PowerTalk

Apple Open Collaboration Environment, or AOCE (sometimes OCE), was a collection of messaging-related technologies introduced for the classic Mac OS in the early 1990s. It included the PowerTalk mail engine, which was the primary client-side interface to the system; the PowerShare mail server for workgroup installations; and a number of additional technologies such as Open Directory, encryption and digital signature support.

AOCE/PowerTalk was heavily marketed between 1993 and 1995, but the hardware requirements meant that most users couldn't even install it, let alone use it. Developers were likewise stymied by the complex system, and since the installed base was so small their potential sales were even smaller. In 1996 Apple Computer quietly dropped their efforts to market AOCE, and the project quickly disappeared.

Development of AOCE started in 1989, largely the "pet project" of Apple Fellow Gursharan Sidhu, formerly engineering lead at Apple for LaserWriter, AppleShare and related networking products.

The project started by taking a "20,000 foot overview" of existing mail systems, and trying to find common concepts and problems. Their key conclusion was that e-mail systems were designed for the wrong purpose—to deliver e-mail to people, when they should instead store and forward things to places. Compare this with the real-world postal service, which delivers not only mail, but magazines, packages, large parcels, and even (in one example) building materials to a worksite.

The team also found other problems with existing email systems. They tended to support plain text mail only, and rarely supported non-English characters. Support for mobile users was poor, often relying on 3rd party "hacks" that were of dubious reliability. And they were all, without exception, based on a dedicated e-mail server that was typically complex to set up, and often "overkill" for small installations with only a few people in an office.

Finally, none of the existing products could give the user what they really wanted: a single universal mailbox and a single universal address book. In this 'pre-Internet' era, savvy users often had mailboxes on their corporate network, online services such as CompuServe or AppleLink, and perhaps a number of Bulletin board systems (BBSs) as well. Each e-mail system used its own standards for collecting and storing information, forcing users to run multiple clients to access the different services. Although a single-mailbox system could be constructed by administrators with the use of e-mail gateways, these tended to be expensive and technically challenging to maintain.

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