1998
At the beginning of the year, focus turned to usability, easy data retrieval, and ad hoc reporting. Features such as quick reports and single-click export to Excel were introduced. Support for handling EDI messages was added. A lot of work was also put into fixing bugs, memory leaks, and just making the whole environment more stable. This led to version 2.1 of Foundation1 on which IFS Applications 99 was released in the fall. IFS Applications 99 had a lot of new functionality and became a huge success. There is still a decent customer install base for IFS Applications 99.
The Web Kit continued to be developed and was integrated into the life cycle support tools of Foundation1. Web interfaces were released for selected components of IFS Applications 99 towards the end of the year. Most popular with customers were the web interfaces for time & attendance and work order handling.
In the area of general trends, business applications started to become more and more integrated. There was integration with other applications, new types of clients, and various devices such as mobile telephones, bar code readers, and radio terminals. To stem an emerging flood of custom-made solutions in IFS Applications, a project to develop an extensible integration framework was started. The framework should use XML as the native data format and have pluggable adaptors for other protocols and standards. Just as for the Web Kit, the implementation was done in Java and executed as COM objects under MS Windows and MTS.
1999
The integration framework started the previous year was completed and released as IFS Connect. IFS Connect was released as a separate component. The Foundation1 platform now consisted of two components: IFS Foundation1, containing the client-server development environment and life cycle support, and IFS Connect which was the integration framework.
Experiences from the first customer installations of web user interfaces resulted in a major overhaul of the Web Kit internal structure and the HTML output created. This work led to the second generation of IFS web interfaces with significant performance improvements and a lot more browser-side functionality. IFS now started to package two types of web solutions, B2E (Business-to-Employee) and B2B (Business-to-Business). The B2E interface was essentially an alternative full user interface for IFS Applications, while the B2B interface was specifically developed for use by external partners such as customers and suppliers. The Web Kit also started to become used by .com startups to build market places and other solutions with IFS Applications as the back end.
IFS Applications 2000 was released in the fall, again with lots of new functionality and entire new solutions. More and more customers started to make use of the new web interfaces and integration capabilities provided through IFS Connect.
1999 was also the year of .com startups, and IFS got involved with quite a few, particularly in the Nordic market. Another significant change was that ERP applications, including IFS Applications, broadened their scope to cover new areas such as CRM, eBusiness solutions (anything from back end application integration to consumer web shopping). It became clear that in the future IFS would be building application components with more varying characteristics than had been the case. While the architecture used by Foundation1, with business logic running inside the database server, was (and still is) ideal for database-intensive applications, new capabilities would be needed by some of the new components in future versions of IFS Applications. Promoting a freedom of choice strategy, IFS also wasn't satisfied that both the Web Kit and the Connect framework relied on Microsoft COM middleware and thus would only run on Windows.
To meet future requirements, the Foundation1 group started project Ti22 at the end of the year. The mission of the project was to identify a platform-independent middleware, an implementation architecture for high-performance application servers, and new innovative technologies for building high-end B2C web solutions.
