Computer-based communications systems allow end users to transmit data from one location to another via various types of communications lines. This type of communication has dramatically expanded the scope of business activities. The most vital component of any data communications system is the network. The network is any system that makes interaction between two or more computers possible. Today, computer users can tap into a vast number of resources to retrieve information on a variety of subjects and events. For example, a CEO of a nationwide corporation may wish to examine information about regional sales levels or expected economic conditions.

This section examines two types of network applications: Groupware and the Information Superhighway (Internet). These two applications are the future of information technology.

Groupware

This is a communications application that is growing in popularity (also called collaboration technology). Groupware is software that helps groups of people to work together more productively. Groupware allows people to exchange ideas, debate issues, make decisions, and write reports without actually having to meet face-to-face. The most important advantage of Groupware is its ability to help groups make decisions faster. This section focuses on four popular types of Groupware:

Electronic Mail

Electronic mail (E-Mail) is one of the earliest Groupware tools and is also the most heavily used tool today. E-mail is faster and cheaper than regular mail, and can substitute for telephone conversations in some cases. Several standards have been developed to ensure compatibility between different software packages. They include X.400, CMC (Common Messaging Calls), and MAPI (Massaging Application Program Interface).

Document-based Groupware (Notes)

Notes was the first document-based Groupware product. It is a document database designed to store and manage large collections of text and graphics to support ongoing discussions.

Group Support Systems (GSS)

Group Support System, one of the most popular uses of Groupware, is a software tool designed to improve group decision making in special purpose meeting rooms that provide networked computers and large screen video projection systems. These rooms are equipped with special-purpose GSS software that enables participants to communicate, propose ideas, analyze options, and evaluate alternatives. A group of employees could view a document displayed on a projector screen. Then, each employee could manipulate the data from his station while others observed the resulting changes.

Video Teleconferencing

This is a video conference among several users, which is provided by one or more video cameras and several display monitors set up in special purpose meeting rooms. It provides real-time transmission of video and audio signals to help people in different locations to have a meeting. The advantage of this technology is the time and cost savings. Another form of video teleconferencing, desktop video conferencing, is growing up fast.

The information superhighway or simply Internet is one of the most important developments in the history of information systems. It is growing fast. The Internet is not one network, but tens of thousands of networks linked together. In other words, it is a large network made up of thousands of smaller networks. Internet does not have overall central administration, because it is a collection of thousands of smaller networks. Internet provides four basic functions to its users:

• E-mail
  
• Remote Login
  
• Discussion Groups
  
• Information Resources
  

E-mail on the Internet

Electronic mail (E-mail) is one of the most rapidly growing developments in networked communications. Users of E-mail have their own file stored on a computer system. This file can be called a "mailbox." Access to a person's mailbox is protected by means of a password. Once logged on to an E-mail account, an end user may send messages and files to other mailboxes. An individual electronic mail transmission may be sent to one or many recipient accounts. This person may also read messages that have "arrived" in her or his mailbox from other E-mail accounts.

One of the main advantages of using E-mail is confidentiality. No one can access an individual's mailbox without knowledge of the password. E-mail also allows recipients to know the exact transmission times for each incoming message. Popular uses of E-mail have been to set up meetings within business organizations and to distribute memoranda throughout an organization. E-mail is increasing in popularity for communication between businesses. The main reasons for this are speed and cost; there is no reason to spend postage on a letter that will take three to seven days to arrive when electronic mail could be used for virtually nothing and arrive instantaneously.

Anyone with access to the Internet can send E-mail to anyone else on the Internet. Internet E-mail addresses have two parts, the individual user's account address and the address of the computer. The computer's address in turn has two parts, the computer name and its domain. The general format is therefore: user@computer.domain. Note that the "at" symbol (@) separates the user's account from the computer address, and that a period separates the name of the computer from its domain. Some computer names also have several parts separated by periods, so some addresses may have the format: user@computer.computer.computer.domain (e.g., user@sunset.backbone.olemiss.edu)

Remote Login (Telnet)

Internet offers a large number of services. Among them, the service that allows users to connect to a remote Internet host is called Telnet. Users on one computer in the Internet can login into other computers on the Internet by a special program, called Telnet, on your computer. This program uses the Internet to connect to the computer users specify. The users should know the account name and password of the remote computer. In Telnet, a user's computer is called the local computer. The other computer that the Telnet program connects is called the remote computer. An example of using Telnet is that users can read and send E-mail while traveling.

