What if your desktop applications didn't care what operating system was running on your computer? If IBM's Workplace group delivers on the vision they laid out for me in a recent demo of their Workplace Managed Client (WMC), IT departments will have exactly this degree of freedom in their desktop OS selection.

Built on the Eclipse project standard, IBM's WMC essentially provides a desktop middleware layer, if you will, acting as a buffer between the underlying system OS and the application layer. Yet, because of the characteristics of Eclipse, applications running on top of it pull the overall look and feel in from the OS, thus making them appear as native applications that were written for the OS.

WMC comes with a very good set of desktop applications built-in, such as a word processing, a calculation and presentation suite built on OpenOffice, a rich e-mail client with calendaring, integrated IM, and a cool feature IBM calls Activity Explorer. It's their solution to one of the thorniest collaboration issues enterprises face - that is, people working together on documents by e-mailing them back and forth. Activity Explorer provides a central and secure place where co-workers can collaborate on tasks without chewing up e-mail system storage and, according to IBM, it's proving quite popular with customers. For existing Lotus Notes customers, IBM has already ported the Notes client to WMC (see Figure 1).

In addition to the above functionality, a growing list of independent software vendors (ISVs) is gravitating to the WMC framework and writing their applications to it. Among these are Cognos, Epiphany, and Hyperion. Arthur Fontaine, senior offering manager for IBM Workplace, indicates that several more "household name" ISVs are in discussions with IBM to write their apps to WMC, though these have not been announced publicly yet. Mr. Fontaine indicates that while there is no Chiphopper equivalent for WMC, ISVs can and do use IBM's ISV Enablement Centers and Workplace Integration Centers, located around the globe, to get help writing their applications to WMC.

In addition to the promise of freedom to choose the best desktop OS for their varying end-user needs without having to worry about application availability, enterprises deploying WMC benefit from an integrated, server-managed solution. The server side is called Workplace Collaboration Services and it allows IT professionals to deploy updates, new applications, and provision new systems based on individual and/or group profiles. The server-side capability relies on IBM's WebSphere portal.

From an architectural perspective, WMC consists of the following components (see Figure 2):

• A secure data store, which is a zero-administration, pure Java relational database
• The Eclipse rich-client framework
• A personal Enterprise JavaBean container for running local applications
• The ability to download layouts and application components from the WebSphere Portal
• A synchronization framework, which is achieved via an implementation of SynchML, allowing new features to be pushed to desktops from a central server
• Auto-provisioning capabilities, for creating accounts based on policies defined for each user and/or group of users