Microsoft Outlines RTC Rollout Schedule

Greenwich, the collection of realtime technologies to be integrated with Windows.Net Server 2003 will be out in the second or third quarter of 2003, said Dennis Karlinsky, Microsoft product manager of realtime communications.

The company hopes to ship Greenwich to key ISVs for testing in December with the beta version due in the first quarter of next year, Karlinsky told attendees of a session at the MEC 2002 show here.

On Tuesday, Microsoft Senior Vice President Paul Flessner reiterated that those capabilities will be part and parcel of Windows.Net Server, even though they will not ship initially with that operating system.

"It's in the box, even though it's not shipping in the box [initially," said Bob O'Brien, product manager for Windows.Net Server.

The embedding of capabilities such as instant messaging and group conferencing in the operating system is a big shift for Microsoft, which had offered up analogous capabilities in its existing Exchange Conferencing Server (ECS).

The Exchange-based collaborative capabilities aren't quite dead yet. The company plans to ship Service Pack 3 for ECS in the second quarter. "ECS will remain Microsoft's integrated multiparty conferencing and data collaboration product, but here's the 'but': Third parties will build atop Greenwich to provide similar functionality. Next-generation RTC stuff will come from Greenwich," Karlinsky said.

Microsoft decided to switch its game plan, in part because the current collaboration technology is based on RVP, a proposed standard that did not garner a lot of industry support.

By contrast, the current Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) has the backing of Microsoft, IBM, Cisco Systems and others, giving it the heft it needs to succeed. "We decided to build the capability from scratch with SIP and SIMPLE support," Karlinsky said.

Also at the show, Microsoft lifted the curtain a little around Jupiter, its planned melding of three e-business servers--Commerce Server 2002, BizTalk Server 2002 and Content Management Server 2002. The last of these was formally launched this week and is slated to ship this year. The first Jupiter iteration, focusing on services for business process management, XML Web Services support, workflow and BPEL support, is due the second half of next year.

The second release, which is expected to include site analytics, campaign management, catalog management and content management and personalization, will follow a year later, Microsoft said. Pricing was not disclosed.

David Kiker, general manager of e-business servers at microsoft, stressed that Jupiter will sport tight links to other Microsoft offerings. "The integration doesn't stop with the products in the bundle. . . . [There will be integration with Visual Studio.Net [and Office. . . . We want people to be able to use the technologies they already understand."

Kiker said another key Microsoft goal is to make customers and partners aware of functionality that may even exist in the current servers but is underutilized. "There is a clickstream analysis tool in commerce server, but I bet many customers don't know that," he told CRN. "With Jupiter, we can call out the components [and take advantage of common metaphors already in use."

MEC show attendees said Jupiter seems like a good move, since Microsoft is now fielding something like 13 servers and is pushing reduced complexity.

"Combining commerce and integration and content management has some natural synergies," said Shawn Willett, an analyst at Current Analysis. "However, portals are increasingly the user interface for these applications, so the exclusion of the portal from Jupiter will be a bit of a drawback for users."

Microsoft is also promising quite a bit of unification through Visual Studio development interfaces in all their products, which Willett said should help in the development process. He said the company needs to easily expose back-end integrations in its commerce, portal and content products, in order to keep up with the plans of competitors such as BEA Systems and Sun Microsystems.