Microsoft's other big code-named project is "Greenwich", through which the company hopes to deliver corporate-class communication, such as instant messaging. The software titan is positioning Greenwich as a real-time communications and collaboration platform around which third-party developers and big businesses can create more sophisticated messaging, videoconferencing and Internet-based communications applications. Greenwich is supposed to be integrated into Windows .Net Server 2003, which Microsoft is expected to formally launch early next year. Greenwich won't come until much later. "Think of this as a feature of .Net Server that didn't make the ship schedule," said Katie Hunter, Greenwich product manager. "It will be delivered a little bit later, probably two quarters following." Microsoft expects to deliver instant messaging first and build on other communications technologies later. "At the infrastructure level we have things making sure that the interaction of the communications can be secure," unlike typical consumer IM, Hunter said. "So the IM you and I would have would be encrypted, very easily managed and conversations are logged and audible." Microsoft has been pushing instant messaging for the corporate market since the company incorporated the technology into Windows XP. Dubbed Windows Messenger, the product delivers instant messaging over the Internet using Microsoft .Net servers or over corporate Intranets via Exchange Server. Bob O'Brien, group product manager of the Windows .Net Server division, said moving the capabilities to the operating system from Exchange is necessary to extend the messaging capabilities for businesses. "The path that we were on and the path most people in the industry are on today is more of a contained strategy," he said. "On Exchange you can do instant messaging within the firewall easily, but when you start to bridge that out beyond the firewall to connect businesses and people, that strategy is not as strong as it could be to corporate class." In a report issued last week, Gartner analyst Mark Rasinko wrote that "during 2003, discussions of IT-enabled business change will start to centre on the topic of time. A focus on time-based transformation will emerge because it meets the current needs for tight financial controls, clear justification of expenditure and transparent measures of value creation." He identified a number of technologies that would be important for what he described as the real-time enterprise (RTE). "Many more timesaving technologies are being added, such as wireless data access, Web services and instant messaging," he wrote. "RTE offers a framework for leveraging and exploiting technological possibilities."
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