Just what is .NET?

Next-generation framework will let manufacturers conduct business without borders

If you’ve heard the term Microsoft .NET but you’re still not quite sure what it means, chances are you’re not alone.

As Microsoft continues to educate the IT and business community, users of business software applications should consider this: knowing how to define .NET is not as important as knowing what .NET can do for your business.

“From a business systems perspective, .NET enables unprecedented connectivity and flexibility,”says Mike Frichol, general manager of manufacturing at Microsoft Business Solutions. “Business users get easy access to a broad array of functionality across the entire business and that of their trading partners. They also have a wider variety of options for how they deploy that functionality and related business services.”

That is a major advantage for small- and medium-size manufacturers that are routinely forced to adapt to business processes - and sometimes even adopt new technology - in response to demand from the larger companies that comprise their customer base. For these companies, “having the ability to deal with multiple customers who want business done in multiple ways is critical,” Frichol says.

The need is not new. Consider the many small- and medium-size companies that lost business - or at the very least angered big customers - because they couldn’t afford to build separate networks to accommodate the exact manner in which each customer wanted to exchange electronic data interchange (EDI) documents.

A .NET-based computing infrastructure easily solves that problem, along with many others. The difficulty - for Microsoft as well as many industry experts - has been in explaining exactly how .NET solves contemporary business problems.

That difficulty stems from the nature of .NET, a very broadbased set of tools. The most significant include the following:

• Visual Studio .NET is the comprehensive tool set for rapidly building and integrating XML Web services, Microsoft Windowsbased applications, and Web solutions, including an objectoriented programming language called C# (pronounced c-sharp), to speed business value.

• NET Enterprise Servers are built to be the foundation of business applications, drive needed functionality into an organization, and consolidate disparate environments within a business.

Microsoft Business Solutions - like numerous independent software vendors - is using these tools to build its next-generation enterprise software suite. Building that suite in the .NET environment means that it will have numerous features that make it easier for manufacturers to conduct e-commerce. These features include some of the services to which Frichol referred, such as Web commerce engines, and programs that manage security functions like verifying users’ identities.

A system built in the .NET environment also would accommodate the use of Web services, which would be the primary source of the flexibility that Frichol spoke about. Web services essentially are software components that have been outfitted with specific communications protocols that allow them to pass information from one application to another over the Internet, without the need for a direct connection between the two systems, and without regard for which operating systems the applications run on.

These protocols are embedded within the .NET environment, which means that application developers, including Microsoft Business Solutions, can easily convert pieces of their applications to Web services. Developers will quickly see the benefits of this environment, bringing added value to their corporation much more quickly than ever before.

This would allow manufacturers to do such things as isolate specific bits of information that a customer wanted to see on a regular basis and have it automatically presented to that customer through a Web browser in exactly the format the customer desired. And what’s even better is that different pieces of information could be presented to different customers - in different formats - without resorting to major programming.

As Frichol says, such a system would “improve small- and medium-size manufacturers’ ability to work in the way in which their customers want them to. They can serve information to customers and suppliers in the way they want to see it.”

That solves the dilemma of responding to the unique demands of multiple customers from a single business system, and is just one of the many potential benefits that manufacturers can expect once .NET-based systems become more commonplace.

For more information on innovation from Microsoft Business Solutions,
go to www.microsoft.com/businesssolutions or call 1-888-477-7989 option 1

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