LOS ANGELES — Stop the presses. Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF), the newest of the next-generation Windows infrastructure pillars, is running early.

WWF, Microsoft's combined human- and machine-level workflow subsystem, was expected to debut as part of Longhorn Server in 2007, at the earliest, Microsoft officials said this past spring.

But at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles this week, Microsoft released to attendees the Beta 1 bits of WWF, and announced that the technology was on track to be incorporated into Windows Vista, the version of Windows client due in 2006.

In April, Microsoft Windows Group Vice President Jim Allchin said that the workflow subsystem — which has gone by a number of different code names, including WinOE and Windows Workflow Services —
would not make it into Longhorn/Vista. But the WWF team pushed to achieve the required quality levels and qualified for inclusion in the Windows Vista Community Technology Preview (CTP) 1 release, which Microsoft distributed this week to show attendees, said Scott Woodgate, group product manager with Microsoft's Connected Systems Division.

Microsoft officials also revealed at this week's show that they are planning to back-port WWF to Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Windows Server 2003, just as they are doing with the other key Windows foundational technologies, including Windows Communications Foundation (WCF, code-named Indigo), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, code-named Avalon), and, most likely, WinFS.

In the past, workflow was a product (in the form of BizTalk Server), and able to facilitate system-workflow interactions only, said Woodgate. But with WWF, workflow becomes a platform that can handle both human- and system-level workflow, Woodgate said.

Microsoft's goal is to make WWF the workflow engine upon which many of its next-generation products will be based. WWF will be built into both Windows Vista and Longhorn Server. It will be the workflow engine underlying Office 12; Version 3.0 of Windows SharePoint Services; the Dynamics ERP, supply-chain and CRM products; and the BizTalk Server "Next" version of the Microsoft integration server due out in 2007.

"All of these products will inherit WWF, like they do the .Net Framework today," Woodgate explained.

While Microsoft envisions some interesting cross-fertilization potential involving WWF and the other Vista pillars, like WCF, WPF and WinFS, it also is counting on third-party developers to design some new workflow-driven applications of their own, and is encouraging them to do so.