Experiences with Building A 
Multimedia Mail System Prototype 
on the OSF DCE Platform


Lee Boswell,


Information Architecture Group,


Hewlett Packard Company


This paper describes the design and implementation of a multimedia mail 
system on the OSF DCE platform. This prototype was undertaken to gain 
some experience with DCE, to provide feedback on HP's Cooperative Com-
puting Framework Architecture, and to look into how this technology can 
most effectively be exploited by Hewlett Packard. This paper primarily 
focuses on experiences gained with DCE during the development of the pro-
totype system.


This abstract will be submitted to Workshop III on Heterogenous Execution 
Environments which is part of the International Conference on Enterprise Inte-
gration Modeling Technology (ICEIMT).


In the fourth quarter of 1989, the CCE Architecture Group within IAG produced 
a "Framework Architecture". Part of this architecture specifies the
architectural 
models and functional specifications for an infrastructure to support coopera-
tive computing services. At about the same time, the Open Software Founda-
tion (OSF) announced it's technology recommendations for it's Distributed 
Computing Environment (DCE). DCE provides a set of fundamental services 
that support the development and runtime needs of distributed systems and 
met a number of the main requirements documented in the framework architec-
ture. The CCE Architecture Group therefore decided to adopt the OSF DCE 
technology and use it as a basis for validating the architectural models 
described in the framework. A prototyping activity was set up to use and 
exploit DCE in order to test its ability to support cooperative computing sys-
tems. This prototyping work was designed to address two main questions:


o	How can we build complete systems using DCE?


o	How can we manage the resources and services of systems that utilize DCE?


This paper describes the approach that we took to attempt to answer the first 
question. The work addressing the second question is not described here. 


In order to address the first question, it was decided to implement a
multimedia 
mail system over DCE. The major goal of the multimedia mail prototype was to 
exploit DCE to demonstrate the advantages of client-server computing, and fur-
ther to show the advantages of using the services built into DCE, such as the 
Directory Service. In addition to this goal, it was also felt that there
would be a 
requirement for a set of tools and services to facilitate the
development of appli-
cations over DCE. It was felt that this activity would act as a catalyst
for deter-
mining the requirements of such tools and services.


 The multimedia services prototypes consists of two client applications
program 
and a set of Mail, Fax, Voice, Media Storage and Conversion Services.
These ser-
vices cooperate to provide DCE-based support for transmitting, receiving, 
translating, and storing multimedia documents. The multimedia mail system 
was developed with the following objectives in mind:


o	focus on the use of DCE to provide a multimedia mail system rather than on 
the multimedia technology itself;


o	determine the suitability of DCE to support such a system and make recom-
mendations for improvement and additions;


o	provide a working demonstrator for group review;


o	validate the CCE Framework Architecture to provide input based on feed-
back from prototyping work for the next revision.


An existing application, namely the Andrew Messaging System (AMS) from 
Carnegie-Mellon University, was adapted to operate in the DCE prototype envi-
ronment. In addition, a simple user interface was developed using HPArchitect 
to support multimedia document creation and editing and to demonstrate the 
functionality provided by the Mail Service. It is important to note that the 
emphasis of this prototype was on showing how the use of DCE can improved 
document transmission, receipt, translation, and storage, rather than on pro-
ducing advanced multimedia capabilities. 


In this paper, the proposed CCE architecture is briefly described and the OSF 
DCE platform is overlaid onto this model. The design and implementation of 
the multimedia mail system is also briefly described, and the mode of
operation 
of this system on this platform is presented. The experiences with DCE that 
were gained during this prototyping phase are discussed, as are the
conclusions 
from the specific application system development. These experiences are then 
mapped into an example of how this technology and architecture could be used 
for Enterprise Integration.