WinOE Likely To Join Indigo, WinFS In Longhorn

Microsoft is working on workflow and orchestration technology, called the Windows Orchestration Engine (WinOE), for the Longhorn/Orcas time frame, several sources familiar with the company's plans said. The technology manages how processes or software services interact in distributed systems.

Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Windows Server Division at Microsoft, Redmond, Wash., confirmed that work is under way but declined to comment on how or when it would be packaged. "Stay tuned," he said. Others at Microsoft said the issue remains under discussion.

Ideally, the plan is to meld WinOE, a subset of the workflow capabilities of BizTalk Server, into the Longhorn server operating system, now promised for 2007.

"I don't believe this is really being positioned as a stand-alone workflow solution a la Staffware or FileNet. Rather, it's a common set of services that all Microsoft products--SharePoint, Content Management Server, Project Server, etc.--can leverage," said a source familiar with the plans. VARs and ISVs could also use that base capability in the OS to build external stand-alone workflow solutions, he noted.

Many features in the upcoming Office 12 suite will rely heavily on basic workflow and orchestration capabilities.

Moving core functions from stand-alone offerings into the OS or infrastructure is hardly new to Microsoft, but it is guaranteed to cause angst among software companies that already offer such functions in their own products.

Microsoft executives have talked, in general terms, of adding orchestration to their platform. In January, for example, Valerie Olague, director of Windows Server System Marketing, talked about a "common ... Windows orchestration engine" taking the best of BizTalk orchestration and "baking it into the server infrastructure so orchestration is just there."

A downside of Microsoft's "integrated innovation" push is that the tight dependencies between a platform and applications means that a delay to one can delay many.

Last week, the company said it was revising the rollout of its planned Microsoft Business Framework (see story) to align it with the Longhorn/Orcas wave of products because of dependencies on key Longhorn subsystems, including WinFS, the emerging file system, the Indigo Web services engine and WinOE. Orcas is the code name for the Visual Studio version linked to Longhorn.

Microsoft observers said further changes to the rollout schedule are likely. "What's probably happening now is that since [WinOE] will be a building block for a lot of other groups, including Office, they are each defining their own set of common requirements. Can you imagine going through that list?" said one observer.

Core orchestration capabilities are key in an era of increasingly process-based computing, industry analysts say. "If you're going to do a distributed architecture, you have to have orchestration. Otherwise, you'll have all these pieces floating out in space," said Judith Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz and Associates.

Shawn Willett, an analyst at Current Analysis, agreed. "Microsoft is trying to sell the next version of Windows as a platform for service-oriented architectures. It's fine to publish everything as a service. But to build something really useful you need a process tool, and you need orchestration," he said.

By embedding orchestration in Windows, Microsoft is trying to pre-empt other companies with process tools, such as Oracle, SAP, IBM and EAI vendors, Willett added.