27-05-2003 - IT Zone guide to .NET
The .NET phenomenon demonstrates the power of Microsoft marketing. The company created the .NET brand to carry forward its vision for a new technology generation, but in the process created expectations that have yet to be fulfilled.

This article sets out to pin down the elements that make up .NET and explain how it is likely to affect financial software applications in the future.

A good place to start is within Microsoft's own specialist wing, where Microsoft Business Solutions UK managing director Simon Edwards likens the impact of .NET to the Plug & Play feature introduced in Windows 95 that allowed the operating system to recognise and configure drivers for new devices that were attached to the PC.

".NET is effectively a similar set of integration tools that allow you to plug and play Web services and applications," said Edwards. .NET is more complex than .NET, he admits, and at this point in development it still requires a leap of faith to appreciate its significance.

To make the concept more tangible, he harkens back to an earlier episode in technological history, when motor cars first appeared. "In the early days there were different kinds of tyres, engines, fuels and so on. The industry moved on from its pioneering period once it established industry standards. In software, we've reached the point where someone like Ford or General Motors needs to come along and invent mass production.

" Microsoft Business Solutions is a vitally important proving ground for Microsoft's long-term vision of a "connected economy". Having acquired five separate application software families, it has laid out a product roadmap that will take those products forward to a new generation product based on .NET. The specialist application wing is something of a proving ground, with projects under way to integrate its software with other Microsoft products such as Office 2003 and a variety of external Web services and applications.

"We'll get as much of the new thinking as we can into existing and intermediate products as they roll off the production line, so people can see where we're going." - Simon Edwards, Microsoft Business Solutions, May 2003

To give an idea of the activities that the .NET architecture will allow users to carry out, Microsoft Business Solutions cited a number of current and planned developments, including :
· Currency exchange rates automatically downloaded from a website into your financial application
· Project resources created in a professional services automation application exported to Microsoft Project.
· Contact details from your Outlook address book picked up and applied within the new Microsoft CRM application - and vice versa.
· Importing outsourced telesales data into Microsoft CRM
· Automated credit checking
· Self-service human resource functions
· A new Business Portal to organise application components from different developers and Web-based information sources on the individual user's desktop.

While all this work is going on, MBS will also be working on a NET-based "next generation" financial suite to unify its acquired product families (Great Plains, Navision, Axapta, Solomon and FRx). During the intermediate period, each of these products will be supported and enhanced, Edwards said. Horizontal products such as customer relationship management, HR and financial reporting tools will be added that work across the families and allow users to take advantage of .NET functionality.

But to play down the rapidly expanding expectations, Edwards warns that the transition could take three to five years.

"We’re writing a new solution," he said. "There comes a time with any software suite where you have to do that. You can't just keep on tinkering with code that was written five to eight years ago. You've got to bite the bullet.

".NET is a great set of development tools that make different Web services work together. " - Mike Evans, Practice Engine, April 2003

The .NET technology stack
Andy Smith, product unit manager for global development/localisation within Microsoft Business Solutions, said one of the application wing's jobs was to demystify .NET. ".NET is a strategy for Web services with XML, the Business Frame work and the tools that come with it," he explained.

While Edwards set out the big picture, but AccoutingWEB is indebted to Smith for helping out with explanations of the bits and pieces of the .NET "technology stack". There are a lot of different layers within Microsoft's business application model, and it may help to understand the overall concept by defining the different components that go into it.

.NET programmimg tools
One of Microsoft's secret weapons in moving forward .NET is a powerful toolkit that makes it fast and easy to develop .NET-compatible code. These are the tools Microsoft uses internally and are based around the Visual Basic Studio, the C# programming language and… etc)

Business Framework
One layer up from the .NET foundation is a new software application framework. Rather than relying on "middleware" to configure software systems to work together, the Microsoft Business Framework is a set of published application programming interfaces into which developers can plug different accounting software and database functions. The framework is what will enable the different Microsoft Business Solution families to interoperate alongside third party programs.

