King of the Enterprise Messaging Mountain
Don't look now, but Microsoft's Exchange Server is tearing up the enterprise messaging mountain. Once an also-ran to Lotus Notes, Exchange is now the fastest climbing client/server messaging platform, according to the Electronic Mail Messaging Newsletter. In the first quarter of 1998, Exchange Server gained 3.05 million new seats compared with 2.7 million new seats for Lotus Notes.
Exchange Server's stunning first quarter is only one trend in a complex industry shift that might whisk Microsoft to the top of the enterprise messaging heap. Another trend is third-party vendors are using Exchange Server rather than Lotus Notes in their products. For example, AT&T offshoot Lucent Technologies is now pushing a combined messaging and telephony platform that uses Exchange Server as the underlying engine. With the platform, remote users can use the telephone to access their voicemail, email, and fax service. The platform is based on Octel Unified Messenger for Exchange, which Lucent acquired as part of its purchase of Octel in September 1997.
Internally, Microsoft is making strides to further erode Lotus' market share. Microsoft's acquisition of the Mesa Group brings critical Notes-to-Exchange migration tools inhouse. These tools will likely ship free of charge as part of the future Exchange Server 5.5 Service Pack. This service pack will include additional workflow tools and connectivity utilities designed to bring Exchange on par with Lotus Notes in the document management space. For example, one important connectivity utility in the upcoming service pack is Legacy Connectors. With these extensions, Exchange Server can coexist with legacy IBM PROFs and SNA messaging platforms running on Digital Equipment Alpha servers. These new connectors will support x509 version 3 digital certificates and further legitimize Exchange Server's role as an enterprise messaging solution.
Although the signs look promising for Microsoft to rule the enterprise messaging mountain, it's too early for a coronation. Despite Microsoft's impressive gains, Notes still has an edge over Exchange Server in certain areas. For example, Lotus still reigns supreme in AS/400 and RS/6000 messaging platforms because of its affiliation with IBM.
Ironically, Microsoft's biggest challenge might come from within. Exchange Server 6.0 will reportedly require Active Directory (AD), a dependency that will later haunt Microsoft if Windows NT 5.0 is slow out of the gate.
Citrix Does Windows CE
When Citrix Systems announced that it was delivering a Windows Consumer Electronics (CE) version of its Independent Computing Architecture (ICA) client to OEMs, most journalists gave the announcement only passing mention. However, this development is significant because it signals a change in how this company is approaching its relationship with Microsoft.
By targeting Windows CE--and the many Windows terminal OEMs building for this platform--Citrix has upped the ante in its poker game with Microsoft. No longer content to pursue just the non-Windows client computing space, Citrix is going after the heart of a market that Microsoft is still trying to define: Windows CE-based terminals.
Citrix has never coveted Windows users, but its platform goals have never been short-sighted either. For years, the company has shipped both 16- and 32-bit Windows versions of its ICA client, along with DOS, OS/2, Macintosh, and UNIX clients. Even the Windows terminal market, which Microsoft defines as a Windows CE-based segment, has its roots in ICA. Citrix pioneered the idea of dedicated Windows-based terminal devices long before Microsoft showed an interest.
By extending its reach to include Windows CE, Citrix is guaranteeing a share of the Windows terminal market for itself and its vendors. Without this new development, Boundless, Wyse, NCD, and other vendors that designed legacy ICA devices for Citrix WinFrame stand to lose business as Microsoft shifts to the Remote Display Protocol (RDP) in its Windows-based Terminal Server. But with Citrix's development of a Windows CE client, these vendors can retain ICA connectivity and develop wares for Microsoft's RDP and Windows CE designs. This dual focus will likely result in dual-function RDP/ICA Windows terminals.
Although Citrix has shifted responsibility for the core MultiWin operating system (OS) extensions to Microsoft, Citrix still hopes to establish a market for its value-added solution, Citrix MetaFrame. MetaFrame builds on Terminal Server by adding client-session-configuration, load-balancing, and license-pooling capabilities. Citrix had stripped these capabilities from its WinFrame 2.0 project before shipping it to Microsoft. MetaFrame also reintroduces ICA to Terminal Server, so having an installed base of dual-function RDP/ICA terminals based on Windows CE gives Citrix an established client market in which to sell its value-added solution.
