Picture yourself in a lifeboat with your CEO and CTO, and you're the one they're relying on to chart a course toward your company's technological future. Well, the category of business applications is largely business as usual for 2002. E-mail, ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer-relationship management) vendors are working to ditch their reliance on fat clients by developing full-featured browser-based front ends. Collaboration tools, both real time and asynchronous, are big and will get even bigger because of tight travel budgets and lingering travel concerns. The line between real-time and asynchronous collaboration products is blurring as each camp adds features from the other.

The biggest issue surrounding business applications will be Web services. If you don't know what SOAP, UDDI, XML and WSDL stand for and you haven't been studying Microsoft's .Net and Sun Microsystems' Sun ONE strategies, read on. The future of business applications is Web services, and the survivors will be those who steer their companies deftly through these uncharted waters.

E-mail systems are still a critical part of a company's IT infrastructure, but they're already in place, so it's tough to get too excited about them. During 2002, the hot messaging products will continue to emphasize Web-based asynchronous and real-time collaboration capabilities. Collaboration products are on the same track as that of e-mail systems, which enjoy virtually universal implementation. Collaboration products will move from nice-to-have to must-have status.

The general trend toward Web-based application front ends continues at breakneck speed, creating a greater need for robust portal frameworks to pull things together. ERP vendors and CRM vendors are all firmly on board the Web-based express train. This is a great thing for administrators and users alike.

As long as applications are functional and secure, Web-based access to corporate information means that a user can get his or her work done wherever a browser is available. Administrators don't need to worry about distributing and maintaining fat-client software. The functionality of Web-based applications is good and getting better. Security will continue to be an issue, not so much between the browser and the Web application server but more because of a history replete with examples of server and service vulnerability.

Internet application-development environments are the prime movers behind the Web application trend. It's coming down to two offerings: Sun's Java and Microsoft .Net. Last year we said Java was the development language of choice. Now customized applications will be Java-based or .Net-based.

A single company tightly controls each of the options, but some of the key enabling technologies, like UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration), SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), WSDL (Web Services Description Language) and XML (Extensible Markup Language), are standards or on track to be standards. That's what gives us hope. The next couple of years could reveal a clear winner between the two environments.

No matter which one your company settles on, XML will provide the critical interprocess communication layer that ties your and other systems together. The language they're speaking will be immaterial.

Security concerns continue to plague Microsoft's Internet strategies. These concerns will slow acceptance among the Microsoft faithful and are bound to hurt broad acceptance of .Net as well. Our advice? Make sure your Windows servers are running what you think they're running -- and no more. Make sure Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Server) isn't installed on servers on which it isn't needed. Make sure you keep up to date with your OS and IIS patches.

Finally, use a firewall to close off access to all services, then open access on a case-by-case basis where needed. We followed this course of action for our public and production IIS servers in our lab during the Nimda and Code Red attacks and stayed virus-free throughout.

Companies To Watch Standards

Universal and reliable authentication and identity systems continue to lag behind and hinder the growth of Internet commerce. Sure, we can make do with our current system of sprinkling our individual user IDs and passwords around the Internet like confetti. How many different IDs and passwords are you tracking? Do you think all your access credentials are safe and secure? We think the system is a mess.

Microsoft is pushing a new service, Passport, to provide universal, interoperable single sign-on and authentication that rely on Kerberos tickets. Bob Muglia, group vice president of .Net services at Microsoft, says this model "bridges today's islands of authentication into a trusted network for users, Web site operators, wire-line and wireless carriers, and corporations that will unlock the power of Web services." We aren't holding our breath, but at least Microsoft is talking about a critical piece in a way that makes sense.