Microsoft Weighs Server For Midsize Companies

In an interview with CRN at TechEd Ed 2005, Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Windows Server Division, confirmed that the company is mulling a Windows server optimized for medium-sized businesses. Microsoft defines that segment as companies with between five and 15 servers and 50 to 250 PCs.

"There's opportunity to do things in this space," Muglia said, noting that such a server would offer pricing benefits for medium sized businesses in the same way that Windows Small Business Server 2003 offers a favorable pricing structure. SBS scales to up to 75 users and bundles Exchange, SharePoint and, for premium customers, Internet Security and Accelerator (ISA) 2004 and SQL Server 2000 SP4. ISA 2004 is an edge firewall solution for small businesses.

Muglia would not specify other than to say core technologies for all companies are Active Directory and Exchange Server. "Goodness happens when organizations deploy AD and Exchange. That gives them a coherent environment where you need to have policies and manage them and messaging is just so core."

While it mulls new possibilities, Microsoft is prepping Windows Server 2003 R2-- with Active Directory Federation Services and better support for branch offices--for release by year's end and a Longhorn server beta this summer, Muglia said.

Two other key servers--the Windows Server 2003, Compute Cluster and BizTalk 2006--will ship in 2006.

The R2 release of Windows Server 2003 is in beta testing and is feature complete, he said. However, the company will not include Rights Management Services or Network Access Protection in R2 as previously stated. The company has said those services will be included in Longhorn.

Longhorn server, the next Windows server upgrade beyond R2, will feature support for unique workloads, unique roles-based web server, business application, desktop and terminal services installations and "Monad" technology. Monad promises to enable command line administration capabilities in a more automated way. Diehard Unix and Linux administrators are fond of the command line, Muglia acknowledged.

The Longhorn server beta, to be released this summer, will offer offline caching of distributed storage, a new replication engine, an enhanced distributed file system, Active Directory cache mode and major improvements in terminal services technology, including application publishing.