No doubt, Microsoft would prefer that Citrix left Windows alone, but Microsoft can do little to stop Citrix from targeting Windows users. Unlike RDP, which Citrix can apply only to Windows client platforms because of a joint licensing agreement between Microsoft and Citrix, Citrix can apply ICA on any platform because ICA is Citrix's proprietary protocol. And if Citrix's ICA-on-Windows CE announcement is any indication, Citrix intends to use this loophole to its advantage.
CA's New Partner Holds Some Weight
Get ready for a shake-up in the IS jungle. Microsoft's decision to include portions of Computer Associates' (CA's) Unicenter TNG Enterprise Systems Management (ESM) platform in Windows NT Server 5.0 will ruffle the feathers and bristle the fur of competitors.
According to Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, the new alliance will bring part of CA's ESM platform into the core NT 5.0 feature set. Specifically, Microsoft will license CA framework technology that runs over Microsoft's Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) architecture, adding true ESM capabilities to NT 5.0.
Most analysts are interpreting the alliance between CA and Microsoft as an endorsement of WBEM by CA. More important, the alliance is marking Microsoft's growing dominance in ESM circles, which is likely causing panic at CA's rival Tivoli. Until now, Tivoli has been the ESM market leader, a position obtained partly because of Tivoli's close relationship with Big Blue parent (and high-end platform provider), IBM. But the tables might turn--CA is partnering with its own 800-pound gorilla.
Tivoli isn't backing away with its tail between its legs. In response to this threat, Tivoli announced its new NT 5.0 initiatives, which include shipping NT 5.0 Tivoli-ready. Beginning with beta 2, NT 5.0 will include the WBEM-based Tivoli Management Agent. NT 5.0's inclusion of Tivoli Management Agent isn't as noteworthy as its inclusion of a complete Unicenter TNG implementation, but Tivoli Management Agent 's presence means Tivoli Management Environment (TME) customers will be able to immediately plug NT 5.0 systems into their existing TME framework.
Although CA might gain market share because of its new heavyweight partner, the real winner in the alliance is Microsoft. With both CA and Tivoli producing WBEM-based agents and with CA framework technology WBEM-enabled, Microsoft has successfully used the lure of NT 5.0 to further consolidate ESM standards.
ACPI Vendors Feel the Heat—Again
It looks like the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) consortium is in trouble again. Already feeling the heat for failing to provide a seamless upgrade path for legacy Advanced Power Management (APM) users, the ACPI consortium must now deal with complaints that the new ACPI standard isn't performing as well as expected.
According to notebook vendors that have embraced the standard, ACPI isn't delivering the battery life that most ACPI advocates expected. Some ACPI-based systems are performing the same as or even worse than equivalent systems based on the APM architecture.
APM, the well-established standard used in most of the previous-generation notebooks, is BIOS-based. In contrast, ACPI notebooks implement the standard at the chipset level and control it through a combination of operating system (OS) commands and application functions. Supposedly, the result is more efficient power management because the OS progressively tunes power consumption at the Registry level. However, such an integrated model requires the cooperation of both applications and the OS--and right now, the only ACPI-compliant OS on the market is Windows 98. Windows NT won't gain ACPI support until version 5.0 ships next year. Even then, the results will likely be less than stellar because most software developers have traditionally been slow to code for specific hardware scenarios. A good example is Plug and Play (PnP). Several years passed before developers began coding the various hardware change contingencies in Windows 95. ACPI requires a similar coding if ACPI is to succeed under both NT and Win98.
At least one major vendor, Gateway 2000, is already backing away from ACPI as a result of the platform's shortcomings. Bob Moore, senior marketing manager of mobile systems at Gateway 2000, said the company was not finding any increase in battery life over APM. "Battery life is a very sensitive \[buying\] threshold," said Moore, who indicated that the company will not switch from APM to ACPI. "If I knew that it was picking up 15 percent to 20 percent, it would be different."
