Why Your Campus Should Consider Adopting OSF's DCE Standards

Copyright 1995 CAUSE. From _CAUSE/EFFECT_ magazine, Volume 
18, Number 1, Spring 1995. Permission to copy or disseminate 
all or part of this material is granted provided that the 
copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage, 
the CAUSE copyright and its date appear, and notice is given 
that copying is by permission of CAUSE, the association for 
managing and using information technology in higher 
education. To disseminate otherwise, or to republish, 
requires written permission. For further information, contact 
Julia Rudy at CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, 
Boulder, CO 80301 USA; 303-939-0308; e-mail: 
jrudy@CAUSE.colorado.edu


             WHY YOUR CAMPUS SHOULD CONSIDER
              ADOPTING OSF's DCE STANDARDS
                    by Samuel Plice

ABSTRACT: At their meeting last December, the CAUSE Board of 
Directors passed a motion to strongly encourage CAUSE member 
institutions to investigate adopting OSF's DCE standards, to 
promote interoperability across heterogeneous systems within 
an institution and between institutions, to aid in the 
transition to client/server computing, and to facilitate 
sharing and leveraging our campus technology investments. 



In the spring of 1994, as part of its annual strategic 
planning process, the CAUSE Board of Directors identified a 
number of areas where actions by CAUSE as an organization 
might be helpful in transforming higher education through 
more effective management and use of information resources.
A critical one of these was open computing standards, and the 
Board agreed to begin to take a leadership role in support of 
such standards. 

Support of standards is not new to CAUSE. Beginning in 1990, 
CAUSE appointed a representative to participate in an ongoing 
initiative of the American Association of Collegiate 
Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) to develop a 
standard for the electronic transmission of student 
transcripts. This initiative resulted in the development and 
adoption of the SPEEDE/ExPRESS standard for electronic data 
interchange (EDI) of student-- and school-related data. 
(SPEEDE stands for Standardization of Postsecondary Education 
Electronic Data Exchange; ExPRESS stands for the Exchange of 
Permanent Records Electronically for Students and Schools.)

At the urging of many CAUSE members, the CAUSE Board next 
considered endorsement of another standard, called 
Distributed Computing Environment (DCE), developed by the 
Open Software Foundation (OSF), a consortium of major 
hardware and software vendors. Recognizing the value of 
building our new distributed computing environments on open 
standards, the CAUSE Board has endorsed the OSF DCE approach, 
and is encouraging all CAUSE member institutions to 
investigate adoption of DCE as part of their information 
resources architecture.


WHY ADOPT DCE?

Virtually every higher education institution is grappling 
with the problem of remaining competitive and delivering 
higher levels of service while the traditional sources of 
funding offer limited growth potential at best. In 
information resources, we are facing the same formidable 
challenges. We can no longer afford to "go it alone"; we must 
find ways to work together to develop common solutions and to 
share applications we develop. A fundamental requirement for 
sharing of applications is a common information technology 
infrastructure. Adoption of an information technology 
architecture which includes a standards-based infrastructure 
will offer a common distributed computing platform upon which 
we can share the development of common solutions to the 
problems we face. The networked environment we create will 
bring world-wide information resources and shared 
applications to the desktop machines across all of our 
campuses.

The creation of a distributed information technology 
architecture has become a primary role for information 
technology organizations. Middleware is a key component of 
this technical architecture, defined by the Gartner Group as 
the network-aware system software, layered between an 
application, the operating system, and the network transport 
layers, whose purpose is to facilitate some aspect of 
cooperative processing. Middleware comprises a set of core 
services including directory services, network security 
services, time services, remote procedure calls (RPC), file 
services, and threads.

Currently, the only open standard for an integrated set of 
middleware is that provided by OSF's DCE--a collection of 
middleware services intended to accelerate the deployment of 
heterogeneous, networked applications by providing for 
interoperability across heterogeneous systems. Included are 
such key services as network security, including encryption; 
user identification, authentication, and authorization; file 
services; and a common operating environment that allows 
institutions to share applications. 

