Joseph Hinkle at MyITForum.com

One last post about Ballmer's keynote...

One of the slides talked about some of the management capabilities Longhorn will have built in.  There is an improved health model with extended event info.  Some of this was referenced in the SQL 2005 Reporting services demo during the keynote as well.  This data will be stored as XML that can be drilled into from Reporting Services.

One of the big selling points is that Longhorn will be the OS platform for the next ten years.  I'm a bit skeptical about that, but it depends on how platform is defined.  I figure a .1 release will come out sometime in the 4-5 year window, but that's pure speculation.

Another improvement is that updates will require 70% fewer reboots over Windows XP.  Any improvement there is a good thing.  I'm tired of looking at our “Reboot pending” report.

The most exciting thing I saw in the Longhorn portion of the presentation was built-in Network Access Protection.  The NAP will be compliant with the Trusted Computing Group specification for network access protection, so there is hope that it won't be a proprietary system that only MS uses.

Also, there was the ever present promise to reduce the number of images necessary, though I've managed to cut the number of images in our environment down pretty well.  It is always good to make that portion of the admin function more streamlined, as it takes a significant amount of time to make a production-ready image.

More to come.  I'm catching up on my notes and I think I may swing by the Expo again to talk to the folks at Vintela.