Copyright © 1996 by David R. Woolley
Portions copyright © 1995 Sams.net Publishing
This article was written for the 1996 International University Consortium Conference on WWW Course Development & Delivery. Portions of this article were originally published in the book World Wide Web Unleashed.
With so many products available, the choice can seem overwhelming.
But with a methodical approach, you'll probably find that you
can quickly whittle the list down to just a few candidates.
A conferencing system is Web-based if it uses Web browsers and
servers to provide most of its functionality. This is not as
clear a distinction as it might sound. Most developers of conferencing
software are hurrying to adapt their products to the Web, and
the result is a lot of hybrid products that use the Web to a greater
or lesser extent. Hence, the boundary between Web and non-Web
conferencing software is a bit blurry.
Systems that work with unmodified Web browsers and servers are
of greatest interest, because they are the most easily accessible
to the great mass of Web and intranet users. Any Web software
that requires users to install a browser add-on, or even an entire
proprietary browser, suffers a handicap, although such special-purpose
software might give it a significantly better user interface.
Historically, there have been five "great rivers" of
conferencing and conferencing-like software that have evolved
more or less independently of one another:
All of these rivers are now converging on the Web, and in this
new environment they are mingling in ways that are beginning to
blur the distinctions between them. But most of the conferencing
products available today still strongly show their origins.
Centralized forum software originated on mainframes in the early
to mid-1970's with systems like PLATO Notes, Confer, and EIES.
These were designed specifically for group discussion, and they
treat messages as part of an ongoing conversation with some inherent
structure. Discussions are stored on one central computer, and
each new message is assigned a place in the discussion structure
immediately upon being posted. Over the years this line of software
has evolved sophisticated features for managing and participating
in conversations.
Within this arena, there is another identifiable subgroup of products
whose designs have been derived from Confer, a system originally
developed in 1975 by Robert Parnes. I call these products "WELL-style"
conferencing systems, because the WELL has been very influential
in spreading this design. There are a number of features that
tend to appear in WELL-style conferencing software, but the most
readily identifiable feature is that it structures discussions
as linear chains of responses, and displays each discussion as
a continuous stream of text.
Examples of WELL-style Web conferencing software include:
Examples of other centralized forum software for the Web include:
Groupware, or workgroup collaboration software, was defined as
a new software category by the introduction of Lotus Notes in
1989. Lotus Notes evolved out of PLATO Notes, so in a sense this
category is an offshoot of centralized forum software. But whereas
forum software is focused primarily on group discussion, groupware
products support a wide variety of other activities, such as scheduling
and document sharing. Some groupware products are suites of ready-made
applications; others are toolboxes for creating collaborative
applications, with customizable templates included.
As a group, these products tend to be both powerful and complex.
They are marketed mainly to corporate customers for internal use
by workgroups, where conversation is generally deemed less important
than an efficient work flow. Indeed, in some of these products,
group discussion seems to be an afterthought, while others handle
discussions quite well right out of the box. But in any case,
many of these products offer tools that let you customize a conferencing
environment to your heart's content, if you have the skills and
time to do so.
Groupware products for the Web include:
BBSs were pioneered by microcomputer hobbyists in the late 1970's.
These systems were designed mainly for swapping files, but also
featured areas where users could post notices. Each message was
treated as an independent entity with no relationship to any other
message, and all were posted on one big "bulletin board"
with no organization. Later, features began to appear for categorizing
messages, responding to specific messages, and carrying on threaded
discussions. But in general, BBS software is not as well adapted
to conversation as the centralized forum software is.
Web BBS software includes:
Usenet arose in the early 1980's. Like BBS software, Usenet was
designed to handle individual messages, although it provides
separate newsgroups to sort messages by broad subject areas, and
facilities for responding to specific messages. Usenet has two
main distinguishing characteristics: first, it uses standardized
protocols to format and transmit messages, and second, messages
are passed from one news server to another and thus replicated
at many places around the world, rather than being stored at one
central location.
The most popular Web browsers, including Netscape Navigator and
Microsoft's Internet Explorer, have built-in news readers. Probably
for this reason, few standalone Usenet products have been developed
for the Web. (Forum News Gateway is the only one I know of, although
Web Threads by inTouch Technology is designed to have a "news
reader-like interface.")
Some argue that with Web browsers supporting the Usenet standard,
there is no need for any other conferencing software on the Web.
I won't get into that argument here, except to point out that
the thriving market for other varieties of Web conferencing software
would tend to indicate otherwise.
Nevertheless, it is certainly true that this is a fairly straightforward
and cheap way to do conferencing. Just set up a news server using
free, standard software, create some local newsgroups on it, have
your users access your server with their favorite news-capable
Web browser (or any other newsreader, for that matter) and voila!
a conferencing site.
Mailing lists have probably been around in some form as long as
e-mail has existed. E-mail is the least structured form of conferencing
-- so much so that it's a stretch to call it conferencing at all.
Yet it is an asynchronous, text-based, many-to-many medium, and
can be used for some of the same purposes as other forms of conferencing.