There are many reasons why colleges and universities should 
consider adopting this set of standards:

  *  DCE achieves interoperability across heterogeneous 
systems, not just within a single campus but between 
institutions as well. It provides a glue to link systems from 
multiple vendors, who can rely on DCE as a robust base for 
their distributed computing solutions. Vendors providing 
their own proprietary mechanisms for networking can utilize 
DCE as a lingua franca to communicate with other vendor 
environments.

  *  DCE offers value to users, systems administrators, and 
application developers. Users can view their networked world 
as a natural extension of their desktop interface through 
such features as single login via DCE security. This can work 
even when the networked world of the user extends beyond the 
campus to other systems across the country or around the 
world. System administrators can utilize a single directory 
for maintaining records for all their networked systems. 
Application developers get an integrated set of services 
accessed through the RPC, reducing the complexity of building 
distributed applications.

  *  DCE security allows institutions to deploy systems with 
confidence even on open networks which are easily tapped. 
DCE's shared secret model of encrypted communication mediated 
by the security server means that passwords do not travel 
over the network in the clear.

  *  DCE can scale from small applications on a local area 
network to enterprise-wide use to inter-institutional use. 
This is increasingly important as the client/server model of 
computing continues to become more prevalent. The benefits of 
client/server to date have often come from one-of-a-kind 
implementations, which don't scale. A Forrester study 
released early in 1994 indicated that some 60 percent of 
Fortune 1000 client/server applications were for a single 
department's decision support system and 92 percent of these 
applications access only a single database. As organizations 
look to merge their client/server applications into a set of 
enterprise-wide services, there will be significant barriers 
to integration if the underlying security, directory, RPC, 
and other components aren't compatible. With DCE, the 
infrastructure doesn't have to be reinvented for each 
application, and the problem of connecting gateways between 
systems for interoperability is eased.

  *  DCE is an extensible set of technologies. Many vendors 
are providing value-added services around DCE, such as 
application development tools, systems management features, 
transaction processing services, and object-oriented 
programming interfaces. IT organizations can choose the best 
source for DCE components to meet their needs, considering 
price and performance to find the most appropriate DCE 
solution for each task, independent of hardware or operating 
system platform. For example, an institution might select a 
DCE directory service to run on one vendor's RISC-based UNIX 
workstation, a security service on another vendor's 
mainframe, and a time service coordinated from a personal 
computer platform.

  *  DCE opens the possibility for institutions to share 
applications. If middleware is based on commonly accepted 
open standards, then applications developed at one 
institution can be successfully installed at other 
institutions. Collaboration, cooperation, and sharing can 
expedite progress and dramatically reduce the cost of 
distributed computing. For example, all institutions wishing 
to capitalize on the promise of networked computing will need 
to develop inter-realm authentication mechanisms; the 
adoption of DCE will provide the basis for the shared 
development and implementation of such mechanisms. Open 
distributed computing technologies offer powerful techniques 
for open applications that are easier to adapt to different 
institutional requirements. CAUSE was founded in the 1960s as 
the College And University Systems Exchange, and now such 
exchange is a real possibility. (See Nancy Youchunas's 
article, pp. 8-10 of this issue of _CAUSE/EFFECT_, which 
addresses the possibilities of using DCE as the foundation 
for sharing administrative software.)

  *  Because DCE is available for so many different 
environments, including such proprietary environments as 
IBM's MVS, Digital's VMS, and Hewlett-Packard's MPE, it 
provides an evolutionary path to reengineering. Institutions 
engaged in restructuring their business processes and moving 
to open systems can use DCE as a way to connect these 
"legacy" environments to newly deployed systems or as a new, 
open applications programming interface on these previously 
closed platforms. This allows organizations to retain their 
investment in current systems and even facilitates both 
upsizing and downsizing.

  *  DCE is an open system. Not only is it based where 
possible on industry-accepted standards, OSF publishes the 
complete specification via a series of books from Prentice-
Hall. Therefore, anyone interested in implementing DCE from 
the specification is able to do so without owing OSF 
licensing or royalty payments.

Businesses, higher education institutions, and governments 
around the world are increasingly adopting DCE as part of 
their information technology architectures. This will 
facilitate interorganizational links that occur through 
partnerships, supplier/customer relationships, strategic 
alliances, and the growing trend of virtual organizations 
(dynamic environments created by alliances of complementary 
skills drawn from separate organizations in order to jointly 
address business opportunities). Common security and 
directory mechanisms based on DCE, for example, will lower 
the barriers for tying together the information systems of 
these partnering organizations. Those that adopt standards-
based infrastructures will more readily be able to exploit 
new opportunities.

