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October 25, 1999

Digital Dashboard Offers Little Light
Microsoft promises to improve productivity by blending Office and Outlook data into a single interface. The idea is strong, but the strategy raises many questions, making waiting for Exchange 2000 a better alternative.

By Steve Gillmor Jeff Angus

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o hear Microsoft talk about its Digital Dashboard, you'd think it was the Holy Grail of knowledge management. Based on a combination of Office 2000 and Exchange's Outlook E-mail client, Digital Dashboard promises to consolidate personal, team, company, and external information in an intuitive desktop interface. To be sure, it's a powerful idea: Blend Office 2000's Web-enabled toolset with Back Office 4.5's SQL Server 7.0, Exchange Server 5.5, and Internet Information Server 4.0. But, like many other high-tech initiatives, once you take a closer look, the reality isn't nearly as attractive as its marketing.

Digital Dashboard's design seems like a life-enhancing idea. It puts on your screen a complete ragout of your immediate business needs, your project to-do list, your fresh E-mail, and access to your most-urgent documents. It rolls in your personal passions, from a real-time stock ticker to breaking news. And for staying on top of whatever you most fear your boss will surprise you with, you'll find sales charts dynamically generated from back-end data sources, plus a series of buttons that drill down to business public folders serving PowerPoint reports, Excel spreadsheets, and links to Web resources. Digital Dashboard neatly aggregates this content within Office's Outlook client on its Outlook Today page, or alternatively via Outlook 2000's folder home-pages technology.

This is the latest float in a parade of integration schemes rolled out by Microsoft, a company long on technical implementation and not so long in concerns for what people actually do with the stuff once it's sold. Far more than most products, this one promises to improve productivity by giving people the applications and data they need without a lot of extraneous information. A presentation that rolls this core in a simplified, targeted interface is a good thing. If measured as a concept, Digital Dashboard, as a single console on the user's world, can be measured only as a great (if not original) accomplishment.

But Microsoft's latest integration strategy raises more questions than it answers. For one thing, Digital Dashboard is a glitzy front end to a patchwork quilt of services soon to be bulldozed under with the release of Windows 2000. Therefore, IT shops face some subtle choices in adopting this first cut of the Digital Dashboard. From security concerns to user customizability to diversion of limited development resources, there is a glut of worrisome questions for Microsoft shops that plan to implement Exchange 2000. If that wasn't enough, Digital Dashboard was built on top of Outlook 2000, an interface that requires a sizeable investment in training for users to become productive. A good Digital Dashboard might ameliorate some of Outlook's excesses, but a merely adequate one will exacerbate them.

Looming just over the Windows 2000 horizon is Microsoft's powerful Exchange 2000 Server, due for a soon-to-follow release. The long-awaited update introduces a number of sweeping architectural changes. Most important is the URL-addressable Web Store and Active Desktop Object/OLE DB access to Exchange data. This will let users access Exchange data with rich fidelity from Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5 browser or via earlier browsers with less-complete, but usable, feature sets.

The upcoming Exchange 2000's Outlook Web Access leverages Internet Explorer 5's Dynamic HTML behaviors, Extensible Markup Language (XML), and Extensible Style Sheet Language (XSL) to store and retrieve messages, calendar items, and contacts from the Web Store. Where Exchange 2000 changes the rules to revolutionary effect is by storing this data with the documents and applications that used to be stored in the file system, Access, or SQL Server. This makes possible the complex types of collaborative applications that used to be the sole preserve of Lotus' Domino/Notes groupware platform.

Microsoft has leveled the collaboration platform playing field. But what happens today, as companies grapple with the Internet's increasingly dominant grip on the economy, the media, and the business decision-making process? Microsoft may know where it wants to go, but does Digital Dashboard represent more than just a placeholder to buy time until Y2K becomes Windows 2000?

Microsoft has released the Digital Dashboard Starter Kit for free download on the Web or via CD-ROM. The kit provides documentation, ActiveX controls, and sample code along with an assortment of customizable Dashboards built with FrontPage 2000 and Visual InterDev 6. These include a basic personal template; rough-hewn industry Dashboards for insurance, manufacturing, and health care; and Dashboards segmented for sales and finance departments. It's unlikely that any company will use the provided Dashboards as is. Rather than the sort of template that requires the usual level of customization, these Dashboards are more like a halfway solution that shows some solid thinking and execution, and provides a pattern most customizing users should follow.

Each Digital Dashboard is composed of information nuggets-filtered and dynamic data that can be rendered through a combination of ActiveX controls, Active Server Pages, and XML data feeds. Each nugget window can be "rolled up" by clicking a show-hide button, letting multiple streams of information share screen space. The Starter Kit includes the Outlook View Control, which exposes the full Outlook object model to programmatic access via HTML scripting.

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