In addition to new corner stone -- Windows 2000 -- the BackOffice Suite and its components will evolve in several ways this year.
The launch of Windows 2000 is right around the corner, so it's high time for another incarnation of the BackOffice Suite of products that surround Microsoft Corp.'s operating system. This year's BackOffice Technical Forecast will tell you what to expect from the suite and its components in the coming year.
The most significant and obvious change to the next version of the suite will be the centerpiece: Windows 2000. The operating system will ship in the BackOffice Suite's box, replacing Windows NT 4.0.
Windows 2000 won't change the nature of the BackOffice products, but it will have a profound effect on all of them. Some of the suite's products will be able to run on both Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 when it ships, but some are designed solely for Windows 2000. All the products, quite naturally, will be honed for Active Directory -- Windows 2000's directory service -- at some point.
The current version of BackOffice -- 4.5 -- shipped last May. Microsoft intends to greet Windows 2000 with a new suite a few months after the operating system ships. Windows 2000 is scheduled to be released Feb. 17.
"We're targeting the first half of 2000 to ship an updated version of the suite," says Joel Sloss, the BackOffice product manager at Microsoft.
When the suite comes to market, it will include the most up-to-date versions of all the components. But the suite as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is more than merely a collection of components.
For instance, the setup of components was integrated in version 4.5 to ease installation and deployment. Now 20 wizards do what more than 150 did in the past. These wizards, along with Windows 2000 Update Wizards that enable the programs to run on Windows 2000, will ship in the suite's next incarnation.
Microsoft is building on that investment. The suite will include software to help customers migrate to Windows 2000 that include a Windows 2000 Readiness Kit and team-based knowledge management tools that run on BackOffice to enhance line-of-business data, unified team, and project-oriented tasks.
Additionally, customers will find third-party tools for security that can limit what an end user can do. Sloss says five or six third-party products will be in the suite. Which ones still have to be determined.
Although the new version will be based on Windows 2000, it doesn't mean Windows NT 4.0 won't be available in the suite at all.
"BackOffice 4.5 will ship for some time after Windows 2000 ships," Sloss says.
In this second annual BackOffice Technical Forecast, we dissected the suite's individual components to investigate what can be expected from each product in the version Microsoft plans to optimize for Windows 2000.
BackOffice will ship with updated and enhanced versions of its other products: Exchange, SQL Server, SNA Server, Systems Management Server (SMS), Proxy Server and Site Server, Commerce Edition.
Some will be enhanced greatly, such as Exchange, SQL Server, and SNA Server.
Others, such as SMS, will not see as many changes this year.
Exchange Server
Many experts opine that Exchange Server 2000 is the most attractive reason for organizations to migrate to Windows 2000. Indeed, Exchange Server will become an integral part of Microsoft's knowledge management vision of a digital dashboard and its vision of providing "anytime, anywhere" access to data from a variety of devices.
The scalability, reliability, and centralization of Windows 2000 make Exchange buffs drool over the possibilities in the Microsoft messaging realm. The ability to store millions of objects in Active Directory, for instance, means users can store millions of mailboxes on Exchange, all with their own attributes that fit into the rest of the Windows 2000 structure.
"From our perspective, when you go to specify within an Active Directory that someone has a mail address, you associate that with an Active Directory Object (ADO)," says Doug Stumberger, Exchange product manager at Microsoft. "What we're talking about is providing an architecture that can really scale to the maximum level needed by a service provider where they're doing massive amounts of data storage across the wire."
The line separating the messaging store and items in databases in Windows NT will be erased with the dawn of Windows 2000's Web Store. This will affect Office 2000 as well as Exchange and its BackOffice counter parts. With the Web Store, Microsoft uses XML to unify the user interface to provide one avenue leading straight to documents, spread-sheets, e-mail messages, instant messages, and voice mail messages, which uses the unified messaging platforms from the major networking companies.
This sets up an entire messaging infrastructure that is completely manageable from the comfy confines of the Microsoft Management Console (MMC).
"You can now store all that information in a much more holistic way," Stumberger explains. "It becomes this central place to store and manage documents as well as messages and Web-based applicatons."
Exchange 2000 also includes URL addressability for all hierarchies, folders, messages, and attachments. This makes all the data in an Exchange server Web-readable. Integration of that feature with Office 2000 should allow Web access to mailboxes. The products will be capable of determining the type of browser in use, and those with support for XML should have a Web experience that is nearly identical to an Outlook client.
The active-active clustering that's achieved through Windows 2000 clustering services is a win for customers who have been clamoring to Microsoft about Exchange 2000. Two systems can be running simultaneously, and if one fails it automatically shifts over to the other machine. In the past, administrators would need to have an idle server standing by for a failover.
"We really view Exchange 2000 as the killer app for Windows 2000," Stumburger says. "For a lot of customers, the Active Directory will be the opportunity for them to rationalize the directory structure, to do things like use security groups for Exchange distribution lists and use Windows security for all Exchange servers and objects."
SQL Server 2000
In addition to its new name, Microsoft's flagship database will get a substantial overhaul this year -- adding a data mining engine and injecting XML into the RDBMS engine.
This time around, Microsoft is building on an already substantially new product. With the release of SQL Server 7.0 in early 1999, Microsoft departed from the code base in place through version 6.5 to create a more scalable RDBMS and add an OLAP engine.
SQL Server 2000, code-named Shiloh, will be released near the end of the second quarter of this year, in time to take advantage of some of the scalability improvements to the operating system that will come with Windows 2000 Datacenter Server, says Barry Goffe, SQL Server product manager at Microsoft. At press time, about 750 customers and partners were participating in a closed beta. A public beta program for SQL Server 2000 is planned for this quarter.
Shiloh can use the full 64 GB of memory that Datacenter Server will support, and it will be possible to use shiloh in four-node failover clusters. Both features are only part of Datacenter Server, and SQL Server 7.0 wasn't built to handle them, Goffe says.
SQL Server 2000 is designed to work with Active Directory. "Integrating with the Active Directory will basically allow DBAs [database administratorsi to automate processes that are totally manual today," Goffe says.
For example, Shiloh will register itself in the Active Directory upon installation. This makes it possible for a DBA to query the Active Directory for all SQL Servers installed on the network since the DBA last checked.
Similar to when Microsoft bundled OLAP Services with the RDBMS with version 7.0 at no extra cost, Redmond will add a data mining engine this time around.
Code-named Aurum, the data mining engine won't compete with existing data mining tools, Goffe maintains. It could, however, drive down prices by eliminating the need for those tools to carry a data loading component.
Microsoft expects the engine to give data mining vendors an infrastructure, to allow users to mix and match different tools' algorithms, and to encourage ISVs to embed algorithms into applications that are not data mining, Goffe says (see sidebar on right).
Integrated XML support in Shiloh fits a companywide effort to embrace XML as a means for supply chain and enterprise application integration. The RDBMS engine will be able to receive queries and return results as XML documents. It will also be possible to apply Extensible Style Sheet Language (XSL) templates to the XML results -- making it possible for a result to appear as a standard document such as an invoice.
