Harnessing the Universal Inbox

by Joe Van Niekerk

Published 1998-02-01    Printer-friendly version

Introduction

E-mail has become a daily part of millions of people's lives. Consumers have discovered the power of electronic messaging, but business has yet to effectively utilize this new form of global connectivity to implement cost effective business applications. In this article we discuss E-mail, Windows Messaging and how business can use the infrastructure this technology provides to implement effective business applications.

The E-mail explosion and its impact on global communication.

A recent Forester Technology report (vol. 3 number 7 Nov. 1996) discussed the extraordinary growth of e-mail and its impact on business and society. The important aspects of the report concluded that:

• E-mail will be the first communication technology to rival the telephone as an inexpensive way to communicate.
• E-mail will reach a majority of U.S. consumers by 2001.
• E-mail will become rich and secure.
• By 1999 the inbox will gather messages and content in a single location.

Forester believes that the "explosion will thunder on" and that by 2001 the number of Americans with e-mail access will leap to roughly 135 million, 50% of the U.S. population.

Factors behind the growth:

• Ease of use and communication clarity of text messages.
• The rise of the Internet and on-line services.
• Major on-line services adopting Internet mail protocols, enhancing inter-service messaging.

If the ease of connectivity is provided by the information services, then there is potentially an enormous market for business applications that can utilize this existing infrastructure without being entangled in the mesh of protocols, messaging and electronic communication that they all provide, in different forms.

Windows and integrated messaging

Personal computers are used for a wide range of tasks. Electronic mail has become a primary communication vehicle within corporations and the public sector.

The growing use of messaging and communication services has a complication in that each information service comes with its own unique software and user interface. Users have Microsoft Internet mail for their POP3 internet account, WinCim for CompuServe mail, groupware clients like Lotus Notes mail and GroupWise, a menagerie of fax software and shareware utilities to make utilizing messaging an involved process.

How can information from all these systems be integrated and made easily accessible to users across the entire organization?

With the growth of enterprise-wide and global workgroup applications for scheduling, forms routing, order processing, project management and more, the need for such a communications backbone has never been greater.

Windows 95 and Windows NT address these complications by including integrated messaging that provides a universal inbox for e-mail and faxes from the various information services.

Many organizations are looking to their electronic messaging system to take on the role of a central communications backbone, used not just for electronic-mail (e-mail) messages, but to integrate all types of information.

Microsoft Exchange client is designed to work on almost any messaging or workgroup system, LAN based or dial-up on-line information service. The transparent access that Exchange gives you to all these messaging systems is available to any application, not just Microsoft Exchange. The key to this architecture is MAPI, Microsoft's solution to the messaging challenge with the Windows™ operating system. In consultation with independent software vendors, Microsoft created the messaging application program interface (MAPI) standard to help ensure system independence for messaging applications.

How does MAPI provide transparent access to all these information services?

MAPI provides a layer of functionality between applications and underlying messaging systems, allowing each to be developed independent of the other. MAPI allows developers the opportunity to add messaging to Windows applications without spending time and money on developing direct support for specific messaging systems. Another aspect of this is that organisations have the freedom to choose the messaging system that best suits their needs rather than choosing those that might be easy to interface to.

The Windows operating system includes a set of system-level components that provides built-in messaging services to any application that wishes to take advantage of them. The components that make up the Windows Messaging Subsystem include:

• Microsoft Exchange Client (Microsoft Outlook with Office 97). Used to manage the inbox, organise e-mail, faxes and other information.

• MAPI. These components seamlessly connect Microsoft Exchange client and other applications to the various information services. MAPI allows MAPI Drivers to be written for almost any messaging and workgroup service.

• Personal Address Book contains e-mail addresses, phone numbers and other contact information. Through MAPI, it becomes accessible from a wide variety of applications.

• Personal Information Message Store. A database that stores e-mail messages, faxes, forms, documents and other information in a common repository. It provides the user with a set of personal folders that includes their universal Inbox and Outbox.

