The Wildcat Interactive Net Server is one of the best all-in-one packages PC Week Labs has seen for companies that want to build a small to medium-size corporate intranet.

Released in November by Mustang Software Inc., the Wildcat! Interactive Net Server is essentially an upgrade to the company's Wildcat 5 BBS software. Although Wildcat 5 had a built-in World Wide Web server, it was pretty basic, and most of its other Internet capabilities were of the less powerful type normally found in BBS packages. However, Wildcat! Interactive Net Server has an improved Web server and includes a full SMTP/POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3) Internet mail server and an FTP server. Other improvements include electronic commerce features and better support for standard Web browsers.

In addition, Wildcat! Interactive Net Server supports Notes-like message forums, real-time chats and excellent dial-in capabilities. It also can be used to provide easy Internet access to users dialing in to the server.

Of all of the intranet packages PC Week Labs has tested, including Frontier Technologies Corp.'s Intranet Genie and Hummingbird Communications Ltd.'s Columbus, Wildcat! Interactive Net Server comes closest to covering all of the bases and, once users overcome some of the learning barriers, is also very customizable. However, companies building a very large corporate intranet would probably be better served by dedicated Internet servers such as those found in Netscape Communications Corp.'s SuiteSpot.

The product runs on Windows 95 and Windows NT 3.51 and is priced at $99 for the basic community edition, $1,125 for the business edition, and $2,995 for the enterprise edition, which was the version tested by PC Week Labs.

Unlike Web server management, which centers around configuring the server, Wildcat! Interactive Net Server setup and management focuses on administering connections. Administrators used to regular Internet servers might find Wildcat! Interactive Net Server's setup confusing. However, with a little experimentation, we were able to determine how to configure pretty much everything and got the software functioning fully on our Hewlett-Packard Co. Vectra XU.

At setup, Wildcat! Interactive Net Server prompted us for information on our type of business and then provided us with a set of suggested discussion forums and sample Web pages. The product has a fairly robust set of security features for controlling access to the intranet or for blocking out certain parts of the server or the intranet from groups of users.

Thanks to its BBS background, all of the Wildcat! Interactive Net Server features can be accessed using a dial-up terminal session, Telnet, Mustang Software's Windows-based Mustang Navigator application, and/or a standard Web browser. Mustang Navigator, which we could easily setup to be downloaded from our Wildcat! Interactive Net Server, provides easy-to-use interfaces for mail, chats, discussion groups and file transfers. It also functions as a browser plug-in and has built-in integration with Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer.

Users connecting over the Web but not using the Mustang Navigator can access Wildcat! Interactive Net Server via Active HTML, which uses CGI (Common Gateway Interface), frames and tables to provide an interface to all of the server's features except real-time chats.

Users dialing into the Internet through Wildcat! Interactive Net Server must use Mustang Navigator with a Web browser. We found this worked fairly well; Wildcat! Interactive Net Server's dial-up Internet capability essentially allowed us to establish a small Internet service provider. However, there is a drawback. The server uses one IP address for all users connecting through dial-up, which can cause problems for certain sites that use cookies or for applications such as Internet phones that rely on unique IP addresses for functionality.

The Internet mail support worked very well, letting us connect to the server using any POP3 mail client. The enterprise edition also includes an add-on that allowed us to have all Wildcat! Interactive Net Server mail and discussions automatically transferred to Microsoft Exchange clients.

Senior Analyst Jim Rapoza can be contacted at jim_rapoza@zd.com.