Redmond enters the enterprise arena
The driving force behind Microsoft's new .NET strategy is the company's transition from a small to midsized departmental technology provider to a provider of full-fledged enterprise software and technology. The Microsoft BackOffice products have been characterized as easy-to-use products that fit well into the departmental niche but lack the scalability and interoperability required to scale into the enterprise arena. Microsoft designed its new line of .NET Enterprise Servers to change this perception. In the past year, Microsoft has revitalized its entire group of server products. You'll recognize most of the .NET Enterprise Servers as the latest versions of established BackOffice products, but others are brand new. Figure 1, page 30, presents the evolution of the various BackOffice products to their new .NET Enterprise Server incarnations. (You can find more information about Microsoft's .NET Enterprise Servers at http://www.microsoft.com/servers.)
Application Center 2000
The most recently released member of the .NET Enterprise Server family, Application Center 2000, is a different animal from the other members. Application Center doesn't provide any standalone functionality that adds new capabilities to your enterprise. Instead, Microsoft designed Application Center to manage the software components that make up your n-tier Web applications. You can use this product to manage software components developed inhouse or from third-party vendors. Application Center provides one management image for the cluster as well as tools to deploy and load-balance COM+ components. This product requires that Windows 2000 and Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS 5.0) be installed.
Microsoft offers only one edition of Application Center and licenses it per CPU. The Application Center 2000 license includes support for an unlimited number of users from inside or outside the firewall. Released to manufacturing in February 2001, Application Center is still too new for Microsoft to have discussed any service packs or subsequent releases.
BizTalk Server 2000
Designed to enable business-to-business (B2B) application integration, BizTalk Server is a new addition to Microsoft's server-product family. BizTalk Server 2000 lets companies build business processes that use XML to extend their applications across the Internet to their business partners. In addition to support for XML transfers, BizTalk Server uses the ANSI X.12 or EDIFACT standards to support fax, email, and EDI data exchanges. The server's Orchestration Designer lets you visually design the information process flow that BizTalk Server will use to control the flow of information between business partners. BizTalk Server requires Win2K Server and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 7.0. Additionally, to use the Orchestration Designer, you must have Microsoft Visio 2000 installed.
Microsoft offers two versions of BizTalk Server: Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition. Standard Edition is for small to midsized businesses and supports integration with as many as five applications and five external trading partners. Standard Edition is limited to a standalone single-CPU system. Enterprise Edition offers support for an unlimited number of applications and trading partners and for SMP systems and clustered deployments.
Microsoft released this product to manufacturing in December 2000 and hasn't yet announced any service packs or new releases. Third-party vendors, however, have announced BizTalk Serverintegrated products, such as Compaq's Compaq iOrchestrator.
Commerce Server 2000
Commerce Server 2000 is a Web-development platform that lets you build e-commerce Web applications. Commerce Server replaces the earlier Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition. Commerce Server provides all the tools, metrics, and functions required to build an e-commerce Web site. Microsoft designed it for tight integration with the other .NET Enterprise Server products such as SQL Server 2000, Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2000, and BizTalk Server. Commerce Server requires Win2K and SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 7.0.
You can purchase Standard Edition or Developer Edition. Microsoft licenses Standard Edition per processor, and you can install it on multiple machines. You can install Developer Edition on multiple servers, and it allows an unlimited number of connections. However, Microsoft licenses Developer Edition only for development purposes, so you can't use it for a production Web site.
Microsoft released Commerce Server to manufacturing in November 2000. The company hasn't yet announced any service packs or follow-up releases.
Exchange 2000 Server
Email has been dubbed the killer Internet application, and Microsoft Exchange Server is the most widely used email platform. Exchange 2000 Server was the first BackOffice product to require the use of Win2K and features tight integration with Win2K Active Directory (AD). Since its initial release as a basic email server, Exchange Server has consistently offered expanded functionality. The latest Exchange release adds support for the new Web Storage System (WSS), conferencing, and instant messaging to its established email and workgroup capabilities.
Exchange Server is available in three editions: Exchange 2000 Server, Exchange 2000 Enterprise Server, and Exchange 2000 Conferencing Server. In addition to the feature set that the standard Exchange 2000 Server provides, Enterprise Server supports active/active clustering and distributed services for high-end reliability and scalability. Microsoft designed Conferencing Server explicitly to manage voice, data, and videoconferencing across multiple locations in your enterprise network or across the Internet.
The second service pack for Exchange 2000 is scheduled for release in the second half of 2001. A future release of Exchange, which is still on the drawing board, is expected to utilize the SQL Server database engine instead of the current Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) database engine that is based on the Microsoft Access Joint Engine Technology (JET) engine database technology.