The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department wanted its deputies to get out of their cars and interact directly with the community. But to do this effectively, officers would have to take their computers with them, and that meant building a mobile communications network.
So the department turned to Microsoft Corp.’s .NET framework to make information on its legacy databases available to the officers’ handheld computers.
“We’re moving officers out of the cars and back into the community, and so we’re trying to push the technology right out alongside them,” said Robert Schultz, technology manager for the sheriff’s department.
The department quickly learned that migrating duties from the patrol car’s laptop to the handheld device depended more on the right information technology infrastructure than on the specific device itself, Schultz said.
“We see handheld computers like the pagers and cell phones we have out there. Officers drop them in the gutter or damage them in a fight. New models come out. So we want to keep them on a browser base that’s not dependent on a single type of device,” Schultz said.
Platform interoperability is one of the benefits Microsoft touts with .NET, the company’s integrated open standards platform for making applications available over networks.
Using .NET, Microsoft developed for Sacramento a prototype browser-based system that runs on Pocket PCs, called eCOP. With limited bandwidth, eCOP sends officers information about recent dispatches and allows them to submit field identification data back to the station.
While eCOP awaits funding and another round of competitions for the pilot project, Microsoft clearly has tapped a growing market for Web services with .NET.
In fact, .NET is more than a new platform. It is a business strategy for the company itself. The Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft is wagering the software vendor industry will move to a Web-services model, and so this year, the company reorganized its internal structure to reflect .NET.
“We view .NET as a key technology provider for the next-generation Internet,” said Pat Arnold, director of technology for Microsoft Federal in Washington, D.C. “There are all sorts of opportunities for integrators and partners to build on .NET. The ability to have an application anytime, anywhere, anyplace is quite exceptional.”
The company’s fiscal 2001 10K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission stated that .NET is Microsoft’s “largest strategic initiative,” one that would subject the company to “more intense competition during the transition from the traditional core businesses.”
According to Whit Andrews, a research director for technology research company Gartner Inc., Stamford, Conn., “Microsoft seems to recognize that its own interest is tightly woven in the open Web services model.”
Andrews said there are no clear leaders yet in the Web services field. Microsoft has two main competitors. One is IBM Corp., Armonk, N.Y., which has “demonstrated substantial vision and intelligence in Web services and is executing quite nicely,” Andrews said. The other is Hewlett-Packard Co., Palo Alto, Calif., with its e-Speak open services software platform.
Thus far, customers remain wary of .NET, according to a May study from Forrester Research Inc., Cambridge, Mass., which found that many Microsoft organizational users aren’t ready to commit to .NET. Most cited that it is still too cutting edge. Two-thirds of those surveyed didn’t even know what it was.
Perhaps the recent releases of Windows XP and Windows 2000 will help bring recognition to the platform, since both operating systems are tuned for Web services and already benefit from .NET technologies.
Richard Warren, chief strategy officer for Internosis Inc., Arlington Va., an electronic business and knowledge management solutions provider, said .NET helped his company with 1,000-seat-plus deployments of XP. The .NET framework facilitates interoperability among Microsoft’s seat management tools, allowing XP to be provisioned and managed remotely with less manpower than previous versions of Windows.
Warren said other enterprise-geared software packages from Tivoli Systems Inc., Hewlett-Packard and Computer Associates International Inc. can be managed by .NET as well.
“Computer Associates has a strong partnership with Microsoft and we are committed to support .NET as well as open standards,” said John Pincomb, Computer Associates vice president for the electronic business platform solutions.
When asked about .NET’s advantages for integrators, solutions providers and their clients, Arnold pointed to scalability, ease of deployment and cost savings, the last factor coming from how .NET could extend the life span of legacy systems.
“Rather than rip out an old system and rewrite it, just expose it as a Web service with .NET,” Arnold said.
The Agriculture Department employed this approach for its Lighthouse portal, a pilot project undertaken with Microsoft and Compaq Computer Corp. of Houston. Using the Lighthouse Web site, farmers check weather reports and futures prices, map their fields, monitor their water efficiency and access other data and services, many of them drawn from legacy systems.
The scalability factor of .NET is being harnessed by at least one Microsoft partner to generate new business, namely Emerald Systems Inc., Spooner, Wis., a custom Internet software provider.
Emerald has already carved out a successful market tying together local and regional law enforcement systems.
The company was awarded contracts from Minnesota and Wisconsin to develop Internet-based integrated records management systems for juvenile services and law enforcement, respectively.
For these contracts, Emerald, partnering with Microsoft, developed a regional crime information system, a framework to allow real-time data sharing among about dozen agencies, such as police departments, federal agencies or neighboring counties.
According to Phil Brandsey, Emerald chief executive officer, Emerald will now use .NET to offer more complex systems integration. Emerald has created a product called the Web Index Server, which aggregates data from many regional crime information systems.
The Web Index Server would allow federal agencies to tap into the collected databases of local, county, regional and state crime information systems to gather data on possible suspects.
“One of the things we found out about law enforcement is that information in one system is intelligence to someone else,” Brandsey said.
Internosis’ Richard Warren said .NET facilitates quicker development times in his shop.
“We’re finding an incredible decrease in time needed to build Web-based applications,” Warren said. Web forms that took 16 hours to complete now take only two to three.
Another benefit for Internosis is how .NET allows components written in different languages to be assembled into a single project. Warren said this shifts the resource allocation focus from “How many of our Java developers can we get in one place?” to the much stronger position of “Who do we have available who is really good at doing this kind of thing?”
For Schultz of the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department, Web services — either .NET or another solution — is inevitable.
“When radios got small enough to fit in cars, police departments put radios in cars. When radios were small enough to put on officers, we put them on officers,” he said. “Now, we’re at the edge of technology where computers are small enough to be placed on officers. It is the wave of how things are going. It’s not just this year’s technology.”
