Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) especially emphasized at Convergence 2005, the company's annual user conference, that the upcoming wave of MBS business management applications will make individual users much more productive. As part of the undertaking, the vendor claims to have conducted extensive face-to-face conversations with over 2,000 business people from around the world and from all walks of life; chief executive officers (CEO), marketing vice presidents (VP), sales people, accountants, purchasing managers and clerks, warehouse workers, and so on, were all talked to, observed doing their work, and more importantly, listened to.
The booming feedback according to MBS was that almost all of these users wanted their enterprise applications to be more intuitive and organized around their specific role and tasks, that is, with pertinent personalized desktops/user interfaces (UI) that would only show them what they need to naturally do their jobs. Another often heard issue was that people want to connect and collaborate in the context of their work. Also, given a number of customers that are switching from using "pedestrian" fax and snail mail to using e-mail as the main technology for connecting and transacting with their customers and suppliers, MBS intends to build much easier transactional e-mail support into the first wave of product releases, and to make it easier to build and use collaboration portals.
Almost every current or prospective user MBS talked to also purportedly prioritized gaining insight from applications. At the basic level, users want a more intuitive way to "look inside the business", and they want applications to bring them closer to their operations, such as alerts that can help them handle exceptions or better yet, to act on business events (or even non-events) well before they become exceptions (for more related information, see the article Business Activity Monitoring—Watching The Store For You). Customers also always want very flexible and easy-to-use reporting capabilities, whereby it is always astounding to see them referring time and again to Microsoft Excel when trying to create and visualize reports, thereby virtually crowning the spreadsheet product as the leading business intelligence (BI) tool (see Vendors Harness Excel (and Office) to Win the Lower-end of Business Intelligence Market).
These first three "software of the future" design themes—empowered, connected, and insightful users—are all about making people more productive, and Microsoft believes this convergence of structured transactional data coming from MBS applications and unstructured work coming from Microsoft Office is something it can uniquely do, although the trend has also been noted and tackled by the likes of SAP, IBM, and Oracle (see Mainstream Enterprise Vendors Begin to Grasp Content Management).
Going beyond end-user productivity, there is also the realization that most business people have a mental picture of the organizational hierarchy (with associated roles) and process flows model of their company in their head, and they want their business management software to be able to easily map to this model and change with it. MBS refers to this as the "adaptive process", which it plans to enable through a model-driven development approach. Although the idea of model-driven development has been a vision in the software industry for a long time, what makes Microsoft think it can deliver it to business applications now is the existence of a set of integration standards that make it easier for the building blocks of an application to be assembled into business process flows. To that end, the Web services stack precisely addresses this need, and the use of Web services in process-based applications is referred by some pundits as one practical embodiment of SOA. For more information, see Understanding SOA, Web Services, BPM, BPEL, and More.
To put this into competitive prospective, at the recent mid-May Sage Insights Conference, Sage Software's CEO Ron Verni also spoke about what drives users to investigate technology options—a vision that is rather focused on providing the broadest range of choices and customer-specific application options that readily integrate. For Sage, underlying technologies are a means to an end, and the end is to provide businesses with highly functional, easy-to-use business process management (BPM) tools. Sage is in the business of providing business applications, not development tools, and therefore is less inclined to develop in a way that requires an ever expanding technology stack such as what Microsoft focuses on (after all, the MBS-related business is not profitable, but the software tools business is). This is where the Best/Sage broad line of application comes into play, given its attempted sweeping coverage of market needs.
As it will be detailed later on, the vendor has also announced a multi-year plan to deliver an integration framework which ties many of these products as well as third-party products together behind the scenes, and a common desktop that ties the Sage products together at the UI level, providing businesses with logical suites of business applications that they can bring together in a building block fashion as their needs dictate. Sage offers many points of entry to its product lines, including specialty applications for construction, real estate, manufacture, non-profit, and accounting, among others. In addition, the idea of supporting Linux and non-Microsoft databases is not a foreign concept to Best/Sage, making the concept of "choice in computing" even more accessible, even if Linux and non-Microsoft databases are not supported across all products.
Coming back to Microsoft, for the first wave of Green, as mentioned earlier on, MBS is building a Web service-based interoperability layer, that is enabling applications to integrate, and is also developing composite applications to support cross-company and cross-module processes. To explain a bit deeper, Indigo, part of Microsoft's Windows upcoming operating system (OS) code-named Longhorn, unifies a variety of Microsoft technologies (e.g., Common Object Model [COM+], MSMQ, ASP.NET Web services [ASMX], and Remoting, most of which will be explained shortly) and transports (i.e., hypertext transfer protocol [HTTP], transmission control protocol [TCP], user datagram protocol [UDP]/dynamic data exchange [DDE], and inter-process communication [IPC]) to create a single framework and runtime environment for building distributed computing systems. Hence, Indigo is well suited for building software oriented architecture (SOA) systems, whereby service orientation should help software architects and developers design and build connected systems. As a well-known fact, SOA complements object orientation and helps articulate services (i.e., software components) in a platform- and implementation-independent manner.
