The Service Platform

The Consumer web (Web 2.0) and the enterprise Web (SOA) both have value and applicability, the consumer web where responsiveness and scale are important the enterprise web where security and integrity are paramount. It is highly unlikely that organizations will either replace all their present systems or find the security and data integrity available in the consumer world to be appropriate to business critical information but they will want to take advantage of the Web 2.0 levels of responsiveness and flexibility. Organizations will add service support to their present server software based IT systems and use supplied services from SaaS based Web 2.0 systems to create a melded software and services approach loosely connected with a Service Oriented message passing system. This will allow organizations to ensure the appropriate levels of data security, availability, responsiveness and flexibility to their organization, their partners and their customers.

In this joint SOA and Web 2.0, or software and services world, services will be supplied from service suppliers and / or enterprises and will be composited into new services or be mashed up on the device to produce secure, flexible and adaptable systems. So for example an Enterprise search system could include internet search from a SaaS provider, a internal search system running on an organizations servers and a local search on individual devices to provide a composite search experience.

Microsoft strongly believes that a "one size fits all" approach will not be appropriate for the organization of the future and the enterprise will include individual device, server and SaaS supplied services in a client server service configuration running both server software and Software as a Service to provide a complete service platform.

On top of this service platform there are a number of cross platform functions that are required such as identity and relationship management, search and discovery services, communication and collaboration services and content creation and management services. These provide user, consumer, partner and enterprise support across the complete Software + Services or Services platform layer for areas such as search, email, messenger, blogging and wikis. These cross service platform functions build a federated infrastructure layer across the organizationally distributed services platform and use one another to provide a complete service platform.

Relationship and Reputation (RR)

This is in many ways the underlying layer for the other elements of the Service Platform and provides all the security and governance support for those layers. It has multiple layers starting at the bottom with federated logon and single sign on support and identity and access control The R&R layer also supports the concepts of relationships with other individuals and systems and the roles played by these. Finally a trust and reputation layer  exists on top of the identity and relationship layer to provide levels of trust and reputation by role and individual which includes support for ranking and rating.

Participative Content (PC)

The content is the output from the burgeoning creativity that is occurring on the web either in terms of implicit or tacit content such as relationship information, attention information, page ranking information and usage information or explicit content such as geographic, audio, video or movie information.

Search and Discovery (SD)

Discovery is about finding things. Clearly search based on implicit information is well understood but in addition tagging systems,  favorites and bookmarks, preference capture and customization, location and presence based systems are all very important.

Communication and Collaboration (CC)

Unified communication supports all types of communication from real time such as instant messenger, chat, VOIP and video messaging  / conferencing to email. Collaboration provides the social networking systems such as bots, blogs, Wiki's, newsgroups, discussion groups etc.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Starting with this post I'd like to delve a little deeper into the ideas I first started discussing in