## MS BackOffice Unleashed

- Market Drives
- Predictions from 1996 Professional Developer Conference
- Recent Product Announcements
- Summary

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The Future of BackOffice

So far, this book has been devoted to technical facts and step-by-step procedures. Before you leave this book, let's have a little bit of fun speculating on where the BackOffice family is going to be a few years from now. Actually, there is some good that comes of all this speculation. If you read enough speculations about where the industry is going, you can get a feel for common themes. More often than not, these common ideas lead to products that will be on the market down the road.

This chapter into is divided into three basic sections. In the first section I reiterate my beliefs on the market-driven nature of the BackOffice product family to set the stage for my later work at the crystal ball. Next, you learn some of the things that I have gleaned from watching the videotapes and reviewing the presentation slides from the 1996 Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference. Finally, the third section in this chapter presents some impressions that I have obtained from recent product announcements and position papers from both Microsoft and the other major players in this field.

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Market Drives

Many vendors—some of which who are no longer around—have complained that the Microsoft marketing machine is an unstoppable force. They credit all of Microsoft’s success to this marketing machine. Perhaps this is just an excuse for their own lack of success. Although it is true that Microsoft does have a marketing flair, it is also good at anticipating what the market is going to demand and having products ready (or at least close to ready) when they are needed.

A few examples seem to be in order here. When Windows first came out, many vendors ignored the success of the Macintosh environment and stuck with their good old DOS products where the development costs had already been paid and they were in the mode of raking in the profits. They felt that users were weak when they asked for a convenient user interface and strong standards for interacting with the computer. This incorrect reading of the market cost many of the early PC industry giants their dominance in the industry, if their companies survived at all.

Microsoft was also one of the first companies to sense the desire among users for a tightly integrated office automation environment. Although other companies were content to be the dominant force in a particular market (spreadsheets or PC databases), Microsoft built up a suite of products that were eventually integrated to enable users to easily move data from one application into another. It also provided common tools and interfaces between the products to make them easier to use. The market preferred this integrated approach to processing over a series of individual products that might have been stronger in certain specialty areas. This correct reading of the market’s desires led to Microsoft’s dominance in the office automation world where it had lagged behind for many years.

With BackOffice, Microsoft is turning its attention to the server market, as shown in Figure 47.1. This is a market that is ripe for integration and simplification. The market leaders are fragmented. They provide a number of proprietary solutions designed for certain niche tasks. It is the responsibility of the local information systems shops to integrate applications that run on Novell servers and several flavors of UNIX with the processing capabilities of the mainframe. There are a number of specialty-product vendors, each of which has its own set of requirements and system of doing business. This is not a pleasant situation for many information systems shops that are under pressure to do more with less resources. Several vendors have seen this situation—the real question is which one or ones will get to market with viable solutions.

FIGURE 47.1. Factors in the server marketplace.

BackOffice is Microsoft’s solution to this situation. Microsoft read this situation several years ago and started to work on solutions. It has had to make changes along the way. The rapid growth of the Internet technologies has caused it to place additional emphasis on ensuring that their solutions use these standards. It also has the advantage of being large and successful enough to be able to devote massive resources to their projects. Most of the software companies that have long success records have regularly devoted large portions of their profits to research and development that fuels future growth. Those that try to build a product and then collect the profits are now chapters in the history books.

Anyway, the key point is that if you want to see where Microsoft is headed, look at where the industry is going. You could argue that Microsoft has a strong influence on where the computer industry is headed. There are many cases, however, where Microsoft has realized that it was not heading in the right direction and took action to correct its course. Examples of this include the small Internet-related companies such as Vermeer that Microsoft purchased when it realized that it was lacking in certain product areas, such as Web page authoring tools.

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Predictions from 1996 Professional Developer Conference

The strongest theme that I gathered from my review of the materials from this conference was Microsoft’s strong commitment to being a provider of Internet-based solutions, as witnessed in most of the talks by high-level officials. It was also reflected in many of the lower-level detailed talks that were designed to actually show how to implement solutions. Specifically, the following key elements struck me as important:

- The BackOffice product family was going to contain products that met all the major Internet product needs.
- Specific emphasis was placed on developing tools that facilitated commerce over the Internet.
- Tools that enabled the Web to integrate with database management systems were deeded necessary to enable Web pages to be based on dynamic user needs as opposed to being static-based on what the authors came up with.
- Tools that enabled developers to build programming constructs into the Internet environment were also a major emphasis. These tools enable developers to build custom applications to meet specific product needs.
- Commitments were made to place many of the common services that are needed in an Internet environment into the operating systems themselves. This includes support for the TCP/IP protocol, Web servers, FTP servers, and domain name servers in the case of server operating systems.
- Commitments were also made to build Internet information access tools directly into the operating system or make them available for free through the Internet. The prime example of this is the Internet Explorer Web browser, which now includes newsgroup reader and Internet mail services in addition to its traditional Web and FTP browser capabilities.
- The operating system will evolve to incorporate some of the object-oriented file technologies that have been under development by Microsoft under various code names such as Cairo.