• Microsoft Mail transport drivers are a set of MAPI transport drivers that enable the Exchange Client to access a Microsoft Mail Postoffice, either the Workgroup version or the newer Microsoft Exchange Server. It has excellent LAN and remote connectivity.

• Microsoft Fax transport drivers are a set of MAPI transport drivers that allow the Exchange Client to send and receive electronic faxes into the Inbox like an e-mail message.

• Internet Mail transport drivers are a set of MAPI transport drivers that let the Exchange Client send and receive e-mail using TCP/IP connections to POP3 mailboxes and SMTP gateways, either over a LAN connection or via dial-up.

• Compuserve Mail transport drivers allow the Exchange Client to send and receive mail via the Compuserve Information Service. Used either with a dial-up or a LAN connection and most recently via WinSock connection functionality across the Internet.

• Optional Third Party MAPI Transport Drivers. There are various other transport drivers for other messaging systems and one should contact those companies for more information regarding these drivers. Novell MHS & GroupWise, Banyan Intelligent Messaging, MCI Mail, Hewlett-Packard OpenMail, DEC TM MailWorks, Lotus cc:Mail TM and Notes Mail, Microsoft Exchange Server etc..

• The Message Spooler. The message spooler uses the recipient addresses of a message to decide which transports are to be used. Depending on the address types, it can call on more than one transport driver. It performs message management functions such as directing inbound messages to message stores, catching messages without matching transport drivers, and implementing store and forward functionality if the transport service is unavailable. When the connections are reestablished, the spooler forwards pending messages to their destinations. Some transport drivers will require an initial logon but other than that, the spooler transport providers operate completely in the background while the foreground applications are idle. This means that the transferring of messages does not impact on the applications currently being used.

Windows application developers enjoy the benefits of the spooler and other messaging subsystem features without having to write additional code beyond the MAPI calls. MAPI automatically assigns the appropriate tasks to the appropriate service providers.

Push Technologies

Most corporations are still struggling to come to grips with how to supply corporate data to end users. Costly tools and technological strategies using data warehouses, serious SQL query tools, pumping and middleware tools have failed to push appropriate corporate content to the end users. Corporations are now using Web technologies as a relatively cost effective solution to deploying corporate content. On the horizon is the option of pushing content directly to users. This content could take the form of automated business reports, pricing updates, transaction based data or even automatic software upgrades! Most corporations already have the infrastructure to implement basic push systems. E-mail. Most do not realize that they have one of the cheapest communication components to implement moving corporate data directly to the appropriate end users, arming them with the business information needed to be more effective.

Middleware

Data pumping tools have traditionally been expensive and database specific. Messaging systems can provide a cost effective, low-tech transport for off-line transaction-based Electronic Data Interchange (E.D.I.) databases. Advanced messaging technologies (i.e. DCOM, CORBA) are poised to provide a cutting edge solution to the on-line document based technologies but to implement an off-line transaction based strategy one needs a subtly different connectivity implementation.

Security is always an issue when the Internet is involved in transporting data. This is not as sensitive an issue when using Intranet messaging servers. The onset of automatic message encryption and the rapid development in digital certificates means that messaging is rapidly approaching the point where even Internet messages are secure. Messaging allows the various transport drivers the option of implementing their own appropriate security features; security features will thus vary depending on the operating system and the underlying message system. The Messaging Subsystem encrypts any security information that it stores for the transport driver (i.e. Mail account name and password)

Successful Message Delivery is a real issue when using message servers to forward data content, especially when using the Internet as a transport, which is notorious at mislaying messages. When using the Intranet Message servers, one has a better chance at assuring delivery. Ever taking this into account, it is advisable to implement some degree of message delivery receipt when using Windows Messaging as a data pumping component.

Distributed Databases

Certain business processes lend themselves directly to implementing distributed data processing and databases. Consider an assurance/insurance corporation, or a salesman for a products firm who is out on the road and away from the high-tech network at the office. Often they can't be expected to use their dial-up connection every time they want to capture some order details or process a transaction. They tend to work exclusively on their own client subset from a large master database. Windows Messaging can give the remote user all the tools he needs to do off-line business.

