Microsoft shifts gears, but Cairo still no closer

Las Vegas

Microsoft has been talking about its Cairo operating system for so long, it seems like ancient history. And like history, many aspects of Cairo have been rewritten.

Microsoft has delayed Cairo re-peatedly and changed its definition several times, but that hasn't helped make Cairo less murky. And last week at NetWorld+Interop 96, company officials put another new face on the long-awaited technology and at the same time stretched the de-livery schedule out even further.

Cairo was originally supposed to be a follow-on to Windows NT 3.5, and based on the original schedule, it should be in broad deployment today. But the technology will not even enter beta testing until next year, Microsoft officials acknowledged.

The technology was also supposed to make its debut all at once as a complete operating system for clients or servers. Instead, Microsoft has been dribbling out what it calls "parts of Cairo."

One such part, the company said, is the Exchange directory. However, the original plan was for Exchange to have its own directory and Cairo to have an enhanced but compatible one of its own.

Now instead of Cairo being anchored by an object-oriented Object File System (OFS), the company will simply meld the Windows NT domain-name space with the X.500-like directory database in the Exchange groupware product.

NT and Exchange will maintain separate data stores, but NT 4.0, which is currently in beta testing, will be able to link the two transparently.

A single-user interface will update both stores to centralize administration tasks, according to Mike Nash, group product manager for NT Server at Microsoft. The two directory data stores will finally be united in Cairo.

The change in plan represents no change in strategy, Nash said. "We're still doing all the original features we talked about for the Cairo NT Server," he said. "The only thing different is OFS. All the things it was supposed to do will be in Cairo."

OFS was never a product feature, but rather a code name for a set of capabilities that will now be built into the Exchange directory, Nash said.

Others skoffed at the notion that the Cairo plan has not been revised significantly.

"There is no question Microsoft has made a basic change in the implementation of what they call Cairo," said Jamie Lewis, president of the Burton Group, Inc. consultancy. "Cairo was to be based on an OLE file system that was an object store, directory and file system all in one."

What it means for users

As described by Nash, the Cairo directory will maintain separate stores for files and the directory, but the file system will be extensible so users can add attributes, such as who created it, to a file identifier. The directory will be able to search for objects using those attributes, according to Nash.

Novell, Inc. officials at NetWorld+Interop crowed over the shift in strategy, saying Microsoft had left the network operating system directory space open to Novell's NetWare Directory Services.

The new plan may be a major change in strategy, but show attendees watching NT Server demonstrations were diffident.

"It really doesn't affect us because we're just getting started on the migration," said Greg Larson, chief information officer for the City of Scottsdale in Arizona, which plans to move from a NetWare 3.1 network to NT Servers.

A version of NT based on OFS would be so different from the current version that the upgrade path would be a "nightmare" for both users and developers, he said.

The new plan will ease that migration, and the fact that the directory and file system keep separate data stores will be masked by user interfaces and APIs that address both simultaneously, Microsoft said.