I recall sitting at MMS 2003 I believe and seeing a cool slide that compared the Beta testing that was done prior to releasing SMS 2003 and comparing it to SMS 2.0's testing. In essence it displayed how poorly SMS 2.0 was tested and how much more rigorous the testing was for SMS 2003 prior to RTM.Below is a snip of the data along those lines relevant for Configuration Manager 2007’s Beta testing as seen in a presentation at the Partner Airlift by Jeff Wettlaufer, Sr. Technical Product Manager.
• >300,000 beta seats deployed
• 20 Tap and 33 RDP Customers World Wide
• Over 20,000 downloads of beta 2 and RC
• Over 6,000 RTM evaluations downloaded since August