Microsoft Business Framework To Wait For Longhorn, Orcas

"We are aligning now around the Orcas/Longhorn time frame," he said. That's a shift from the game plan where the company planned to deliver a subset of MBF timed with Yukon/Whidbey and then more bits in the Longhorn era. Now Microsoft is consolidating that work into one release due with the rollout of Longhorn, the next-generation Windows client and server software and Orcas, its related Visual Studio toolset.

"We need to align now with Indigo, WinFS and WinOE," all components of Longhorn, Laybourn said. Indigo is a conglomeration of Web services subsystems. WinFS is the emerging Windows file system. WinOE is the scheduling engine that is now part of BizTalk Server but will be integrated into broader workflow technology.

At WinHEC this week, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said the company will deliver betas of the Longhorn server and client next year. The company has fudged on final release dates, but most observers don't expect the final software until 2006 or later.

MBF is envisioned as the platform underpinning of a raft of Microsoft and third-party business applications.

Last year, ISVs had been promised early bits of the project by late 2003, but they never materialized. The plan now is for ISVs to get early code in August, Laybourn said.

This is not the first realignment of MBF. The technology has roots in Great Plains and the Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) group. Last June the team and effort was moved from MBS to become part of the Visual Studio team. At that time it was to be a two-release strategy with the Yukon/Whidbey product wave and the Longhorn/Orcas wave, it has now has been moved back to a single release in the Longhorn/Orcas wave, Laybourn said.

Adam Sohn, product manager in Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group, said the company had been working with about 30 ISVs on MBF planning. At the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) last fall where Microsoft showed off a lot of early Longhorn and Whidbey goodies, about three of the 30 were ready to "use the stuff in Whidbey, 27 were waiting for Longhorn primarily for the new user interface stuff, reporting and other functionality," he said.

While product/technology slips are usually viewed as negatives, some ISV partners and others view the overall Longhorn slips as not necessarily a bad thing. People have seen the advantages of the rich-client Microsoft has shown off in Longhorn previews and other perks. The fact that they won't surface for three years means there's an opportunity for smaller ISVs to fill the gaps between the current Windows and the promise of Longhorn, said one ISV. "If Longhorn were out next year or the year after, they might wait. But no one's going to wait now," he said.

For more on MBF and its positioning, see related story.