Professional SharePoint® 2007 Development

1.3. A Service-Oriented View of the Microsoft Application Platform

The Open Group is a consortium that mainly deals with open standards and interoperability among technologies that originated on UNIX or Linux systems, for example, LDAP. It does a good job of describing the standard services found in an application platform, and it is an interesting exercise to map the Open Group model to the Microsoft stack. According to the Open Group, an application platform consists of the following standard service categories: Data Interchange Services, Data Management Services, Graphics and Imaging Services, International Operation Services, Location and Directory Services, Network Services, Operating System Services, Software Engineering Services, Transaction Processing Services, User Interface Services, Security Services, and System and Network Management Services. Figure 1-2 shows both the Open Group Service Map (left) and the Microsoft Application Platform Service Map (right).

It is convenient to replace Graphics and Imaging Systems with the more general Media Services category. This new category then contains Graphics and Imaging Services, Animation Services, and Audio and Video Services. Also, Transaction Processing Services are omitted and described instead as a feature of Data Management Services.

In addition, the Open Group defines standard infrastructure applications, which are built on and extend the capabilities of the application platform. While the capabilities of infrastructure ...