared white board with others on the Internet.

For $20 more, you can get Communicator Professional Ed-ition, which includes applications designed for heavy-duty collaboration needs. The most useful is Netscape Calendar, a client of the company’s Calendar Server. It gives you the ability, albeit limited in scope, to publish and share scheduling information, including scheduling multiple users.

The Professional version also includes a 3270 emulator for access to IBM mainframes from the browser.

Real enterprise sites will want the Professional Edition for Netscape AutoAdmin. In conjunction with a separate server-side tool called Mission Control, AutoAdmin lets you set client configuration information – such as home page, mail server address and menu items – and lock items you don’t want users to change.

The coolest component of Communicator – Netcaster – will be an integral part of both editions of Communicator after another month or so of development. With Netcaster, you can subscribe to push channels, receive automatic updates at user-defined intervals and tune in to channels via Web technology or an integrated Marimba, Inc. Castanet Tuner. There’s an offline browsing capability and a feature that lets you broadcast software to multiple desktops.

Is Netscape Communicator worth a place in your organization? The short answer is yes. Its Navigator Web browser is the best in the business. The messaging client is now good enough that you may not need a separate product – that alone could be enough for cost-conscious organizations to justify the nominal price of the product. The Collabra newsgroup reader is adequate, though power users will still want a more full-featured application. Composer is fine for the weekend Web author but inadequate for power developers. But toss in the other components, plus a wealth of third- party plug-ins, and you have a package that’s a real value.