Microsoft To Ship Longhorn Server In Second Half Of 2007

During his keynote at the Microsoft Management Summit 2006, Bob Muglia, senior vice president of servers and tools at Microsoft, told the audience that the next major Windows server upgrade, code named Longhorn and informally referred to as the Vista server, will likely ship during the second half of 2007.

The company has said it would ship in 2007 but did not provide this guidance in the past.

The company is expected to release the next "near feature complete" beta in the very near future, Muglia said, and will release the next major server beta that incorporates all necessary Vista client changes this fall.

The Vista beta 2 client, also dubbed the consumer Community Technology Preview (CTP), is expected to be available by the end of the quarter and final product for businesses this fall and consumers in early 2007.

Last month, Microsoft said the Vista client would not be broadly available till early 2007.

In a meeting with CRN, Kirill Tatarinov, corporate vice president of the Windows and Enterprise Management Division at Microsoft, said Systems Center Configuration Manager 2007 and Systems Center Operations Manager 2007 will ship in 2007 and would not be affected by any delay in the Windows server in spite of deep integration between the operating system and management software.

"We're careful about managing dependencies in our products," he said.