Citrix Winview & Winframe
With the release of Windows NT to user desktop, windows record locking systems changed from file to page level. This impacted 7 order management systems database function called Customer Order Database (COD) by causing user concurrency issues.
I owned these systems, and BT had been trying for a long time to migrate out into alternative platforms, but the complexity and rate of change in them was making it impossible at the time, but as the same time BT Global Systems were totally reliant on their functionality to provide services to customers.
The solution BT suggested was to run Winview as host which operated on OS2 - allowing file locking. However it only worked on a LAN. As service management was distant offices in BT Wholesale at the time, another layer had to be added to enable LAN over WAN connection. To facilitate this Winframe was delivered to host the Win-view which in turn hosted COD.
Phew. The key message here was that this was the fist ever use of Citrix in BT and lead to a boom in thin client release across the group and I was the first to be an administrator and co designer of it.
This was not however an ideal solution which lead to the next two innovations.
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