New .Net Server Code Hits The Web

One East Coast solution provider, who rushed to get the RC2 bits, said about seven Microsoft sites have the code available.

Microsoft had hoped to have the release candidate available for download at Comdex, and solution providers were told that Nov. 15 was D-day. But the date came and went without the software.

At Comdex last month , Microsoft executives said the server operating system would be generally available in April 2003. Until then, the company had been telling partners and customers it would happen in the first quarter of 2003. (See related story.)

Provided there are no more delays, April should be a big month for Microsoft. The company said it plans to ship Visual Studio .Net 2003 in tandem with the .Net Server 2003 operating system. Also slated for that time frame is the final version of 64-bit SQL Server 2000, code-named Liberty. The much-speculated-upon Yukon, a major upgrade of SQL Server, is on tap to ship late next year.

But right now, most solution providers are just happy to get their hands on a presumably more complete version of .Net Server.

"This is what we've been waiting for and wondering about," said a solution provider who was downloading the software. "Microsoft swore that they'd have it available Nov. 15, and we've all been wondering exactly what happened to it."

Microsoft is pitching a combination of .Net Server running on faster SMP machines as a way for companies to consolidate servers. And some large customers are not waiting for final code to deploy.

At Comdex, Jay Corriveau, enterprise program director for Reed Elsevier, said his company is rolling out .NET "across the board." While Microsoft also pitches the new operating system as a way to proliferate Web servicse, Corriveau views it mostly as an infrastructure for existing applications. The London-based publishing conglomerate is building Active Directory and .Net applications in parallel, he noted.

St. Louis-based Enterprise Rent-a-Car is likewise doing a lot of .Net work, deploying new rental service and fleet management applications for employees. Those .Net-based applications will replace AS/400-based applications now deployed to terminals. As of November, the software had rolled out to about 20 branches and was starting to be installed at airport locations, company executives said last month. Ultimately, the plan is to roll out the application to 5,000 locations and 30,000 users.