Microsoft Talks Up Realtime Communications Generalities, TCO Focus

For example, there was no new information about the availability of promised realtime collaboration capabilities that will eventually be part of the Windows .Net server.

The goal is to offer corporations secure, archivable and auditable realtime capabilities. Current instant messaging products from America Online, Microsoft and Yahoo are wildly popular but also easily hacked, observers said.

Paul Flessner, senior vice president of .Net Enterprise Servers, speaking at MEC 2002 Tuesday, estimated that 30 percent of businesses now use some form of insecure instant messaging capability. Others think that number is on the low side.

Microsoft refers to these realtime collaborative capabilities, including instant messaging and team room capabilities, collectively as Greenwich. Flessner said only they will be "tightly integrated into the platform" but no time-frame was given.

Other Microsoft officials said to expect them to be made available via a download sometime after .Net Server itself ships.

Greenwich represents a "holistic view of realtime collaboration," and is a list of what needs to be done to make such features suitable for enterprise use, said Harley Sitner, lead product manager for Enterprise Communications for Microsoft.

As a gauge of partner and customer interest in RTC, Tuesday afternoon's conference session was sold out, with many attendees turned away from the door.

Currently, IBM's Lotus Software group offers what it calls enterprise-class instant messaging in Sametime and additional collaboration capabilities in QuickPlace. New versions of both shipped last week. Third parties, such as IM Logic and FacePoint Communications offer products to bolster security and archiving in existing instant messaging products.

Microsoft's worldview is that much of this capability must ship with the infrastructure, i.e., the operating system.

Cutting total cost of ownership (TCO) was a recurring theme and one that resonated with at least some conference attendees. Flessner stressed that the upcoming Windows .Net Server operating system will solve common IT woes and cut costs.

The operating systems bolstered group policy management will let administrators better lock-down desktops. There will be 160 new settings for such lock-downs, Flessner said Tuesday morning.

In addition, an improved Windows System Resource Manager will let administrators allocate CPU and memory usage by application and "fence off" runaway applications, should they need to do so. They can also schedule more resources for certain tasks by time of day--a talent that will be increasingly important as more large symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) configurations come online, Flessner said.

That TCO message resonated with some in the audience. Ron Barrett, an IT manager at Cubic, said he was more interested in hearing about cutting costs than in the latest-and-greatest features of any given product.

But the demos that got the loudest receptions were far more mundane. The new spell-check feature in the upcoming Outlook Web Access (OWA) probably drew the loudest applause, for example. OWA will also support "tasks" so users on the Web can access and manage their to-do lists.

The new OWA, full Outlook 11 mail client and "Titanium" version of Exchange Server are due next year.