`Windows 2000' is impressive

In six weeks Microsoft will launch the latest version of the product that has made the company the phenomenon of the nineties…

In six weeks Microsoft will launch the latest version of the product that has made the company the phenomenon of the nineties. The Windows 2000 operating system (OS) arrives on February 17th and how it fares will set the tone of Microsoft's start to the new millennium.

Every version of Windows has had some difficulties in development. Major delays and changes in direction with this latest version have prompted some critics to predict a disaster in the making. Microsoft shows no signs of worry and points to rave verdicts from independent reviewers such as Cnet.com which headlined its review "Stable, sophisticated and worth the upgrade".

To ease its way, Windows 2000 has had long-term testing of pre-release versions by volunteers from among Microsoft's customers. In preparing web-based training for it over recent months, I have worked on it and put it through its paces on a client-server network. There were quite a few bugs, but overall I'm impressed. Microsoft has put much effort, including a reported 500 person-years of testing, into its 35 million lines of code.

Windows 2000 was originally Windows NT 5, and was supposed to be an update to NT 4. Then the company decided to merge Windows 95/98 with Windows NT and unify its operating systems. This turned out to be too difficult and had to be scrapped. Microsoft will release an update to the 95/98 line in the middle of this year.

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Windows 2000 Professional will replace NT 4 Workstation. This is the OS many people have on their machines at work. For the server version of Windows 2000, the original plan was to have three versions: a standard one for small to medium enterprises and two more powerful servers called Advanced Server and DataCenter Server.

The latter two had a feature called Component Load Balancing (CLB) in their beta formats. In September, Microsoft announced that it was removing the load-balancing feature, and that this would appear in yet another version called AppCenter to be released later in 2000.

Although both servers still have other load-balancing facilities, the withdrawal of the CLB must raise some doubts about their heavy-duty performance capability as web servers.

The desktop isn't all that different to what 95/98 or NT users are used to. Internet Explorer 5 is the interface and some intelligent tracking features have been introduced. Clicking on Start/Programs produces only a small selection of the available programs. The remainder are hidden initially, but display after a few seconds.

Items selected from the hidden menus are promoted to the displayed list as the machine gets to know a user's preferences. Those who prefer a constant interface can easily switch this off.

For roaming users there is a new feature on the server called IntelliMirror. Travel to a different branch of your company, possibly abroad, and log on as yourself. The remote station becomes a mirror site of your home desktop. You will have all the rights of access that were assigned to you by your system administrator.

By selecting a "make available offline" option, users can also work on a document on the move. When they log on to the network again the system automatically updates the stored network version.

This should make Windows 2000 popular with laptop users. But they will have to be careful of the portable's specification. A minimum of 133MHz Pentium, 64MB of RAM, and 650 MB of free disk space is required.

The OS now supports plug and play (PnP) hardware. This means that it is easier to install and that system administrators can use PnP device drivers for better power management - reducing the company electricity bill by shutting off system components when not in use.

On the security front, Windows 2000 has adopted Kerberos 5 authentication. Conventional passwords being sent across a network can be intercepted by someone using a "sniffer" program. With Kerberos, encrypted user identifying tickets rather than passwords are transmitted.

At the workstation, the user can also choose to save sensitive files in an encrypted form to the hard disk or to network drives. Personally, I found this feature complex and unintuitive.

Undoubtedly the most important change on the server side is the introduction of Active Directory. This is the first real attempt by Microsoft to introduce a directory service to compete with Novell's NDS and servers based on LDAP directories.

Although Windows 2000 is expected to ship in February, Microsoft does not expect it to be an instant best-seller. The company believes that businesses will hold off until later in the year, for Year 2000 reasons and to get the first round of bug fixes when service pack one is released.

So, from summer onward the pattern of uptake will become clearer. We will see whether companies rush to upgrade and how well Microsoft's plans to go on being the operating system company for the new century are working out.

gibney@ireland.com