WinInsider

Microsoft signed a contract in June with Hewlett-Packard to provide technical support for 61,000 Microsoft employees in the use of the software maker's internal computer systems, the two companies said yesterday. Hewlett-Packard won the contract in a competition with Siemens Business Services Inc. of Redmond. HP won because it charged Microsoft less, said Joel Fleming, Siemens' senior director of services, in early April when the decision was made.

Historically immersed in a sea of proprietary APIs, Microsoft is in the midst of overhauling the Office code-base around XML to meet the interoperability demands of Web services and become the client window into its .Net strategy.But XML is a double-edged sword, promising Microsoft the riches of tight integration across its diverse product lines while simultaneously opening the door to competitive displacement.

The next generation Office 11, scheduled to ship in 2003, will leverage XML so that it runs on a diverse collection of client devices from Tablet PCs, to PDAs, notebooks, and PCs.These devices in turn will facilitate user collaboration courtesy of a single Microsoft data store, Yukon, that links .Net servers such as BizTalk and Exchange, and Microsoft applications such as Great Plains, Navision, and Visio.

The truth is, nobody knows when, how, or even if we will get from here to there. XML and .Net are really just code words for sets of best practices that will, we hope, create an environment in which the vision can be made real. It's useful to unpack these terms and list what those best practices are.

First, consider the engine at the core of .Net: the CLR (Common Language Runtime). Already deployed on servers, and coming soon to a desktop near you, CLR unifies the two great themes of modern software: objects and components. The ideas embodied in the CLR are so unstoppable that Microsoft's open-source competitors are rushing to embrace them.

The chassis of the vehicle powered by this engine is the .Net Framework. Its design goal, first stated by Microsoft architect Dave Stutz, was to capture a wide variety of best programming practices. A work in progress, the framework also wraps consistency around a welter of legacy APIs, first by consolidating interfaces to the servers (see "Road to managed code," Aug. 5, page 24), then by doing the same for the client.

The other day the company released some of its Windows source code, and shortly thereafter it promised to revamp its controversial Passport service. After years of stonewalling, has the granite face of the Redmond giant softened? The moves will be met with skepticism by people who dislike the company so much that they will condemn anything Bill Gates and Company do. The rest of us, however, are certain to be baffled by the company's latest decisions, and understandably so.

I asked Rob Helm of Directions on Microsoft, an independent research company dedicated to watching the software giant, what his take was on Passport. Mr. Helm said Microsoft had clearly failed to explain Passport effectively to Windows users.

Microsoft tried to reduce the heat from the Justice Department and federal regulators, but the company also has to light a fire of its own to get its most ambitious project off the ground. The software giant touted the ways it is complying with a November antitrust settlement during a conference call, but analysts say it is little more than Windows dressing. A Microsoft lawyer focused on four August milestones as part of Microsoft's compliance progress on the deal, which still awaits the approval of a federal judge.

In general, the settlement seeks to force Microsoft to treat PC makers and developers evenhandedly and disclose more of the underlying technology behind its software. However, critics charge that the company is using the settlement to raise prices.

Mobile phones with color screens and cameras are set to become star gadgets in the holiday shopping season, say U.S. industry analysts, mobile gear makers and the wireless service providers marketing them. With all of the top six U.S. mobile carriers ready to offer a range of new services over higher-speed voice and data networks, the second half of 2002 promises to be the first big retail season for Internet-friendly mobile devices. On Thursday, Sprint unveiled its long-awaited plans to offer customers the ability to easily check e-mail and surf the Web from their mobile phones, a move analysts said was likely to fire up a competitive battle in the U.S. wireless market.

As anyone who has used Microsoft Project 2000 knows, this project manager packs in its many tracking features and charting tools as if they were bread and batteries at hurricane time. But the new Microsoft Project 2002 addresses the issue of overload by adding wizards that guide you through every aspect of constructing a plan for a complex project, monitoring its progress, and finally reporting it.

Once I got my shipping copy of Microsoft Project Standard 2002 running (the install takes time), I appreciated how quickly I could set up a project plan and specify options. The program retains all of Project 2000's options and offers new Project Guide help tools.

Industry heavyweights Microsoft, IBM, and BEA Systems on Monday will unleash a trio of proposed Web services standards that address several unmet needs of the nascent services-oriented application model, according to sources. With these standards, the companies are looking to solidify workflow and business process execution as well as transaction integrity and coordination.

Primary among the new proposals is the awkwardly named BPEL4WS (business process execution language for Web services), which represents the marriage of two rival standards, WSFL (Web services flow language) from IBM and XLang from Microsoft. An executable language, BPEL4WS is designed to ensure that differing business processes can understand each other in a Web services environment.

Microsoft agreed on Thursday to submit to 20 years of U.S. government oversight of its online identity service in order to settle charges that it misled consumers about security and privacy standards. Microsoft's Passport service, which aims to make online shopping easier by storing passwords and credit-card numbers, came under scrutiny by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission last year after privacy groups said it would give the software giant unprecedented control over users' personal information.

A Microsoft official said there were "lessons that can be learned" from the FTC action and that the company would improve its description and disclosure of Passport's features.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has said that building the company's .Net software architecture is more difficult than "getting to the moon or designing the 747." But the company's massive initiative apparently faces an even tougher problem that has nothing to do with the technology itself: explaining the meaning of .Net to consumers, corporate executives and investors. "We still get people saying to us, 'What is .Net?'" Gates said at a conference held two weeks ago specifically to answer that question. "It's one of those great questions that people can say, 'Yes, it's come into focus at the infrastructure level,' but a little bit where we go beyond that has been unclear to people."