Accordingly, Microsoft's server-side Web technology, ASP.NET, takes an object-oriented programming (OOP) approach to web page execution, whereby every element in an ASP.NET page is treated as an object and runs on the server. To refresh our memory, OOP is a type of programming in which programmers define not only the data type of a data structure, but also the types of operations (functions) that can be applied to the data structure, in which way, the data structure becomes an object that includes both data and functions. In addition, programmers can create relationships between one object and another, and, objects can, for example, inherit characteristics from other objects. One of the principal advantages of OOP techniques over traditional procedural programming techniques is that they enable programmers to create modules that do not need to be changed when a new type of object is added, since a programmer can simply create a new object that inherits many of its features from existing objects, making object-oriented programs easier to modify.
On the other hand, Web services are software programs that are communicated with via message exchange, and are also autonomous, which means they exist and run on their own. Furthermore, functionality exposed by these services are described using standards-based schema and contracts, so that many applications can invoke a service, and the service should not crash if one of the consuming applications breaks. A system would then be a collection of deployed services cooperating in a given task, and would thus be built to adapt to change.
Indigo is implemented in the Microsoft .NET Framework, which means that Web services can be created with any common language runtime (CLR)-compliant language, which can be dozens, at this stage. Indigo Web services are exposed on the wire via standards based technologies (such as extensible markup language [XML], XML schema definition [XSD], simple object access protocol [SOAP], Web services description language [WSDL], and other Web services specifications).
Earlier Microsoft .NET framework-based distributed computing technologies such as ASMX, Enterprise Services, Remoting, COM+/MSMQ can also be used from within Indigo applications, since Indigo can interoperate on the wire with virtually any applications built on infrastructure that conforms to the above Web services standards. For example, Remoting is a .NET-based technology (a replacement for Distributed Common Object Model [DCOM]) that allows objects residing in different application domains (and are said to be separated by a "remoting boundary") to communicate. Objects using remoting may be on the same computer, or on different computers connected by a network.
At the end of the day, Microsoft pledges to provide mechanisms for migrating applications that use most existing frameworks to services. To brush up on our knowledge, the .NET Framework is a programming infrastructure created by Microsoft for building, deploying, and running applications and services that use .NET technologies, such as desktop applications and Web services, which contain the following three major parts:
1. The CLR, also known as the virtual execution system (VES), which is a runtime environment that manages the execution of a .NET program code and provides services such as memory and exception management, debugging and profiling, and security;
2. The framework class library (FCL), which is the collective name for the thousands of classes that compose the .NET Framework. The services provided by the FCL include runtime core functionality (basic types and collections, file and network input/output [I/O], accessing system services, etc.), interaction with databases, consuming and producing XML, and support for building Web-based and desktop-based client applications, and SOAP-based XML Web services; and
The booming feedback according to MBS was that almost all of these users wanted their enterprise applications to be more intuitive and organized around their specific role and tasks, that is, with pertinent personalized desktops/user interfaces (UI) that would only show them what they need to naturally do their jobs. Another often heard issue was that people want to connect and collaborate in the context of their work. Also, given a number of customers that are switching from using "pedestrian" fax and snail mail to using e-mail as the main technology for connecting and transacting with their customers and suppliers, MBS intends to build much easier transactional e-mail support into the first wave of product releases, and to make it easier to build and use collaboration portals.
Almost every current or prospective user MBS talked to also purportedly prioritized gaining insight from applications. At the basic level, users want a more intuitive way to "look inside the business", and they want applications to bring them closer to their operations, such as alerts that can help them handle exceptions or better yet, to act on business events (or even non-events) well before they become exceptions (for more related information, see the article Business Activity Monitoring—Watching The Store For You). Customers also always want very flexible and easy-to-use reporting capabilities, whereby it is always astounding to see them referring time and again to Microsoft Excel when trying to create and visualize reports, thereby virtually crowning the spreadsheet product as the leading business intelligence (BI) tool (see Vendors Harness Excel (and Office) to Win the Lower-end of Business Intelligence Market).
These first three "software of the future" design themes—empowered, connected, and insightful users—are all about making people more productive, and Microsoft believes this convergence of structured transactional data coming from MBS applications and unstructured work coming from Microsoft Office is something it can uniquely do, although the trend has also been noted and tackled by the likes of SAP, IBM, and Oracle (see Mainstream Enterprise Vendors Begin to Grasp Content Management).
Going beyond end-user productivity, there is also the realization that most business people have a mental picture of the organizational hierarchy (with associated roles) and process flows model of their company in their head, and they want their business management software to be able to easily map to this model and change with it. MBS refers to this as the "adaptive process", which it plans to enable through a model-driven development approach. Although the idea of model-driven development has been a vision in the software industry for a long time, what makes Microsoft think it can deliver it to business applications now is the existence of a set of integration standards that make it easier for the building blocks of an application to be assembled into business process flows. To that end, the Web services stack precisely addresses this need, and the use of Web services in process-based applications is referred by some pundits as one practical embodiment of SOA. For more information, see Understanding SOA, Web Services, BPM, BPEL, and More.