NT users can look forward to an all-or-nothing relationship with ACPI. For reasons that continue to defy logic, Microsoft has chosen not to support APM in NT 5.0. Thus, customers who have legacy APM-based notebooks will still need to look to third parties such as Softex and SystemSoft for power management capabilities. Even worse, Microsoft has tied PnP (especially as it relates to hot-docking of notebooks and similar functions) to NT 5.0's ACPI support.
Service Pack 4 Arrives Early
Most Windows NT administrators have three items on their wish list: state-of-the-art device drivers, PCs that never fail, and service packs that ship on time and are constructive rather than destructive in their NT systems. Microsoft took an important step in addressing the last wish with the early release of the much anticipated Service Pack 4 (SP4) for NT Server 4.0 and NT Workstation 4.0.
To the surprise of many, SP4 not only fixes numerous bugs, but provides much needed enhancements in the form of tools and capabilities that weren't expected until NT 5.0. Given the breadth of these enhancements, SP4 is more like a point upgrade than a true service pack. Microsoft didn't initially intend to make SP4 such an ambitious update, but with NT 5.0's shipping date continuing to slip, Microsoft apparently felt it necessary to shore up the current platform in anticipation of the long wait.
Some NT customers will be delighted by Microsoft's ambitiousness. The infusion of new features will be music to the ears of NT customers frustrated by too many security interfaces and not enough manageability.
Customers concerned with security interfaces will be pleased with SP4's new Security Configuration Editor, a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in that provides a centralized interface for all aspects of NT security, from user and group accounts to file- and share-level access control lists (ACLs). With SCE, customers will no longer have to hunt around for the right dialog box to secure a server.
Customers concerned with manageability will be pleased that SP4 includes Microsoft's first implementation of the Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) architecture under Windows NT. (For more information of WBEM, see the news story "CA's New Partner Holds Some Weight," page 38.)
Developers concerned with manageability will also be pleased SP4 provides support for distributed component object model (DCOM)-over-HTTP and the Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP).
SP4 includes other programmatic and network configuration enhancements. For example, SP4 provides Microsoft's official Year-2000 fixes, Telephone API (TAPI) 2.1 support, an update to File and Print Services for NetWare (FPNW), and several new accessibility options.
SP4 includes all previous service pack fixes and the previous updates for the NT 4.0 Option Pack and Internet Explorer (IE) 4.01. Together, these files constitute a hefty package. SP3, which was a far less ambitious update than SP4, topped out at more than 18MB, so you will be better off using the CD-ROM version of SP4 rather than trying to download it.
The breadth of the changes involved--several million lines of new code in the enhancements alone--begs the question of whether Microsoft should be including such enhancements in a service pack. This question will be on the minds of many veteran customers who have been eagerly waiting for SP4's incremental hotfixes to the main NT 4.0 code base, but have no need for its incremental enhancements. With SP4, as with all of Microsoft's service packs, these customers will get the whole package, whether they like it or not. This forced feeding is enough to steam even the coolest customers. (For more on NT 4.0 enhancements and how Microsoft might disseminate them, see Mark Minasi, "NT 4.9," June 1998.)
Perhaps the time has come for Microsoft to re-evaluate the service pack program. Microsoft already has a valid medium for disseminating incremental enhancements: option packs. They do what service packs can't: give customers a choice.
Danger, Will Gates, Danger!
The development teams for Microsoft's Office 9x and Internet Explorer (IE) 5.0 are charting new territory--and therein lies a danger. Although the teams' changes to their respective products promise to significantly and positively affect the user community, the internal platform and product inbreeding needed to implement the changes might put Microsoft in hotter water with the US Department of Justice (DOJ).
Changes to IE 5.0's browser platform will be the most controversial. The browser platform will exist as a series of distinct component object model (COM) objects that customers can download and assemble as needed. Microsoft will no longer force Windows users to download the entire IE platform to gain access to the Web browser. More important, developers will be able to leverage specific portions of the platform, such as the rendering engine or search function, without having to include unrelated components. Why include a 4MB Java Virtual Machine (JVM), when all you need is the HTML rendering code?
Outlook 98 is one of the first products to include leveraged code. Microsoft's latest incarnation of Outlook's notoriously quirky messaging client and personal information manager (PIM) makes good use of IE's rendering engine. Developers used the rendering engine to construct the Outlook Today summary page.
