FirstClass

Infobox_Software
name = FirstClass



caption = A screenshot of FirstClass Client version 9
author =
developer = SoftArc / Centrinity/ FirstClass Division of OpenText
latest_release_version = Client:
9.1 (Windows and Mac OS X)8.3 (Linux)
Server:
9.1

latest_release_date = 2008-01
operating_system = multi-platform (server and client)
operating_system_desc =
genre = Groupware
license = Proprietary
website = [http://www.firstclass.com/ FirstClass]

FirstClass is a client/server groupware, email, online conferencing, voice/fax services, and bulletin-board system for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. FirstClass's primary markets are the higher-education and K-12 education sectors, including four of the top ten largest school districts in the United States (FJA, Las Vegas's Clark County School District, Florida's Broward County Public Schools, Hillsborough County Public Schools, and Chicago Public Schools).

The product is currently owned by Open Text's FirstClass Division and runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux platforms, for both client and server. According to the company, the product is used at over 3,000 organizations and has 9 million users worldwide.cite web |last=Maganini|first=Rich|coauthors=M. Stevenson and B. Edwards|title=Chicago Public Schools Selects Open Text’s FirstClass Software for District-Wide Email, Collaboration, Social Networking|date=2007-10-18|url=http://www.opentext.com/news/pr.html?id=1947|accessdate=2008-02-18]

Early history

FirstClass is originally a product of SoftArc, formed by three former members of Bell Northern Research, Nortel's research arm located in downtown Toronto. The team, consisting of two brothers and a friend, had been the primary developers of the successful Meridian Mail system, and styled themselves as the Toronto Ideas Group. After a run-in with management, the three left and formed SoftArc as a consulting firm.

FirstClass was created in response to a request by a family friend who worked at the Scarborough Board of Education (now part of the Toronto District School Board). He asked them to find a reasonable Macintosh-based e-mail system that offered both LAN and modem support, a real GUI, and supported both private e-mail as well as public discussion areas (forums). BBSes offered modem support and public forums, but typically had no LAN support and were character-based. Various LAN e-mail systems existed, those on the Mac with reasonable GUI's, but they tended to have poor modem support and few offered forums.

The team found only one product, TeleFinder, which came close to filling the requirements. However they were unimpressed with its solution for LAN access, which consisted of a system extension that redirected AppleTalk data into a sort of virtual modem port. Additionally they felt they could improve on the GUI. Although they said they would be happy to set up a TeleFinder system under contract, they also offered to write a new product that was even better. The proposal was accepted, and work on EduNet started some time in 1989.

FCP, the FirstClass Protocol

Key to FirstClass's operation was the underlying FCP ("FirstClass Protocol"). FCP was a transport layer networking protocol that all FirstClass communications used. This guaranteed error-free communications for all activities, not just file transfers. FCP could run on several different physical layers, starting with modems and AppleTalk, and later adding Novell's IPX and TCP/IP. Both the client and server could communicate over any of these links, allowing a user to seamlessly move from office to home and have access to the same server.

FCP was based on a sliding window protocol, using a wide variety of packet sizes tuned to different networking protocols. Later versions of FCP could turn off their own error correction systems when running over error-free links like TCP/IP. FCP also implemented an optional encryption system based the on Blowfish cipher. With all of these features turned off, FCP still offered good performance even on the slow modems common in the era it was first written, 2400 bit/s being most common.

Additionally, every FCP packet included a "task number" identifier, similar to the port identifier in TCP/IP. This allowed FCP to construct a number of "virtual links" between each client and server. This was a key to FirstClass's popularity; the server implemented a multithreaded kernel and opened a new thread for every task requested by a client. Clients could continue to "operate" the system even with communications already set up. The user could upload and download files at the same time, while simultaneously reading and writing mail. No operation in the client blocked the user, with the exception of the OS-supplied modal dialogs.

The BBS revolution

After renaming it to the more generic FirstClass, they started demonstrating early versions to Toronto-area Mac BBSes. The reception was generally poor.Fact|date=August 2008

However an Apple Canada employee, Mark Windrim, set up a FirstClass BBS for Magic (the "Macintosh Awareness Group in Canada"). Local Mac users heard of the system and established accounts, quickly turning it into the largest Mac-oriented BBS system in the area.Fact|date=August 2008

Due to the multithreaded nature of the system, the user could open multiple messages at the same time, while uploading and downloading in the background. Whereas most systems indirectly encouraged users to simply "leech" files and then leave, users waiting for downloads on FirstClass had an entire modem channel free for uploading or writing. This seemed to encourage participation; generally the average user posted about three times as many messages as on traditional command-line based systems.Fact|date=August 2008 Even with a single phone line and a tiny user base, Magic soon had message volumes approaching that of major commercial services such as Canada Remote Systems and even entire networks such as FidoNet.Fact|date=August 2008

SoftArc sought to take advantage of the growing interest by offering reduced prices to BBS operators. During this time, some FirstClass BBS systems mushroomed to thousands of users, including the Virginia-based DigitalNation, which had hoped to become an AOL competitor, the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group's Planet BMUG and the LiveWire and Virtual Valley services operated by Silicon Valley's Metro Newspapers group.Fact|date=August 2008

The FirstClass software later incorporated a feature that allowed individual FirstClass sites to share conference content and private mail by allowing the servers to link together. Originally this was accomplished via dialup connections, but eventually allowed sites to link via the internet using internet connections. Apple employee Scott Converse formed the first and probably the most extensive network of FirstClass based sites in the world known as OneNet. [Scott Converse, [http://onenet.org/history.html How the OneNet Started] , OneNet. Retrieved August 22 2008.]

