Abstract
While capital funds for central computing at the University of Alberta were shrinking, campus departments were buying desktop computers and powerful workstations by the thousands. An institution-wide strategy was needed to leverage this rich distributed computing environment. Developing a shared distributed architecture has proved to be an effective response; managing the extended enterprise continues to be a challenge. This article explains how the vision of shared distributed computing was developed and implemented, provides a high-level description of the architecture, and explains the technical and managerial challenges involved.