Distributed applications are of growing importance in many application fields such as office automation, manufacturing, telematics or information services. This paper outlines support facilities for such applications based on distributed platforms. It then discusses further requirements resulting from the use of advanced network technologies. Architectural support for such environments is presented, and experiences with specific software support solutions are discussed. As an application example, workflow processing in distributed environments is used in order to illustrate the approaches. The paper concludes with an outlook to future work.