Push Is Out, Pull Is In
When Site Server was first introduced, companies as diverse as BackWeb, PointCast, and others were capitalizing on the fascination with pushing content from centralized servers over the Internet to a specific framework or application. PointCast specifically had much success with this approach throughout the 90s. The approach companies have of delivering content to specific users through "push" technology has since fallen into disfavor due to the bandwidth requirements this approach takes on corporate networks. There are still companies standardized on PointCast, yet the ubiquity of the Internet and its many Web sites is making push technology a trend of the past. It's no surprise that Microsoft has chosen to delete Active Channel Server and its equivalent Active Channel Multicaster from the latest generation of the product. Table 3 compares the push-oriented approaches on both products.
Table 3 Microsoft Has Dropped Active Channel from Commerce Server 2000
Microsoft Site Server |
Microsoft Commerce Server 2000 |
Active Channel Multicaster/Active Channel Server (ACM/ACS) |
No equivalent functionality. |