However, this internal platform and product inbreeding will further heat the Microsoft and DOJ legal debate. If the DOJ decides against Microsoft, the decision will likely affect the entire company because of the proliferation of IE. Simply put, an unfavorable decision will derail many seemingly unrelated projects that depend on IE.
A good example is Office 9x, the industry standard for application suites. The development team is reportedly leveraging the IE rendering engine in Office 9x, obscuring the distinction between browser and operating system (OS). According to Microsoft, Office 9x will now be equally at home in an Internet environment and a traditional LAN environment. With the suite's new Web-oriented capabilities, such as native file format support for HTML and Extensible Markup Language (XML), users will be able to edit Web-hosted HTML and XML documents from within the IE browser interface. And the suite's ability to save files to any FrontPage-enabled Web site might spell the end of file servers as we know them.
However, the most important change in Office 9x doesn't concern the Web but rather modularization. The development team is designing this version to run on several platforms, from a full-blown Pentium II PC to a low-footprint Windows-based Terminal Server session. That improvement will likely make the user community happy.
Xeon, Warrior CPU
No, Xeon does not refer to the heroine fighting evil villains on your TV set. Nor does it refer to the inert gas that helps light up the signs in storefront windows. Xeon refers to Intel's Xeon CPU architecture, which will become an integral component in Windows NT-oriented symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) boxes from Compaq and others.
A server-centric version of the Pentium II CPU, the Xeon-based system will feature a full-speed backside bus and up to 2MB of Level 2 cache. The Xeon CPU architecture will connect to the system through the same 100MHz system bus that first appeared in 350MHz and 400MHz Deschutes-based PCs earlier this year, albeit via a more robust connector (i.e., Slot 2).
To accelerate adoption of Xeon (and the phasing out of Pentium Pro), Intel will slowly release a range of home-grown system board configurations that will serve as the basis for new servers. For example, Intel's low-end Nightshade platform, which is based on the 440BX chipset, will include two Xeon processors and support up to 1GB of RAM. In the third quarter, Intel plans to deliver a 4-way Xeon platform based on the forthcoming 440NX chipset. This new board will support up to 8GB of RAM and will feature hot-plug PCI connectors. Finally, Intel plans to deliver its Saber 8-way platform in the fourth quarter. This platform will be the first implementation of the Profusion SMP technology Intel acquired from Corollary late last year. Although Corollary originally designed Profusion as a Pentium Pro solution, Intel decided to forgo the aging chip's transition problems in favor of a Xeon-based design. Given the challenge Axil Computer and its OEMs faced in migrating customers off Pentium Pro, Corollary's decision is a smart one.
How fast will Xeon-based servers be? No benchmark numbers are available yet, but most experts agree that a performance boost of 50 percent or more over similarly equipped Pentium Pro SMP boxes is a reasonable projection. Unlike earlier Pentium II processors, Xeon doesn't suffer from a half-speed Level 2 cache. Like the Pentium Pro's interface into cache memory, Xeon's interface runs at the same speed as the processor's internal clock. If you factor in the higher internal frequency and the 100MHz system bus (which should help compensate for the added overhead of a 4-way 400MHz configuration), the performance increase will likely be phenomenal.
Corrections to this Article:- "King of the Enterprise Messaging Mountain" contained several errors. Specifically, Service Pack 1 (SP1) does not include the connectors for legacy IBM systems. Microsoft included the connectors in Exchange Server 5.5. SP1 includes Alpha versions of the connectors, but Alpha systems could already use the connectors via intermediate Intel servers. The connectors do not support X.509 V3 certificates. "Service Pack 4 Arrives Early" incorrectly reported that Microsoft was releasing SP4 for Windows NT Server and NT Workstation. As a result of delays to NT 5.0 beta 2, Microsoft indefinitely postponed the release of SP4 for NT 4.0. According to Microsoft officials, the company originally planned to release SP4 after NT 5.0 beta 2. But Microsoft pushed back the release of beta 2, leaving SP4 in a state of limbo. For updates about the status of SP4, visit Windows NT Magazine's Web site (http://www.winntmag.com).
