How can you hold a conversation with people in Australia or Japan whose computers don’t have Hebrew fonts? NetManage offers a solution to this problem in the form of the DoubleAgent technology, acquired from Applicom for $10 million. The technology has additional uses. For instance, it enables the operation of software support centers. Software manufacturers can integrate an agent into the software and when the user encounters a problem, he or she chooses "On-line Help", causing a request to be sent via the Internet for a collaborative conversation with the manufacturer’s support center.
Collaboration on Internet and Intranet applications is considered a relatively new field with a rosy future. Users can share applications such as Excel, Word, PowerPoint, or any Windows application. Each user can write in the same document and make comments, while all the users see the changes and comments of other users in real time.
The idea of common resources isn’t really new. UNIX stations have been able to pool resources for a long time. PCs can be controlled remotely using software like PC Anywhere, and collaborate on the Internet through software like NetMeeting.
However, these solutions enable collaboration only among identical platforms with identical set-ups. This is a real problem, in light of the fact that the idea was designed to enable to simplify working in multi-platform environments including PC, Macintosh, UNIX and network computers. Another problem lies in the security issue. It isn’t easy to convince users to grant someone else control of their computer.
Shortcut
The development staff, headed by Ronen Shilo, searched for a solution that was both secure and solved the problems of incompatibility of different systems. They chose to take a shortcut, and attack the problem with the method used by fax machines. Instead of transmitting a set of commands which would enable each system to know what the other was doing, the software examines the result of the action on the screen, and updates the "client" screen accordingly.
DoubleAgent examines the parts of the application window which have changed and transmits only these in image fragments to the other users. Since this is not a series of commands which gobble up computing power, but graphic elements, computers on the other end can run different operating systems and the results appear as they do on the original system.
This also solves the security problem. No one receives permission to control anyone else’s computer. NetManage, which specializes in connectivity applications, liked the solution. The company does have sales of $100 million annually but is having difficulty penetrating the Internet navigation software and Intranet construction markets.