Distributed Elegance

While neither platform was easy to manage, their technical richness and elegance were praised because all the services required for distributed applications were built into the operating system. Today, we find the same people who built VAX/VMS and Vines are the leading minds at Microsoft driving development of Windows Server 2003 and beyond.

It should come as no surprise, then, that what was old is new again as Microsoft moves to bundle more distributed system services into its operating system. The latest manifestation of this is SharePoint services, which essentially puts the infrastructure for collaborative applications back into the OS.

This reversal of the PC network operating system phenomenon that gave birth to companies such as Novell has been ongoing since the launch of Windows NT. But with the advent of SharePoint, Microsoft is doing to Lotus Notes what it did to Novell three or four years ago. In essence, the services needed to make any application inherently collaborative are now just a part of Windows Server.

Having seen the writing on the wall, IBM is slowly turning Notes into system services that manifest themselves through its WebSphere application server, which at the end of the day is a set of distributed system services that are OS-independent.

The SharePoint move and the integration of Notes into WebSphere are good things because they mean new distributed applications will be richer, less costly and easier to deploy. But this move back to the future does harbinger the end of Notes as an independent platform and makes groupware vendors such as Groove Networks something less than relevant. Groove's only hope is to market itself as a provider of applications that leverage OS services, but to date, the company has stubbornly clung to a losing platform proposition.

Meanwhile, the rest of us can look forward to a new generation of rich collaborative applications that leverage elegant distributed OS platforms based on standard Web protocols and technologies.

What's your distributed services mind-set? I can be reached at (516) 562-7477 or via e-mail at [email protected].