E-Mail, Browser Clients Are Rage At Demo '99

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February 16, 1999 (10:13 AM EST)

E-Mail, Browser Clients Are Rage At Demo '99

Application developers are starting to live by the motto, "Keep it simple, stupid."

If you asked exhibitors and attendees at the Demo '99 conference here in Indian Wells, Calif., last week, software vendors are turning to simple Web or e-mail interfaces rather than bloated proprietary front ends.

Take Abuzz, whose Beehive software is designed to help companies organize informal business information that is not typically recorded digitally or on paper, but rather is passed along by word of mouth.

Employees using Beehive can send questions to an e-mail address. Beehive parses the text of the message, searches an internal database of employee profiles that tells the software who might know the answer, and fires off an e-mail to the potential answerer. After the second employee answers, the first employee sends Beehive a rating of how useful the response was, and Beehive modifies its profile database accordingly.

Beehive also can automatically answer frequently asked questions.

Abuzz chose e-mail as the front end for Beehive because it's a familiar interface, and adding new functionality to e-mail changes little about how employees work.

"There are two things people do every day, whether they're in the office or traveling on the road: They check e-mail and voice mail," said John Rizzi, executive vice president of Abuzz.

Victor Ramesky, director of IT and decision support at Allied Domecq Wines USA, said browsers and e-mail are superior from an IT perspective because they provide common interfaces. That means less maintenance of client information.

Allied Domecq has designed an application that lets users update the company website within Lotus Notes. The company went that route rather than buying a separate Web publishing application because users already use Notes for e-mail.

Simplifying the client also keeps users from being overwhelmed, he said.

"New applications are being thrown at users constantly," Ramesky said. "We didn't want to have to put another application in front of users for Web services. If we did that, they'd kill me."

Similarly, the browser is the interface of choice for @Backup with its new SkyDesk service. @Backup offers a service that copies the entire contents of a PC client over the Internet to a storage center in San Diego. SkyDesk then reconstructs the user's entire work environment, including desktop icons, applications, and data files, on the server. Later, users can connect using clients enabled with thin-client software from Citrix Systems and work as they would on their own PC.

The most common means of connecting will likely be through a browser running the Citrix plug-in, @Backup officials said. The application is designed for mobile users to eliminate the need for carrying a laptop computer. @Backup chose a browser interface because of its ubiquity.

Other products shown at Demo '99 that use simplified user interfaces include the Delano Technology's E-Mail Application Server, which lets companies route and take action on incoming e-mail messages. Lotus unveiled a collaboration tool letting end users build their own password-protected Web servers for workgroups.

Epicentric, Plumtree Software, and Portera Systems separately demonstrated products that give users a view of news headlines, e-mail, purchasing systems, and other information from a single, customized Web page.