E-mail does have certain advantages. It is the lowest common denominator
of Internet services, and therefore reaches more people than any
other avenue. Also, e-mail messages simply show up in your mailbox;
you don't have to go looking for them. On the other hand, e-mail
is not organized by topic, and threading is difficult or impossible.
For this reason, mailing lists are not as good at supporting
multiple simultaneous discussions as are true conferencing systems.
Several Web interfaces to mailing lists have been developed:
All of these support browsing of a mailing list archive through
a Web browser. With very little effort, it's possible to automate
updating of the archive so that new messages appear on the Web
as soon as they are posted. None of these software packages have
built-in message posting capabilities, but perhaps this doesn't
matter much, considering that messages can be posted to a mailing
list with any e-mail client (including the ones built into many
Web browsers).
After considering which of the categories of conferencing software
best suits your needs, there are many other things to take into
account in choosing a product. The following are likely to be
key "make or break" considerations for many people.
Operating System Support. Operating system platform might
also be a key determining factor, especially if circumstances
require you to run conferencing from an existing Web server. Many
choices are available for Unix servers and many for Windows servers,
but relatively few products support both. If you run a Macintosh
server, your choices are more limited.
Compatibility with Other Environments. If all access to
your conferencing system will be made via the Web, then compatibility
with other environments is not an issue. But in some cases there
is a requirement that discussions be accessible by some other
means, and this limits your choices. For example, Caucus and
YAPP are the only two Web conferencing products that also support
access via a text-only telnet connection. WebNotes discussions
can be accessed through a proprietary Windows-based client. And
of course, Lotus Notes has proprietary clients for a number of
platforms.
Administrative Capabilities. If you have limited access
to your Web server, you'll want to choose a product that can be
installed and administered easily with whatever level of access
you have been granted. Conversely, if you are running a server
yourself and want to be able to delegate discussion administration
chores to others, you'll need a product that lets you give limited
administrative capabilities to designated users.
Browser Support. Some Web conferencing systems rely on
advanced HTML extensions such as frames or Javascript. A few
require special browser add-ons. Consider whether all of your
users will be able to access your conferencing system given these
dependencies.
Customizability. Virtually all Web conferencing products
are customizable to some extent, but some are much more so than
others. In some cases, the customizability is limited to simple
things like plugging a logo into a designated location on the
page. But the most flexible products provide ways of significantly
modifying or extending not only the displays, but the functionality
of the system. This is done in a variety of ways. Caucus and
Web Crossing provide macro languages that can be used to modify
or completely redesign their user interfaces. Allaire Forums
and TALKaway are built on top of general-purpose toolsets for
development of Web database applications (Cold Fusion and WebDBC,
respectively) and can be easily extended with those toolsets.
Some conferencing systems, particularly freeware products, come
with full source code, allowing you to hack them into anything
you desire.
Various conferencing systems offer dozens of other features that
might or might not be important, depending on your intended use.
If there are still several candidates left after your key selection
criteria have been satisfied, try to prioritize your feature wish
list, and then compare each product against it to find the one
that best matches your needs.
There is no single perfect solution for all people and all purposes. But
having used a variety of systems over the past 20 years, I can make a few
generalizations about what seems to work well.
Threaded discussions within conferences.
This sometimes takes the form of
a tree structure, in which each topic is the starting point for a
branching tree of responses. Usenet is structured this way, as are many
Web conferencing systems. But although a hierarchical tree is a good way
to organize static information, it does not work as well for conversation.
It is easy to get lost in the tree, and it's often hard to figure out
where to attach a response. Discussions tend to fragment and dissipate. I
prefer a linear structure, in which each topic has a simple chain of
consecutive responses attached to it. This form is easily understood by
most people because it closely resembles "real life" conversation. On the
Web there is an additional reason to use this structure: displaying a
discussion as a continuous stream of text keeps interactions to a minimum.
Since you don’t have to click a button on every response, there are fewer
delays while reading messages. All of the WELL-style systems are designed
this way. WebNotes and several others use a linear structure but display
each message on a page by itself.
Informative topic list.
A reader should be able to easily see a list of
the topics in a conference. At minimum, the list should show each topic's
title and some indication of the amount of activity in the topic: the
number of responses, date of the last response, or both. The topics should
be sortable both by topic start dates and by last response dates.
Respect for the integrity of topics.
A reader should always be able to go
back to the beginning of a topic and follow it all the way through to the
most recent responses. Of course, it is necessary to clear out obsolete
material to avoid clutter (and because nobody has infinite disk capacity),
but pruning should be done by deleting entire topics after they have
fallen into disuse. Some systems (notably Usenet) throw away older
messages even if they are part of an active discussion.
Support for both frequent readers and casual browsers.
A browser wants to
choose a conference manually and scroll through the list of topics,
dipping in here and there, moving backward or forward sequentially through
topics, returning repeatedly to the topic list. A frequent reader wants to
cycle automatically through a customized list of conferences, skipping
topic lists entirely and getting immediately to the new, unread messages.
Most conferencing systems are biased toward one type of reader or the
other; few support both well.
Search and filter tools for readers.
