There was a method to my madness. It could connect promiscuously to an array of private and public discussion servers. The Netscape version could perform full-text searches against the companion Netscape news server. Although these two applications use different protocols, they share a common environment for reading and writing messages. This was crucial, and remains so for any solution to our messaging dilemma.
People live and work in the e-mail environment.
You receive an e-mail from a new acquaintance, and you want to publish that person's contact information to your team. Even if your team has a shared contact manager available on the LAN or the Internet, the odds are slim to none that you will switch from your e-mail application to that other application in order to enter that data. Disruption of context is unacceptable. Any action within the e-mail context that will take more than two seconds is unacceptable. So, if this contact information is going to be shared at all, it will be shared by forwarding the message to the team.