Microsoft Talks Of Jupiter--A Little Bit

Microsoft

With the shipment of Content Management Server 2002, the last of the major e-business servers in this rev cycle, the company is ready to talk about the next step.

But the only specific information given at MEC 2002 here was that buyers of BizTalk Server 2002, Commerce Server 2002 and Content Management Server 2002 would be offered an easy upgrade path to the server bundle "when it becomes widely available in 2003 or 2004," said David Kiker, general manager of e-business servers at Microsoft. (See related story.)

Jupiter will comprise a single integrated set of e-business technologies based on those in the server products currently shipping, and will offer tight integration with SharePoint Portal Server, Microsoft Office and SQL Server, Kiker said. Microsoft promised that Jupiter will support the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS).

In addition, developers will be able to leverage their knowledge of Visual Studio.Net's integrated development environment (IDE) to build applications, he said. The promised server will also integrate with AppCenter and MOM, according to Microsoft.

The integrated back-end bundle will help break down walls between business users and the back-end business processes they need to access, Kiker said.

"A knowledge worker will be able to access business processes directly from Office applications--for example, participate in workflow and order processing from directly with Excel," and use Excel's native talents to extract and graph it, he said.

As expected, Microsoft used the show to unveil its Exchange Server Objects (XSO) managed API for easing integration between Exchange-based messaging functionality and outside applications and servers. (See related story.)