Sasquatch Planet

The history of Microsoft’s Oslo sounds like a complicated mess, which is ironic as the initiative was conceived to clean up complicated software development messes. What started out as ambitious technology package aimed at simplifying, integrating and improving software development for businesses has been sliced, diced and renamed in its short history.

In 2007, Microsoft announced Oslo as a product, if I’m understanding correctly, that would bridge a gap in software analysis, design and implementation between different business departments (IT, programmers, content team, execs, etc.) to increase productivity, efficiency and, most important, save businesses money.

What made Oslo unique was the idea of how it integrated information generated during the design and analysis phase from separate software products. The different players involved in developing a new software solution often generate information in various states. The business or user side may create word documents for their needs. The business process model may be created using BizTalk Server. IT requirements and code will be generated on another platform. The end result is massive amount of necessary project information stored in disparate forms that require human interpretation to piece together.

Oslo’s purpose was to simplify the development process by allowing developers to feed all of this information into individual models that can be easily edited as data. The data modeling was supposed to be done in the M language, which had a specific syntax for defining project needs and specs, such as the current IT build across the business environment. Again, let me state, I may be misinterpreting some of this. But the core functionality of the Oslo was easier implementation of a product across development lines by using a meta-data structure to store, edit, query, test and deploy the product.

Initially, Microsoft had a set of products, like BizTalk Server, .NET Framework, Microsoft Visual Studio, and Microsoft System Center, that it wanted to integrate as part of the larger Oslo package but that changed by 2008. Over time, the larger Oslo picture ebbed as the individual components remained as such and the strength of the Oslo vision waned. Last November, Microsoft jettisoned the Oslo name, probably for PR purposes as much for better product definition, for “SQL Server Modeling”. The core intent remains the same: using a modeling language to reduce project information into data models for efficient editing and deployment. This blog post by Douglas Purdy, a Microsoft software architect, does a good job explaining the power of SQL Server Modeling.