PC Magazine -- April 9, 1996

Coming Up

Home PCs

PCs designed for the home usually offer more amenities than standard business machines: They come with more "free" software, multimedia capabilities, plus better setup instructions, and even customized tutorials or instructional videos to help you work your way around your new PC. We're testing 11 home PCs from this market's leading vendors, evaluating them on their ease of setup, the quality of their sound systems and bundled software, and, of course, their performance.

The Web Within

A new platform for collaborative computing has emerged: the intranet. Based on the open standards of the dynamic World Wide Web--instead of the technology of a single vendor--intranets promise information-sharing solutions that are inexpensive and scalable. But can Internet technologies really provide a better way to work than well-known groupware systems like Collabra, GroupWise, and Lotus Notes? PC Magazine provides an overview of the intranet phenomenon and what such vendors as Lotus, Microsoft, Netscape, and Novell are developing for intranets. We review four collaboration solutions for Web servers and four products for Web-enabling proprietary information bases. And we also give you guidelines on how to deploy your own corporate intranet.

PIMs

Have you been searching far and wide for the perfect product that will schedule your appointments, keep track of your contacts, and keep all important information within easy reach--essentially, organize your life--whether you're at work, at home, or on the road? Well, enough information management packages exist in the market today for you to find one that jives with your life quite nicely. We look at how well 18 products perform contact, task, and information management as well as calendar scheduling, workgroup functions, and remote synchronization. We also take a walk down memory lane to look at these information managers' predecessors--PIMs, contact managers, and network schedulers.

Lotus Notes 4.0

After a long wait, Lotus Notes 4.0 is here. But what does its arrival herald for developers? We look at new options for updating your existing Release 3 Notes applications, as well as what Notes 4.0 offers for building new ones with better performance and UI features. We also look at Notes' new Web features and strategy, which represent a massive change of direction for the most widely used groupware product.