Inside Microsoft's Technology Bundles

First is the $1495 price tag of the bundle of server-based products called Small Business Server 2000. This includes SharePoint Team Server, Windows 2000 Server, Exchange 2000 Server, SQL Server 2000, Internet Security and Acceleration Server, and Internet Information Server. The bundle includes 50 connections for each server, along with a five client access license for Outlook. When the new Exchange and Windows .Net servers are released, the bundle will be updated to include these as well.

"This makes it easier for resellers to sell and to position to their customers as the first small business server they will need," said Bill Veghte, corporate vice president for the .Net Server products group. The price pot is made even sweeter with a $500 rebate for each unit sold by the reseller.

Second are the bundle of features that will appear in the Windows .Net Server itself later this fall: Foremost is an addition to an updated version of Internet Information Server that provides for better application protection and isolation, useful for multi-homed web site hosting. But there are plenty of other enhancements, including a UDDI server that will handle the repository of Web services and objects, an automatic document restore that can rollback documents to previous versions, performance improvements galore, and a built-in RADIUS authentication server that fully supports the load balancing and failover features of the clustering services.

One thing not included in .Net Server is the XP user interface: it is sticking with the old Windows 2000 interface and will eliminate the XP client-standard menu options for Windows Media Player and other client options, based on early customer feedback.

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Third is the bundle of security features that will be included in future Microsoft servers. Make that the bundle of features omitted: finally, resellers don't have to contend with IIS, VBScripting, and a slew of sample applications that can expose their equipment to the vagaries of wily hackers. All three of these are turned off by default installation.

"We don't want to have that broad surface area to be opened up to attackers," said Veghte. "Windows 2000 Server was too big a land mass, and we didn't want our integrators to have to put such a big fence around it when they were developing applications."