The Normandy Invasion

Microsoft's choice of product code names has always fascinated me. I believe that they give insight into Microsoft's vision and strategies for the products they represent, so the code name Normandy makes perfect sense to me.

Historically, Normandy was a key offensive action of World War II, giving the Allies the morale boost of a huge success and gaining them key ground to battle the Axis Powers. Some historians believe that if the Allies had lost the battle of Normandy, they would have lost the war. I think Microsoft has this same feeling about its Normandy platform: It is poised to invade the Internet with a set of new technologies designed to give UNIX a run for its money, loosening its dominance in providing Internet services. To Microsoft, the enemy is UNIX, the battlefield is the Internet, and the most important addition to Microsoft's vast arsenal is the Normandy platform.

Normandy was the code name for Microsoft's Commercial Internet System (CIS), a new collection of Internet services--founded on Windows NT and other parts of BackOffice--that offer businesses a highly scalable option for providing Internet services. The CIS suite addresses the intricacies of Web content publishing and site management and offers services that help companies conduct business online. The suite contains an array of services that all work with each other to form a tightly integrated platform for corporate intranets and the Internet. With CIS, an Internet site can employ live conferencing, news, email, secure Web transactions, content personalization, customer tracking and billing, information retrieval, and easy data replication across multiple servers--and that list just scratches the surface of basic functionality. Most of the CIS suite is customizable, which leaves the boundaries of functionality limited only by your own imagination. The entire product line is integrated with the Internet Service Manager (ISM) just as Internet Information Server (IIS), FTP, Gopher, and Proxy services are.

The CIS platform runs on top of NT and other parts of BackOffice. Figure 1 presents the BackOffice family, including CIS systems and services. Each CIS service or system has specific requirements and prerequisites. Using the entire CIS platform requires the use of NT Server, SQL Server, IIS, and the ActiveX Server (Denali), although you can run some components without SQL and Active Server.

At first you may think these requirements are a way for Microsoft to force you to adopt (and purchase) other Microsoft products to use CIS. In fact, the strategy also makes scaling-up your setup and optimizing your software investments easier, instead of inventing redundant systems for each product's needs: Why create a new database model for user management and mail routing in a mail server when SQL Server can handle the job? And why develop a new standalone merchant Web server when you can easily add that functionality to IIS with additional software components? You get the picture.

Let's take a quick look at the components of CIS and then examine each part to get an idea of how to deploy these products. The Release Candidate 1 (RC1) version of CIS includes nine systems and services:

• Membership System
• Internet Address Book Server
• Personalization System
• Conference Server
• Commercial Internet System News Server
• Commercial Internet System Mail Server
• Merchant Server
• Information Retrieval System
• Content Replication System

Membership System
The Microsoft Membership System (MMS) is the core product that all other CIS servers and services rely on to work together within an online community. MMS provides the mechanisms to accept new users, collect information about them, and manage what the customer can and cannot access. MMS maintains a database of users and associated information, such as membership plans and access to private or restricted areas of content.

Together, MMS and the Microsoft Membership Broker (MMB) handle user identification and authentication. This capability lets the administrator control access to services according to individual membership plans. Membership plans allow the creation of several tiers of service, including a free membership level and various paid tiers. Because security tokens are integrated into NT's built-in access control systems, MMS uses a single user ID and password combination to identify a user to each CIS service you offer.

MMS encapsulates the key components you'll need to build distributed online service offerings for the Internet. MMS lets you deploy servers anywhere on the Internet, where it can link the systems for centralized authentication, authorization, and billing.

MMB is the part of the MMS that lets a server identify users on connection, control their access to content, and bill them for server activities (if you charge for access). MMB even lets users request access to restricted content areas.

Other CIS components, such as the News Server or Chat Server, can identify and authenticate a user with MMB and determine what content a user is allowed to access. (For more information about Chat Server, see "Conversing on the Internet.")

With MMB, a content provider can establish paid online services and track usage statistics to bill the user accordingly. Suppose your company sells software or consulting information. You can easily establish a live online area on your Web site to sell product updates and other valuable information to visiting customers, eliminating the need for sales staff members or phone order workers.