As always, it is not black and white. The Intranet technology can be used to complement or as an alternative to such groupware products. It all becomes a matter of scale, cost, timescale, openness and taste. This will continue to gain momentum as new technologies such as Java become more widely available from Sun, which will allow the creation and transparent distribution of objects on-demand rather than just data or applications. With the move to the use of Intranet mail products with standard and simple methods for attachment of documents, sound, vision and other multimedia between individuals, mail is about to be pushed further forward as a simple, de facto communications method.
Mail is essentially individual to individual, or individual to small group, communication.
The Intranet technology is evolving so rapidly that the tools available, in particular HTML, can be used to dramatically change the way we interface with systems. At the beginning of the 90 s, the industry was deluged with the increases in productivity from GUI s. However, no-one anticipated the converse loss of productivity by normal business users being able to access the wealth of functionality provided by Windows. The GUI has been defined by Microsoft as an iconic desktop. With HTML you can build an End User Comfortable Interface which is only limited by the creator s imagination.