Higher education institutions and other organizations are 
able to participate as members in OSF and thus in the 
evolution of DCE to ensure that their future needs will truly 
be met. After a major restructuring in early 1994, OSF is a 
more vital organization with much greater industry 
participation than it had previously. In addition, end users 
have an increased say in OSF technology development. For 
example, end users sit on the Architecture Planning Council 
that lays out the technology road map for OSF. The Project 
Steering Committee that oversees the DCE effort includes an 
end-user representative along with the vendors funding DCE's 
development. This person gathers requirements from end users 
and shares them with the vendors. End-user input has had a 
significant influence on the features and functionality of 
DCE.

In summary, adoption of DCE, as a shared set of technical 
standards for the implementation of a technical 
infrastructure that will support interoperability, can 
facilitate the implementation of a distributed, networked 
computing environment, establish the basis for institutions 
to develop common approaches to systems management, provide 
hardware and operating systems independence, influence 
vendors to produce interoperable products that meet higher 
education's unique requirements, and lay the groundwork for 
institutions to share applications. 

The CAUSE Board encourages all CAUSE member institutions to 
seriously consider adoption of OSF's DCE standards as part of 
their information resources architecture. CAUSE looks forward 
to feedback from our members about how we can best support 
adoption of the OSF DCE standards.



                 RESOURCE LIST FOR DCE

OSF sells complete sets of documentation, consisting of 14 
volumes and costing $525. 
  *  In the U.S.: Natalie Tarbet, OSF, Cambridge, 
Massachusetts (617-621-8762; fax 617-621-0631; 
tarbet@osf.org)
  *  In Europe: Christine Mambourg, OSF, Brussels (+32-2-772-
8888; fax +32-2-772-9228; mambourg@osf.org)
  *  In the Pacific Region: Haruyo Nogami, OSF, Tokyo (+813-
3479-4740; fax +813-3479-4760; nogami@osf.org)

Prentice-Hall also offers an OSF Documentation Set which 
contains roughly the same material as the OSF set but which 
has been edited to improve readability. For ordering 
information: 515-284-6751.

O'Reilly offers a number of publications that provide 
different perspectives of DCE. For information, phone 800-
998-9938 or 707-829-0515; send e-mail to order@ora.com; or 
access O'Reilly's information on the Internet:
http://nearnet.gnn.com/gnn/bus/ora/ordering/index.html
http://gopher.ora.com/
telnet gopher.ora.com (login: gopher; no password)

Internet resources include:
comp.soft-sys.dce (Usenet newsgroup)
comp.unix.osf.misc (Usenet newsgroup)
comp.client-server (Usenet newsgroup)
E-mail general or product OSF DCE queries to:
     direct@osf.org 

OSF URL: http://www.osf.org:8001
The OSF home page includes information on DCE, OSF technology 
data sheets, case studies, and white papers, as well as the 
DCE Product Catalog.

For a more comprehensive list of DCE resources, send e-mail 
to search@cause.colorado.edu containing the one-line message: 
get CSD0991. A page on the CAUSE World Wide Web server is 
also under construction to serve as a gateway to many 
additional DCE resources on the Internet. If your campus has 
a document related to DCE, please contribute it to the CAUSE 
Information Resources Library; for information, contact Randy 
Richter at CAUSE (rrichter@cause. colorado.edu, 303-939-
0314).


=============================================================

Note:
"OSF DCE: Implementing a Distributed, Networked Computing 
Environment" is the theme of a CAUSE regional conference to 
be held June 1-2 in Philadelphia at the University of 
Pennsylvania. For more information, contact CAUSE at 
303-939-0315 or conf@cause.colorado. edu.


*************************************************************

Samuel J. Plice is Chief Operating Officer of the Information 
Technology Division (ITD), University of Michigan.  ITD 
provides centralized computing and communications services to 
the University. Mr. Plice currently serves on the CAUSE Board 
of Directors.

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Why Your Campus Should Consider Adopting OSF's DCE Standards



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