Entering the Enterprise

BackOffice Enterprise Edition sets the stage for Microsoft's final push into the corporation.

Rainer Mauth

Microsoft will once more try to present itself as a platform provider for enterprise solutions. "Our emphasis at CeBIT is the scalability, availability, and manageabi lity of the new BackOffice Enterprise Editions," says Jörg Lorenz, a spokesperson for Microsoft in Germany.

Indeed, the company has played its cards well in developing a family of enterprise applications. The BackOffice Enterprise Edition includes the SQL Server 6.5 relational database management system (RDBMS), the Exchange Server 5.5 messaging system, the Site Server 2.0 Web-site-management tool, the Proxy Server 2.0 Internet firewall and cache server, Syste ms Management Server 1.2, and the SNA Server 4.0 host connectivity tool. All these BackOffice family members build on the recently released Windows NT Server Enterprise Edition.

At the core OS level, Windows NT Server Enterprise Edition brings eight-way symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) servers, two-node high-availability clusters, 4-GB Memory Tuning (4GT), message queuing, and transaction-server functionality to the Wintel platform.

With this comprehensive application suite, Microsoft has finally become a serious solutions vendor for large enterprises. For companies with 25 or fewer PCs, its Small Business Server is a turnkey solution, providing e-mail, fax services, system management, and immediate Web access.

Microsoft will host a multitude of partners at its booth in CeBIT hall 2. Fifty-seven partners will show new solutions for the banking, marketing, distribution, enterprise-planning, and manufacturing systems based on the BackOffice suite. In all these applications, BackOffice servers are linked to the Web. The integration of legacy applications through work-flow engines will be a key issue in the next several years.

Many software developers are now using BackOffice applications as well as Microsoft's Transaction Server and Message Queue Server to build a new breed of workflow-management applications. Systems such as Onestone's Prozessware for Exchange, Staffware's Staffware for Exchanges, and Dialogika's MultiDesk Workflow closely integrate with the Exchange Server messaging architecture and us e the Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) to communicate with Microsoft Office and legacy enterprise applications. A big advantage of these systems is that users do not have to learn how to use new systems to participate in structured work procedures; they simply select work items from their Exchange client or Outlook-based repositories, fill in the associated forms, and release the work to the next user.

At a Glance:

Microsoft and its partners will focus on large-scale enterprise applications. Look for a new breed of work-flow applications built around the Exchange Server.

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Exchange Server Controls Work Flow

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New work-flow systems based on Exchange Server help enterprises control and synchronize business flows with remote offices.