Microsoft pushes use of new server product

By RICHARD WOOD

Microsoft is applying pressure to firms using Windows NT 4 Server to move to its new Windows 2003 Server.

The software giant will cut most support for the seven-year-old operating system at the end of the year, and stop supporting remaining security aspects by April 2004.

The move affects 3500 firms locally that use Windows NT 4 Server, but not about 7000 that use the three-year-old Windows 2000 Server software.

Lucas Searle, Microsoft NZ product manager, said: "Some people have to bear in mind the product was created and released over seven years ago when there was very little penetration of the internet ... In security it leaves them with an operating system that is not pertinent to the current IT business environment."

He said some NT sites might move to Windows Server 2000, because it was a tried and tested product.

About $300,000 has been spent locally training customers and business partners on how to upgrade servers for 2003.

Both 2000 and 2003 are priced about $2000 for a standard server suitable for small to medium-sized business and departmental use. Four editions of Server 2003 will be launched on April 30, including a lower-cost edition designed specifically as a web server. In that market Microsoft is up against the free open source combination of Apache and Linux.

Unlike Microsoft releases of the past, the development of Server 2003 has not focused on adding new features, but rather on improvements to security, deployment and manageability.

Searle said Server 2003 was the first fruits of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing initiative, which has involved a "complete mind change" of how Microsoft developers think about security. A reported US$200 million ($374 million) has been spent retraining developers to prioritise security issues.

One implication of the new approach is that security on Server 2003 is locked down until changed by an administrator.

Another is manageability and the ability to consolidate multiple applications servers onto new, more powerful servers.

To this end, Windows 2003 has been made easier to configure for each role, for example as a file server, application server, or mail server.

Searle claims the software is 20-30 per cent faster to deploy than previous versions and results in a 30 per cent reduction in management cost.

Also, the management of user names and passwords through Microsoft's Active Directory has been streamlined. Windows Server 2003 can inter-operate with Linux and Unix systems by pulling information from Unix/Linux systems to use in the Windows environment. But it doesn't provide a single log administration system for mixed environments.

Visual Studio .Net 2003 developer toolkit will also be released this month, but it does not require the new server version to run. The .Net Framework programming model has been "fully integrated" into the server software.

Along with the new products, Microsoft has introduced licensing changes this month.

With Windows Server 2003 a flexible "client access licence" allows firms to license on a per user basis, or per device for client devices including PDAs.

For server-based software such as SQL Server and Commerce Server on multiprocessor systems firms now need only pay per-processor licence fees for the partition of processors that they use.