John Fontana

Netegrity Inc. this week will unveil support for emerging security standards in its Web services transaction software, which lets corporations safeguard business-to-business communications using the nascent technology.

IBM Corp./Lotus later this month will ship Notes/Domino 6.5 and begin to show corporate users how to extend the reach of its collaboration software by embedding it in everyday client software.

With Lotus as a lead example, IBM Corp. is working to break down the other software products in its portfolio into sets of components that can be assembled quickly in multiple ways to meet corporate computing needs.

Corporate executives are keeping a sharp eye on new Web services standards and management specifications.

IBM Corp. on Wednesday added the Lotus Domino server to its growing suite of software targeted at companies with fewer than 2,000 users.

Microsoft Corp. this week finally acknowledged that it was developing a server version of its Longhorn operating system and said the evolution of its next-generation enterprise software lineup would be integrated around both the client and server version of that operating system.

Software and standards for building interoperable identity-management systems are evolving rapidly, but streamlining business processes and cleaning up personnel data remain major stumbling blocks to corporate adoption of the technology.

Existing identity management practices and standards in combination with Web services security protocols will provide needed protection to support distributed computing between corporations and their partners.