By 1994 the internet was becoming a major force, killing off most BBS systems on both the Mac and PC over the next year or so. [ [http://bbslist.textfiles.com/support/statistics.html Statistics Generated by the BBS List] ] Most BBS vendors went bankrupt during this period, but SoftArc's sales into the Mac e-mail market remained strong enough through this period.Fact|date=August 2008

Corporate e-mail and collaboration

By the mid-90s FirstClass had evolved into a small-to-medium sized internal e-mail system,Fact|date=August 2008 but its BBS continued to receive attention. [Nicholas Baran, [http://www.byte.com/art/9409/sec4/art5.htm Businesses Turn to BBSes] , "Byte", September 1994] A Windows-based FirstClass client was introduced and a PC server on Windows NT soon followed.

During the mid-1990s FirstClass evolved to compete in the groupware marketplace. There were a number of problems that limited its appeal in this role. The server could be run only on a single machine, limiting its expandability (today, all three platforms support up to 10,000 simultaneous logins). Although a store-and-forward linking was built-in, user accounts and other information remained associated with a single server, forcing users to always log into "their" server. Additionally the look of the system was also becoming more idiosyncratic; the layout and visual polish were designed to be cross platform rather than look "native" to the client platform, and by the mid-90s the system was starting to look dated.Fact|date=August 2008 Even so, the product was successful to some degree, besting Microsoft Exchange in number of installed users until 1997.Fact|date=August 2008

FirstClass added internet functionality and a scripting method by 2000 but both Lotus and Microsoft had introduced these features earlier and FirstClass lost market share to themFact|date=August 2008 The Mac market simultaneously declined through the mid to late 1990s, eroding the product's primary customer base.Fact|date=August 2008 Even among those that considered the FirstClass system, the lack of a robust calendaring component during this time (until FirstClass v6 in 2001) significantly hurt the product's competitiveness.Fact|date=August 2008 Nevertheless they were recognized as a notable (though not top) vendor of worldwide integrated collaborative environments by International Data Corporation in 2004. [Mark Levitt and Robert P. Mahowald, " [http://download.microsoft.com/download/e/9/6/e9627503-eb6c-4798-8b0a-8f584e4f73a7/IDC%20Sept%2004.pdf Worldwide Integrated Collaborative Environments 2003. Vendor Analysis: How to Keep Moving When Surrounded by ICE] ", International Data Corporation, July 2004.(PDF) Retrieved August 22 2008.]

During this period FirstClass added a voice mail solution integrated with the server. The feature, commonly known as unified messaging, allows users to receive voice, fax and e-mail in their single mailbox. While the system was quite advanced from a technical perspective at the time, it was also expensive when compared with dedicated voice systems at the time and its introduction apparently had little effect on the product's market share.Fact|date=August 2008

In the mid-late 2000s FirstClass redesigned its interface and introduced an automatic server-based and policy-driven archiving service for legal compliance purposes, and full Unicode support.Fact|date=August 2008

Tools

The FirstClass Application Services (formerly called "RAD" for "Rapid Application Development") allows third-party developers to create tools and applications for use with FirstClass.

Company history

In 1997 the company arranged a reverse takover by a company from Vancouver to become listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange as Centrinity.Fact|date=August 2008 In September 2002 Open Text bought Centrinity, for a reported $19 million CAD.Fact|date=August 2008 Open Text was developing a suite of online collaboration products through a series of mergers, and FirstClass's educational background fit particularly well with some of their other offerings. At the time Open Text stated their intention to integrate FirstClass into the "LiveLink" internet information collection engine, but this integration was not practical due to the architecture of LiveLink.Fact|date=August 2008

Versioning controversy

Recently OpenText has stopped updating their Linux client, focusing development on Windows and Mac OS X. In an advert OpenText uses the slogan "Choose the platform that's right for you, not us" [ [http://www.firstclass.com/Divisions/Products/Supported%20Platforms Supported Platforms: FirstClass Online ] ] even though the Linux client at June 1, 2008 was at version 8.315 compared to its Windows equivalent being at version 9.106 [http://www.firstclass.com/Divisions/FAV13-0024FC95/?Plugin=FC&OpenItemURL=S047C50E4 Resources: FirstClass Online ] ] .OpenText offers the FirstClass client in English exclusively on the Linux platform, compared to the Macintosh and Windows versions, having support for 10 other languages in addition to Canadian and British English.

References

External links

* [http://www.firstclass.com/ Official website]
* [http://www.ofcn.org/whois/ben/Free-Nets/GLFN/First_Class.html FirstClass and Supporting Hardware] — historical document shows a number of images from a standard FC system in 1996, as it was used as part of a series of systems being used to run Free-Net.