What is the status?

Windows Server 2008, formerly Longhorn, will be delayed until Q1 of 2008 but will be available to SA and MSDN subscribers prior to RTM.  SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 are scheduled to be released with Server 2008 so I can only assume they will be delayed as well. 

Vista SP1 also suffers from the same fate, delayed until Q1 of 08.  The BETA of Vista SP1 will be  available to participants in about two weeks however.  And SP3 for XP is moving along with its BETA also being out in a couple weeks and should be released in the first half of next year, a little later than the other two thankfully. 

Why should I care?

Without Server 2008 you cannot make use of the NAP functionality built into ConfigMgr so this may delay some implementations of ConfigMgr, and will certainly delay the implementation of NAP.  You will also need XP SP3 for NAP to work with your XP clients, but Vista is set already.

What will be in Vista SP1?

Included in Vista SP1 is all the updates so far for Vista plus improvements in three areas, performance, security, and reliability. 

Under reliability there is:

• Greater compatibility with a larger number of printer drivers
• Greater reliability AND performance when resuming and entering sleep
• Improvements to the reliability in networking configuration scenarios
• Greater reliability with connecting to external displays when you are using a laptop
• Greater reliability and compatibility with newer graphics cards

Performance improvements:

• Improved speed when you copy or extract files
• Improved battery life by lowering the number of screen redraws on some computers
• Improved performance when browsing network shares
• Improved logon times by removing the 10 second delay after you hit crtl-alt-del sometimes
• Faster JavaScript in IE7

Under security there are a number of things including improvements to BitLocker.

More on Vista SP1 here.

Regards,
Anthony

Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E Inc.

http://configmgr.com

© 2007 Anthony Clendenen