A reader should be able to search
messages by date, author, or keyword. Word searches on both topic titles
and message texts should be possible. Frequent readers should also have
tools for controlling what they see; for example, a way to "forget" topics
so that any subsequent responses are skipped automatically.
Access control.
Both public and private conferences are useful in
different situations. A conference host or moderator should have flexible
control over who can access the conference and what level of access each
participant has. For example, it should be possible to give some
participants read and write permission, others read only, and others no
access.
Host tools.
The host of a conference should have good tools for managing
topics: for example, weeding out obsolete topics, archiving those that are
worth saving but no longer active, and moving a divergent thread of a
topic to a new topic of its own.
Speed.
Frequently used functions such as advancing to the next message
should require only one keypress or pointer-click and should happen
instantly when selected. If the system is slow or cumbersome, people
simply won't use it much.
Although Web conferencing software has improved enormously in
the past two years, in a sense, all of the products available
today are fundamentally crippled. The problems are not the fault
of the conferencing software, some of which is quite well designed.
They are inherent in the architecture of the Web itself. The worst
problems lie in two areas:
User interface. The only way to navigate through a Web
conference is to click on buttons embedded in HTML pages. This
is the only method that HTML supports. There are several problems
with this. First, keyboard navigation is impossible; you are forced
to aim your mouse at buttons on the screen. Second, the buttons
don't stay put! They float around and even disappear from the
screen as you scroll through a page. Nobody would tolerate such
a user interface in any application outside of the Web. Imagine
a word processor whose menu bar disappears whenever you scroll
down through a document. Such a product would be laughed off the
market. Yet that's the current state of the art of Web applications.
As an added insult, the text editing capabilities built into today's
Web browsers are incredibly lame.
Solutions for the Web's performance problems are in the works.
Future versions of HTTP (the HyperText Transfer Protocol used
in all communication between Web browsers and servers) will allow
a Web browser to maintain an open session with a server while
it requests multiple items. This should drastically reduce the
delays involved in moving from page to page.
The user interface problems are tougher, given the structure of
HTML. It's even difficult to imagine reasonable extensions to
HTML that would give software developers sufficient freedom to
create a good user interface. Some Web software developers are
using HTML frames and Javascript to attack these problems. This
approach has merit, but it's only a partial solution, and it comes
at a cost: not all Web browsers support these features. The ultimate
solution probably lies in bypassing HTML entirely, and writing
the user interface in some other language -- possibly Java.
No conferencing system available excels at everything. There is
no single "best" product that is the ideal choice for
every situation. The field of Web conferencing software is rich
in variety, and many good products are available, each with its
own strengths and weaknesses. But a careful analysis of your
needs will help you to choose the product best suited to your
application.
Introduction
The field of Web conferencing software is growing at a breathtaking
pace. In the summer of 1994 there were exactly two products in
this category, both of them rather primitive freeware packages.
Today there are well over 60 commercial and freeware products,
many of them quite sophisticated, that support conferencing on
the Web in one form or another.
What is Web Conferencing?
First, let's define our terms. For our present purposes, conferencing
is a form of group discussion that uses text messages stored on
a computer as a communication medium. It does not include
various types of real-time, or synchronous, communication, such
as "chat rooms", voice-based teleconferencing, or video
conferencing.
Categorizing the Products
Five Great Rivers
Web conferencing systems have widely varying designs, partly because
they were built with very different purposes in mind. Hence, an
across-the-board comparison of all available products would be
meaningless. It makes more sense to group them according to the
different traditions from which they have grown.
Centralized Forums
Groupware
Bulletin Boards
Usenet
Mailing Lists
Key Considerations
Price. This is still a young field, and prices are all
over the map: they range from free to several thousand dollars.
Don't assume that a higher priced product is better. To a certain
extent, you get what you pay for, but a few of the freeware products
are actually stronger than some commercial products. Even if price
is no object, the most expensive product is not necessarily the
one that best suits your specific needs.
What Makes a Good Conferencing System?
Ask 100 experienced conferencers what makes a good conferencing system,
and you'll get 100 different answers. As with any kind of software, people
tend to like whatever they are used to. But almost anyone who conferences
regularly will readily point out flaws in their own favorite system.
Separate conferences for broad subject areas.
This is a nearly universal
feature. Whether the discussion areas are called conferences, forums,
newsgroups, or notesfiles, they provide a basic level of organization.
Besides focusing on different subjects, different conferences often have
very different atmospheres and social conventions. People become
"regulars" only in the conferences that most interest them.
Universal Problems
Performance. The Web is lousy for highly interactive applications
because of the overhead involved in moving from place to place.
Every time you click on a link, you have to wait. Even if the
average wait between pages is only two or three seconds, the delays
become annoying when you're trying to navigate quickly through
a large amount of material.
Conclusion
A comprehensive list of Web conferencing software, with links
to information about each product, is available at:
http://thinkofit.com/webconf/
David R. Woolley
(drwool@thinkofit.com)
created one of the first
computer conferencing systems, PLATO Notes, the model for such conferencing software as Lotus Notes,
DEC Notes, and the tin newsreader. Today he is a software designer, consultant, and writer, and is
leading an effort to set up a Web-based community network in Minneapolis-St.Paul.