Another common theme that struck me in these presentations was the desire to provide a complete product family. Perhaps drawing from their successes in the office automation world, Microsoft seems committed to build a suite of product that are designed to work together and meet all of the common Internet server needs. Many of these products are built directly into the Windows NT Server operating system. The rest will be provided by one or more of the BackOffice products. These products feature tight integration with one another and the Windows NT server operating system.

A theme that ran through many of the discussions was that of building intranets (see Figure 47.2). Many of the services that people envision for the Internet of the future are just not practical today. People want to exchange large amounts of information, such as full motion video presentations and audio files. The support infrastructure of the Internet, and even most local communications lines, is just not big enough to transfer significant volumes of this information. That volume of information, however, can be transmitted over many of the existing Ethernet local area networks. This will be especially true as more organizations upgrade to the 100 Mbps networks that are starting to become commercially available.

FIGURE 47.2. Advantages of intranets.

Also, there are many organizations that are just not ready to put their entire company on the Internet. They may be willing to keep a Web server for product information, but they have too much in the way of sensitive material to risk on the Internet. Perhaps they just want to use the powerful yet friendly tools that have been developed for the Internet to provide access to their own internal information. Microsoft seems to be well positioned to move into this market. Its capabilities of supporting a less-expensive server environment than many UNIX-based Internet tools and using more powerful development tools (such as ISAPI and JAVA) enable you to develop full Internet-based applications for the first time. Although it is true that you can find JAVA in other environments, many of the early JAVA applications have been interesting toys and not fully database-integrated business applications.

A final theme that I would like to mention in this section is that of building a complete package for Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Currently, most of the vendors who offer Internet services to other companies and individuals use UNIX computers. The ISPs then integrate a series of products that they feel has the best cost/performance benefits to build a suite of services to offer to their clients. The ISP is usually responsible for working out conflicts between the products and keeping the environment running smoothly on their chosen flavor of UNIX. What Microsoft seems to be targeting here is the use of the BackOffice products that it has developed to sell to these integrators. They offer the benefits of tight integration, easier administration, and the capability of using potentially less expensive hardware platforms. You may have read about this product under the Normandy code name.

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Recent Product Announcements

Everyone that I talked to seemed almost overwhelmed by the volume of product announcements and new application programming interfaces that were discussed at the Professional Developers Conference. Since this conference, however, the pace of announcements has not seemed to slack up. Specific initiatives that have caught my interest include the following:

- Activating Web pages. This is a series of ActiveX technologies that enable applications to be downloaded and run by Web browsers as they are needed. This is, in effect, a technology that enables you to download miniature applications when needed as opposed to loading a large application suite.
- Activating Web servers. This is a series of programming technologies that enables your server to adapt the pages it displays based on previous input by the user or information retrieved from a database. You also have the option of performing some of the work done by active clients on the server if you desire more control or want to support less powerful clients.
- Internet security and Internet commerce products. A number of Internet security and Internet commerce products have been released for beta testing. These technologies would turn the Internet into a business technology that would convert Internet servers from a marketing expense into a source of revenue.
- Group conferencing technologies. Several group conferencing technologies have been released in beta format that could enable the Internet and other corporate networks to be used for meetings by groups that are geographically separated.
- Integration of newsgroup server technology into Exchange Server. Early testing of the last common Internet technology that is missing from the BackOffice family—the integration of newsgroup server technology into Exchange Server.

Next, there seems to be a strong direction towards supporting as many technologies as possible. This is exemplified by the support of JAVA (in the J++ version of the language), ISAPI interfaces to C++, Visual Basic Web scripting, ActiveX components, and a number of other technologies. Perhaps Microsoft concluded that no one can accurately see exactly where the market is going. Therefore, it is trying to provide a range of products and see which one consumers prefer.

Finally, Microsoft is moving to merge the Web technologies directly into the operating system itself. Just as Network Neighborhood and Explorer enable you to actively scan and work with documents on your current local area network with the same ease that you work with documents on your own computer, they will be modified to enable you to access documents on the Internet or intranet. This is a good feature because most users do not really care where a document is or what format it is stored in—they just want access to the data. They also tend to not want to have to learn a number of different interfaces to find that information.

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Summary

This chapter was not designed to be a long, exhaustive analysis of where Microsoft is heading with the BackOffice family. A lot will be determined based on how users accept some of the Internet products that are being put forth today. Especially in the area of tools to develop applications based on the Web technologies, there are a number of tools that are being offered in parallel with one another to see what people will choose. Microsoft also seems to be working to build a complete server product line of supporting tools. I have seen no indications that it plans on releasing a series of vertical applications (that is, Oracle’s manufacturing suite), but then again only time will tell.