Microsoft To Fuse Three E-Business ServersMicrosoft To Fuse Three E-Business Servers

Microsoft plans to fuse its BizTalk Server, Commerce Server, and Content Management Server software into a single product, code-named Jupiter, that's due within 18 months. The software would integrate components that Microsoft's customers commonly combine themselves to build applications that automate the flow of business documents among users who sit behind different corporate firewalls, senior VP Paul Flessner said Tuesday.

Customers' portal software built with the new technology could combine the application-integration capabilities of BizTalk Server, E-commerce catalog and price-management functionality of Commerce Server, and Microsoft Content Management Server's ability to manage versions of files posted to the Web. Microsoft released Content Management Server 2002, a new version, this week: It lets users publish documents directly to the Web from Microsoft Word. The upcoming Jupiter software also could let customers more easily tie Microsoft's Office applications into computerized workflow systems, Flessner said at the Microsoft Exchange Conference in Anaheim, Calif.

"If people want to author [documents] in Word and publish in Content Management Server, we certainly should enable that," he said. There's a need for business customers to design systems that can route documents or expense reports among users in a workgroup using agreed-upon specifications based on Web services protocols, Flessner added. "Lots of customers spend a lot of their day in Outlook and Word," he said. "It's smart for Microsoft to think of how to make it easy for them to author simple person-to-person workflow processes."

To help users create these types of systems, the Jupiter server will support the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services, a software specification being developed by Microsoft, IBM, and BEA Systems for describing the user roles and application logic of a business-to-business system, in the context of messages that can be passed between companies, and based on several XML specifications. The Jupiter server is scheduled for delivery in two shipments, in late 2003 and 2004.

Disclosure of the Jupiter development project indicates Microsoft's aggressive effort to tie together its products via Web services to create a collaboration infrastructure. Flessner said the next version of Microsoft's Exchange server, code-named Titanium and due next year, will remain a standalone messaging system. Microsoft is removing its Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging software from Exchange and including it in its real-time-collaboration server, code-named Greenwich.

Focusing on Exchange's strengths as a messaging architecture is an astute move, Aberdeen Group analyst Dana Gardner says. "They're not going to make the same mistake Lotus made five years ago by making people who just want a messaging platform buy a whole application development environment," Gardner says. "You can't get lower total-cost-of-ownership from selling people stuff they don't need."