To put this into competitive prospective, at the recent mid-May Sage Insights Conference, Sage Software's CEO Ron Verni also spoke about what drives users to investigate technology options—a vision that is rather focused on providing the broadest range of choices and customer-specific application options that readily integrate. For Sage, underlying technologies are a means to an end, and the end is to provide businesses with highly functional, easy-to-use business process management (BPM) tools. Sage is in the business of providing business applications, not development tools, and therefore is less inclined to develop in a way that requires an ever expanding technology stack such as what Microsoft focuses on (after all, the MBS-related business is not profitable, but the software tools business is). This is where the Best/Sage broad line of application comes into play, given its attempted sweeping coverage of market needs.
As it will be detailed later on, the vendor has also announced a multi-year plan to deliver an integration framework which ties many of these products as well as third-party products together behind the scenes, and a common desktop that ties the Sage products together at the UI level, providing businesses with logical suites of business applications that they can bring together in a building block fashion as their needs dictate. Sage offers many points of entry to its product lines, including specialty applications for construction, real estate, manufacture, non-profit, and accounting, among others. In addition, the idea of supporting Linux and non-Microsoft databases is not a foreign concept to Best/Sage, making the concept of "choice in computing" even more accessible, even if Linux and non-Microsoft databases are not supported across all products.
Coming back to Microsoft, for the first wave of Green, as mentioned earlier on, MBS is building a Web service-based interoperability layer, that is enabling applications to integrate, and is also developing composite applications to support cross-company and cross-module processes. To explain a bit deeper, Indigo, part of Microsoft's Windows upcoming operating system (OS) code-named Longhorn, unifies a variety of Microsoft technologies (e.g., Common Object Model [COM+], MSMQ, ASP.NET Web services [ASMX], and Remoting, most of which will be explained shortly) and transports (i.e., hypertext transfer protocol [HTTP], transmission control protocol [TCP], user datagram protocol [UDP]/dynamic data exchange [DDE], and inter-process communication [IPC]) to create a single framework and runtime environment for building distributed computing systems. Hence, Indigo is well suited for building software oriented architecture (SOA) systems, whereby service orientation should help software architects and developers design and build connected systems. As a well-known fact, SOA complements object orientation and helps articulate services (i.e., software components) in a platform- and implementation-independent manner.
Accordingly, Microsoft's server-side Web technology, ASP.NET, takes an object-oriented programming (OOP) approach to web page execution, whereby every element in an ASP.NET page is treated as an object and runs on the server. To refresh our memory, OOP is a type of programming in which programmers define not only the data type of a data structure, but also the types of operations (functions) that can be applied to the data structure, in which way, the data structure becomes an object that includes both data and functions. In addition, programmers can create relationships between one object and another, and, objects can, for example, inherit characteristics from other objects. One of the principal advantages of OOP techniques over traditional procedural programming techniques is that they enable programmers to create modules that do not need to be changed when a new type of object is added, since a programmer can simply create a new object that inherits many of its features from existing objects, making object-oriented programs easier to modify.
On the other hand, Web services are software programs that are communicated with via message exchange, and are also autonomous, which means they exist and run on their own. Furthermore, functionality exposed by these services are described using standards-based schema and contracts, so that many applications can invoke a service, and the service should not crash if one of the consuming applications breaks. A system would then be a collection of deployed services cooperating in a given task, and would thus be built to adapt to change.
Indigo is implemented in the Microsoft .NET Framework, which means that Web services can be created with any common language runtime (CLR)-compliant language, which can be dozens, at this stage. Indigo Web services are exposed on the wire via standards based technologies (such as extensible markup language [XML], XML schema definition [XSD], simple object access protocol [SOAP], Web services description language [WSDL], and other Web services specifications).
Earlier Microsoft .NET framework-based distributed computing technologies such as ASMX, Enterprise Services, Remoting, COM+/MSMQ can also be used from within Indigo applications, since Indigo can interoperate on the wire with virtually any applications built on infrastructure that conforms to the above Web services standards. For example, Remoting is a .NET-based technology (a replacement for Distributed Common Object Model [DCOM]) that allows objects residing in different application domains (and are said to be separated by a "remoting boundary") to communicate. Objects using remoting may be on the same computer, or on different computers connected by a network.
At the end of the day, Microsoft pledges to provide mechanisms for migrating applications that use most existing frameworks to services. To brush up on our knowledge, the .NET Framework is a programming infrastructure created by Microsoft for building, deploying, and running applications and services that use .NET technologies, such as desktop applications and Web services, which contain the following three major parts:
1. The CLR, also known as the virtual execution system (VES), which is a runtime environment that manages the execution of a .NET program code and provides services such as memory and exception management, debugging and profiling, and security;
2. The framework class library (FCL), which is the collective name for the thousands of classes that compose the .NET Framework. The services provided by the FCL include runtime core functionality (basic types and collections, file and network input/output [I/O], accessing system services, etc.), interaction with databases, consuming and producing XML, and support for building Web-based and desktop-based client applications, and SOAP-based XML Web services; and
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