Web-based mail clients still don't measure up

Lotus' release last week of its latest browser-based Notes client again raises the question of whether full-fledged e-mail and collaboration "fat clients" are soon to go the way of the dinosaur.

The answer would appear to be not anytime soon.

Although thin clients such as Lotus iNotes Web Access are finding their niche, the promise of a browser-based front end that can match the enterprise worthiness of a native client for corporate messaging and collaboration is no closer to reality than it was when a thin-client revolution was first touted three or four years ago.

"It's foolish to say the fat client is here to stay, but it won't go away in a hurry," says Jason Williams, product manager for deskless collaboration at Novell.

Lotus, Microsoft and Novell offer browser access to their messaging and collaboration servers, but it's mostly limited to e-mail and calendar features. The rich interfaces and range of services are still tied to the native clients from all three vendors, which combined have nearly 185 million users.

Lotus and Microsoft tout their browser-based clients as complements to the native client - Notes and Outlook, respectively. Novell still favorably compares its GroupWise client to GroupWise Web Access, but the platform is less of a development environment than the others.

"The thin and fat options are necessary because they need to satisfy a broad user base," says Ron Shoults, IT secretary for The Salvation Army and a user of Lotus Notes. But Shoults has no plans to abandon the R5 Notes client for the new iNotes Web Access browser-based client that Lotus released last week. "We just completed our rollout and we are set," he says.

Plus, Shoults says, the fat client guarantees that whatever Notes-based application he installs will work on the desktops of all his users.

The promise of the thin client was that IT would not have to deploy and manage an enormous roster of clients.

Or absorb the cost, which experts say can hit $500,000 for a rollout of 15,000 fat clients, a price tag that would be sharply reduced in a thin-client scenario.

However, thin clients offer a fraction of the functionality for e-mail systems that are now a hub of sophisticated messaging and collaborative applications.

The native client is a necessity especially for users of Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange that develop applications on those platforms. Without it, offline features are lost and IT has to re-engineer existing applications for the Web to have any hope of getting some of it back. Novell does not offer offline access with its thin client.

On the flip side, deploying thin clients typically means not having to buy and maintain hardware for end users who just want to check mail while away from the office. They require less software to download. By comparison, a full Notes client installed over the network is an 80M-byte file while Internet Explorer 5.0 is 16.8M bytes for a standard install. And the thin client gives employees without dedicated machines - such as those on a shop floor - e-mail and calendar access through a kiosk or shared PC.

The limited-function thin client also translates well to the wireless plans of vendors.

Research bears out that thin-client migrations are likely to be selective.

The number of companies that used a browser as their primary messaging client was roughly 3% last year, according to a survey by Ferris Research. And that number will drop to 1% by the end of this year. The survey also showed that 5% of employees last year used a browser for occasional access, with that number expected to rise to 8% by year-end.

"The real growth will come from the 30% of corporate users today that have neither a desktop nor e-mail," says David Ferris, president of Ferris Research. "They will come on board just needing e-mail and they will likely get browser access."

Ferris says vendors and users would prefer a thin client over a fat one as soon as they are functionally equivalent, but that likely won't happen for another five years.

"We would have to redesign thousands of applications in order to use them with iNotes," says Steve Holman, assistant vice president of Internet architectures for Wachovia Bank of Winston-Salem, N.C.

However, Holman does anticipate finding uses for iNotes.

"Our main goal with the thin client is to give users access from home without a corporate laptop while using their own ISP. We didn't want to download software to a PC we didn't own because that meant we'd have to support it," he says.

Holman saves on average more than $60,000 per month now that employees use their own ISP for connectivity instead of a company-funded 800 number.

However, he finds that among his installed base of 13,000 LAN users about 60% require the fat Notes client.

One reason for that is iNotes does not natively support offline access to applications, a major feature distinction for Lotus. Companies have to use the Domino Offline Services tool kit to DOLS-enable applications. But that means first having to Web enable legacy Notes applications before re-engineering them for DOLS and adding code to the browser.

Microsoft last fall promised offline access in Outlook and then scrapped the plan three months later. That meant the feature also would not be available for its Outlook Web Access client.

"Outlook Web Access is a companion, it's a true thin client, it's not the client we think people will live in," says Chris Baker, lead product manager for Exchange.

Contact Senior Editor John Fontana

Other recent articles by Fontana

Lotus beefs up browser-based Notes client
Network World Fusion, 07/10/01.

E-mail continues explosive growth
Network World Fusion, 03/08/01.

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