Although Microsoft Corp has finally picked a date for its ActiveX standards group event – Tuesday October 1 at the Downtown Convention Center 7, World Trade Center – it appears Redmond is going to keep a firm grip on the reins of its object technology. Initially just a basic set of services are up for adoption by whatever organization Microsoft chooses to guide the direction of the technology. Enough to get objects talking to each other, according to Internet division marketing director Tom Button. These include Component Object Model (COM), Distributed COM, system registry, remote procedure call, automation and storage extensions. Microsoft has invited more than 70 ActiveX ‘stakeholders’ to the meeting, the goals of which are to detail options for the process that will govern the future licensing and management of ActiveX technologies and to poll the participants to help determine the best option. Microsoft says stakeholders – customers, ISVs and vendors – will help draft the options but that it will conduct a poll and make a recommendation on that poll; there will be no vote as such. Only after the basic ActiveX technologies are handed to the TBD organization will Microsoft and its partners decide which other higher level object services should be turned over to the group. They include data access, remote distribution of software, transaction processing, large-group development and others. The services are built upon COM but now reside under the umbrella of Object Linking and Embedding, a term Microsoft recently resurrected to shelter its core object technologies from the ActiveX handover (CI No 2,995). Microsoft has already promised to provide specifications and source code implementations of COM, DCOM and other interoperability technologies and says its aim is to drive the standardization and evolution of ActiveX technologies and accelerate their adoption on non-Microsoft platforms including Unix and Macintosh. Hewlett-Packard Co, Intel Corp, SAP AG, Computer Associates International Inc, Netscape Communications Corp and Digital Equipment Corp are among the 70 with a ticket. Sun Microsystems Inc, Oracle Corp, IBM Corp and Object Management Group aren’t on the published guest list though Oracle, Sun and others have been invited but haven’t RSVP’d according to Microsoft. We asked Oracle and Sun why not but hadn’t heard back by press time.
