THE NETWORKOLOGIST

Creating Business Harmony Out Of Web Noise

Solutions in the works will make distributing and receiving information more efficient, and the traditional push model of e-mail and the traditional pull model of the Web will be revamped in the process. Two companies, among many others, are trying to change the models. Diffusion proffers IntraExpress as a solution to the business delivery of different information to multiple recipients across a variety of media. Wayfarer Communications offers a way to blend information from the Web, news feeds and inside the organization into desktop harmony.

You Say Violi n, I Say Fiddle Diffusion calls its model "co-active information delivery," but I'll avoid yet another made-up marketing term. You can think of its software as an informationa l watercooler, which receivers and distributors of information can hang around. If you have information you want to distribute to a large group of people, you set up IntraExpress with a profile of the kind of document you're sending, where you're sending it from and to whom you'd like to send it.

For example, let's say you want to send new product pricing to your sales staff. IntraExpress sends a notice to the people you've indicated, and the recipients accept or decline the offer. If they accept, they indicate in which format they want the material and in which medium.

For greater efficiency, you can build subscriber lists that new users can join. New recipients are automatically offered all the past documents in the system, so IntraExpress can be used as an easy way to bring new members, employees or business partners up to speed.

The software tracks profile information for senders and receivers. For senders, it tracks file formats for sending information, who is authorized to receive the materials , where the information is posted and what has been previously posted. For receivers, the profile includes the addresses at which they receive information and to which groups they belong.

IntraExpress runs on a Windows NT box and uses a Watcom database, and supports Windows95 and NT 4.0 clients as well as any Java-enabled browser. It works with POP3/SMTP- and MAPI-compliant mail systems. Diffusion will ship IntraExpress in the first quarter of 1997. The company says it expects the entry-level price to be $125 per user, whether the user is a distributor or a recipient.

Cotton for Aching Ears Another company harmonizing the din of business content is Wayfarer. Launched this month, ScreenMagnets essentially is a Webcasting product designed to deliver headlines to an organization's employees, whether they're from public news fe eds, external Web sites, an internal client/server application or a message composed at the keyboard of a company president (or her corporate communications director). Scree nMagnets supports Reuters, PR/Newswire and Web-based stock quotes services for publicly available information.

IS tightly controls what goes into ScreenMagnets; it's not a tool designed to let the user poke, prod and twiddle. The advantage is that through IS, the organization controls which headlines dance on the users' desktops, and controls the flow by individual, department or company. Because the client/server application maintains session-level information for all of the users, access can be controlled and secured.

On the server side, ScreenMagnets runs on an NT 4.0 server, and servers support 2,500 to 3,000 concurrently active clients, according to Wayfarer. On the user side, Windows 3.1 and 95 are supported. Wayfarer estimates pricing will be $10 to $15 per user. Pricing was not final at press time.

Patricia Schnaidt can be reached at pschnaidt@nwc.com.