Announcements from Microsoft last week were designed to further consolidate its market presence at every level of client-server. The newly unveiled XDocs technology, combined with Office 11, will tighten the company's grip on corporate desktops, while the planned combination of its e-commerce, content management and BizTalk server products into a single platform codenamed Jupiter will create a formidable e-business server offering.
But Microsoft is not yet home and dry in its efforts to survive and prosper in the transition to Web services architectures. Even leaving aside the challenge of turning these concept designs into working, shippable products, Microsoft still faces a stiff challenge from the Linux camp — especially since its strategy has overlooked an unguarded flank where it remains particularly vulnerable to attack, as I explain below.
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XDocs Marks the Spot
By far the most creative of last week's announcements is XDocs (see Microsoft Shows Off New Office XML Tool). This is being billed as a forms-creation tool, but a more accurate description would be to call it an application development tool for information workers. What XDocs does is much more revolutionary than merely creating electronic versions of paper-based forms to be filled in on-screen. The important technology of XDocs isn't on the screen, it's what happens behind it. Building a form in XDocs automatically creates an XML-based query and database structure. Users can build forms that read in data from remote databases, or which collect data that can be saved to a database or passed on to other forms and applications for further processing.
When I saw XDocs, I immediately thought of two other technologies that have impressed me recently. One is Macromedia's MX architecture, which makes it easy for developers to create user-friendly complex forms that connect to remote data sources. The other is the connectable modules developed by U.K.-based ASP Xara Online, which allows nontechnical users to construct complex forms, reports and applications using a completely visual interface. But while MX has the back-end connectivity and Xara has the ease-of-use, neither has the promised end-to-end elegance of XDocs, which of course will come conveniently packaged in the familiar Office user interface.
Jupiter is notable for unifying the backend servers into which the Office 11 suite of applications — XDocs included — will link (see Microsoft Unveils E-Business Game Plan). Microsoft is very astute in bringing together three separate products to form this single platform. Whereas previously the activities of e-commerce, content management and B2B integration were treated as separate technology propositions, Web services architectures allow all these components to become part of a single business automation infrastructure, co-ordinated by emerging business process technologies such as the joint Microsoft-IBM specification BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services).
Office at the Center
Jupiter will have a particularly strong appeal to enterprises that want to seize the emerging trend towards giving business managers more direct control over IT automation of business processes within their organizations. Its emphasis on defining, managing and analyzing business processes, rather than the underlying application technologies, could substantially tighten Microsoft's already strong grip on the mid-tier server market within the enterprise.
Meanwhile, XDocs, along with other XML-based technologies to be introduced in Office 11, will do much to maintain and even strengthen the loyalty of the Office user base. The cleverest part of it is allowing users to access network data and resources from within the Office environment, thus keeping them away from the more open Web browser environment, where potential competitors lurk.
The strategy would be foolproof were it not for the gaping flaw at its heart. Microsoft has mounted a sterling defense of its dominance of the enterprise desktop, and it has marshalled its forces convincingly to extend its presence among enterprise servers. Any challenge from the open-source Linux camp has little hope of making a dent on either of these redoubts. But that is not where the threat from Linux lies. In securing its position within the enterprise, Microsoft has all but surrendered the one territory that really matters — the hosted server.
Using tools and services that run on hosted servers, many business users are already discovering the flexible automation potential of form-driven, XML-based systems based on cheap, reliable open source platforms. Even shared servers, once seen as the poor relation of the hosting scene, have had their reliability and scalability boosted by the introduction of virtual hosting systems from vendors such as Sphera and hosting provider Interland's blueHALO system (see Interland Ups the Ante on Shared Hosting).
Has Microsoft Overlooked Something?
Microsoft may be tightening its grip on enterprise computing, but all those efforts will be for naught if business users find that shared hosting provides more flexible, cost-effective access to the productivity and automation tools they need for their day-to-day work. You may think my idea sounds a bit far-fetched, but there was a time when people said much the same thing about the PC as a platform for business computing. Most of the companies that overlooked the threat posed by the PC are no longer with us today. Maybe shared hosting is the one threat to its market dominance that Microsoft has overlooked.
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