"I use Eudora, Pegasus mail, Netscape Mail, Outlook Express or GroupWise. How do they differ from Microsoft Exchange and can I use them in conjunction with each other?"

The Microsoft Exchange Client (Microsoft Outlook with Office 97), Eudora, Netscape Mail, MS Internet Mail (Outlook Express with IE 4), Pegasus Mail, WinCim (CIS Mail) are all Messaging clients. Some of them, like Microsoft Exchange, Pegasus and Eudora can utilized multiple messaging systems. All of these clients, however, have their own message storage methods and not all of them provide the Windows developer with an integrated solution as to how one interacts with the message store.

Although some of them provide access to multiple messaging systems, a documented method of accessing the message store and a method of invoking system level messaging-related actions (send, receive etc.) Windows Messaging is by far the most comprehensive implementation of this kind of functionality. It has been specifically developed with this purpose in mind, utilizing the knowledge resources of most of the top messaging vendors in the world. This makes it a "best choice" mail client application when you need to combine it with Windows applications.

Once messages have been retrieved from the message server by the respective e-mail client application, all the messages are kept in a local message store. If this message store happens to be a GroupWise store then you will need to use GroupWise API calls to access this store. This means that, if you retrieve messages using Pegasus mail, your Windows Messaging application will not be able to access those retrieved messages. This presents a problem when you want to keep your existing e-mail clients on GroupWise and utilize Windows Messaging to implement business applications. One easy way around this is to create a separate mailbox on the message server specifically for the Messaging application – that way your normal e-mail client-messaging store does not interfere with the Windows Messaging store.

"What kind of EDI and Groupware Applications can I implement using Windows Messaging and Clarion for Windows?"

Software distribution via e-mail – the ability to be able to Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) is important so that you don't publish you user base's e-mail addresses.

It’s perfect for remote computing where your salesman is on the road all day with a notebook and a cell phone. He can do all his transactions off-line and when he next dials in to collect his e-mail, all the transactions are automatically forwarded on.

Non time-critical SQL Queries against SQL Databases, "think of the license saving!" if the line is down, then the query will wait in the outbox until the line comes up again to be delivered!

"What is the difference between Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Outlook Express, and if I use Outlook Express and don’t have Windows Messaging installed can I interface to it from Clarion?"

Microsoft Outlook is available on the Microsoft Office 97 CD. It is essentially a later version of the Microsoft Exchange Client that comes with Windows 95 and Windows NT. Microsoft Outlook Express is part of Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 and is a later version of Microsoft Internet Mail that formed part of Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.

Microsoft Outlook Express does support two Simple MAPI calls. Send Mail and the Address dialog. This means that if you have Outlook Express installed with its Simple MAPI support turned on, you will be able to pick recipients out of the Outlook Express Addressbook and send e-mail via Outlook express. It doesn’t, unfortunately, support reading mail messages and processing them, but it’s pretty useful none the less.

Conclusion

The TopSpeed paradigm of the application being independent of the target database, thus freeing the developer from the constraints of being tied to a specific database type, is one of Clarion’s strongest points. In the same manner, if the developer can keep the application independent of the underlying messaging system type it gives him the freedom to concentrate on making his application the best it can be without being involved in messaging issues. There is a host of Messaging systems out there; for the developer to write an interface to cater to each and every one of them would be too time consuming to be viable. Windows Messaging is the only interface that gives a consistent front end to be able to automate e-mail and fax from a Windows or Clarion for Windows application, regardless of the Messaging system.

Until now , e-mail has not been seen as a valuable application-to-application business content transport, but the messaging technology has merged with the operating system and is there for those who need to utilize it as a cheap and cost effective way of automating global business application communication. Windows Messaging will give the Clarion for Windows developer the tools to seamlessly integrate this technology into their applications.

Printer-friendly version

Copyright © 1999-2008 by CoveComm Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in any form without the express written consent of CoveComm Inc., except as described in the subscription agreement, is prohibited.

Clarion Magazine ISSN 1718-9942