Business application components
Microsoft is building its Next Generation software family around generic modules for nominal/general ledger functions, accounts receivable, accounts payable, purchase and sales order processing and so on. Its ultimate ambition is to provide these components as building blocks that other software users can build into more specialised vertical-market applications.

Business Portal
Launched in the spring of 2003 in the US, the Business Portal is described by Microsoft as the "public face of the Business Framework". The portal points the way to how Web services will appear on your PC desktop in the years to come. Depending on your role within the organisation, the portal will present you with a view of the applications and Web services you need to do your job. The salesperson could access the sales order module of the company's Navision application from within the forthcoming Microsoft CRM program, which itself will rely heavily on the Outlook interface and data-entry functions. All of these components could be presented on the desktop alongside industry news feeds and directories (useful for prospecting) and credit rating data.

".NET is a marketing concept and always has been. Primarily, it is about using XML as a means of communication - a standard data label that means people can combine services over the Web." - Jeremy Rihll, Digita, January 2003

Key .NET Standards

XML The eXtensible Mark-up Language does not belong to Microsoft, but has been embraced as the medium that will make .NET possible. Where HTML describes the text, graphics and hyperlinks on a Web page, XML applies descriptive data, so that an XML reader or computer program can recognise information such as or . A very simple concept, and potentially extremely powerful as early XML pilot projects have shown.

SOAP - One step up from XML is SOAP. Short for the Simple Object Application Protocol, it is a standard for describing the format in which messages will be passed between application programs. A SOAP message wraps an envelope around the XML message to identify where it has come from and to describe how the recipient program should treat the data it contains. The Web service would verify the message, check to see that all the parts are there and match its expectations, then process the request or return an error message. If you are keen to learn more about XML message mechanics, there is also an Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) to flag up that an incoming message is a SOAP object or some other Internet message such as an HTTP request or MIME-encoded message.

UDDI The Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration language is a standard to catalogue what Web services are on a website or intranet and to show where they are. Software developers can interrogate UDDI files to find programs they can link to or reuse in new applications. All the information needed to link into a Web service should be available as a UDDI description.

"It will be a catalyst for change and deliver things like platform independence that the software industry has been seeking for years. We will be able to focus on the big ticket functions within our accounting program, but .NET will allow resellers and others to build in their own vertical applications." - Eduardo Liogorri, Exchequer Software, January 2003

How will .NET and the Business Framework change financial software?

With its "next generation" .NET financial application, Microsoft Business Solutions is planning to capture a significant chunk of the financial software landscape. By providing core components for nominal ledgers, sales and purchase orders and the like, it is planning to relieve rival software developers such as Sage, Exchequer, Access and the like from the bother of having to develop their own ledgers.

Access managing director Alistair O'Reilly is a long-time Microsoft partner and offered the following analysis: "If Microsoft is successful, it will mean the end of the packaged financial software industry. The Next Generation family will be a series of tools that enable people like us to base our products around its foundations. IF they're successful, Access and our resellers will add specialist functionality to meet the needs of our users - and Microsoft will get a chunk of every product we sell.

" While acknowledging the potential end of the program he helped to build from scratch, O'Reilly still sees .NET as a "huge opportunity for growth".

Over at Microsoft Business Solutions, David Langridge's job is to support third party developers such as Access. He amplifies the message: He explained that roughly 30% of financial software R&D is duplication of effort with companies all developing their own ledgers and order processing systems. Rival suppliers can choose to continue building their own components, but he explains that .NET will allow them to link into the Microsoft Business Framework at any point of the technology stack.

Not only are many companies wasting some of their effort, Microsoft has identified that the major portion of software suppliers' revenues come from the applications and consultancy they provide to customise financial software and ERP systems for their clients.

".NET is good technology, but it needs partners to build on top of it to prove it out," said Langridge.