Discussion Groups

Discussion groups are lnternet users who have joined together to discuss some topic. There are many discussion groups on every topic imaginable, from cooking to biological science. Two groups are commonly used for business.

• Usenet Newsgroups: Usenet is a large collection of discussion groups involving millions of people from all over the world. This is the most formally organized among the discussion groups. To read Usenet articles, users use a program called a newsreader. There are a number of different newsreaders. In UNIX, nn, rn, tin, and trn are the most popular newsreaders.

• Listserv: A listserv is simply a mailing list developed on the large Bitnet network (not on the Internet). The listserv processor processes listserv commands such as requests to subscribe and unsubscribe, while the listserv mailer mails any message it receives to everyone on the mailing list.

Information Resources

The major use of the Internet is to find information. There are six major ways to find and achieve information:

FTP
Archie
Gopher
Veronica
World Wide Web
WAIS

• FTP: File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is the underlying set of specifications that support Internet file transfer. In other words, FTP is a service that allows us to copy a file from any Internet host to any other Internet host. A ftp program acts as a client and connects to the FTP server on a remote host. Internet users can download (copy files from the remote computer into users' computer) and upload (copy files from users' computer to a remote computer) files. An anonymous FTP site permits any Internet user to login using anonymous as the account name and a user's mailing address as the password.

• Archie: Throughout the Internet, there are a number of computers, called Archie servers, which provide a service to help users find the name of Anonymous FTP hosts that carry a particular file. Archie is a tool that allows users to search most of the publicly available anonymous FTP sites worldwide for specific files of interest.

• Gopher: The Gopher is a powerful system that allows users to access many resources of the Internet in a simple, consistent manner. To use the Gopher, all users need to do are making selections from a menu. In other words, Gopher is a menu-based tool that enables users to search for publicly available information posted on the Internet. The power of the Gopher lies in the fact that the resources listed in a menu may be anywhere on the Internet.

• Veronica: Veronica is a Gopher-based resource that users can use to search gopherspace for all the menu items that contain specified words. Veronica is to Gopher what Archie is to FTP. It enables users to search all publicly available Gopher sites by specifying key words.

• World Wide Web: WWW (World Wide Web) or simply Web is one type of information resource that is growing even faster than Internet itself is the World Wide Web. WWW is an attempt to organize all the information on the Internet as a set of hypermedia documents. Besides that, the WWW allows users to access all kinds of Internet resources, just by using a browser to read the appropriate document. The Web provides a graphical user interface and enables the display of rich graphical images, pictures, full motion video, and sound clips.

  The Web is the most common way for businesses to establish a presence on the Internet. This Web has two major components, a Web browser and a Web server. A browser is a software package for accessing a Web server that stores files using HTML. There are many Web browsers available, including Mosaic, Netscape, Cello, and WinWeb. Most browsers show these links by highlighting text in a different color, usually blue. To use a link to go to a new page, users simply click on the text, and the browser takes users to the new page.

  A Web server stores information in a series of text files called pages. These text files or pages use a structured language called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) to store their information. HTML enables the author of a page to define different typestyles and sizes for the text, titles, and headings, and a variety of other formatting information. HTML also allows the author to define links to other pages that may be stored on the same Web server, or on any Web server anywhere on the Internet.

• WAIS: The WAIS stands for Wide Area Information Service. The original idea behind WAIS was to develop a generalized system of information retrieval that could access collections of data all around the world.

Bitnet

Bitnet is a worldwide network, separate from the Internet, which connects well over a thousand academic and research institutions in more than 40 countries. Many Bitnet sites are IBM mainframe computers running the VM operating system. Each country has different name for Bitnet.