Finally, after all the hype, we have a testable,
relatively stable version of Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows 2000. In fact,
we actually have three versions because Microsoft has shipped Professional, Server and
Advanced Server simultaneously and this allows us to see how this new operating system
will affect the environment.
The need to educate
At the same time as releasing the beta code, Microsoft has also made a major upgrade to
the training materials and started to tighten the certification requirements for trainers
who will be looking to teach the official course materials. The need to educate the
trainers extensively is clear. The explosive growth of training over the last few years
has led to a huge skills and experience shortage in the training industry. To combat this,
many training organisations have nurtured their trainers in-house and whilst this provides
them with a good understanding of the training materials, it does not provide them with
the experience that can only come from actually supporting and managing servers and
clients in a production environment. More important than this is that a significant
percentage of Microsoft Official Curriculum trainers have little or no experience of
Netware 4.0 and other LDAP or X.500 environments. They must gain a real appreciation of
this central technology if they are to effectively teach Windows 2000. In addition, the
complexity of Windows 2000 means that corporate customers should take seriously the need
to send their key networking staff on the relevant courses particularly if that site has
little or no experience of LDAP or X.500 directory services.
The development process
Microsoft has been extremely keen to stress that it also sees the development of Windows
2000 as a watershed in its development process and how that process is perceived by
customers. Who can forget the Windows 95 beta program when corporate customers were
persuaded to purchase beta copies of the software just to gain access to the code so that
they could begin to prepare for the future? While that process was not repeated with
Windows 98, there has been a real problem with a number of drivers for popular hardware
and Microsoft has recently released a major service revision of that product.
With Windows 2000, Microsoft is focusing on the need to get the operating system right
before releasing it. The last thing that Microsoft needs is to have to issue a service
pack within a couple of months after release to fix problems that should have been
detected in the development process. This emphasis on quality is a welcome change and has
been backed up by Microsoft publicly saying that the reasons for the delay of the
operating system are primarily due to the code not being ready or complete. When you then
load and play with the beta disks, you actually do get a feeling that the code is
extremely stable. In fact, several members of the official beta program who have been
looking at different versions of beta 3 since January, have all remarked on the fact that
the beta code appears to be as stable as the current version of NT 4.0 including its
service packs and hot fixes.
When you consider the almost doubling of lines of code and the vastly increased complexity
of Windows 2000 this is a significant achievement indeed. In fact, Microsoft has taken
this stability and persuaded a number of large corporate customers to join it in running
the beta code on production systems. The in-house term for this is ‘dog-fooding’
and whilst these customers are predominately US based, Swiss Bank Corp is the key European
customer. Insider reports indicate that the project is running very well indeed with far
less problems than were actually predicted.
The convergence of the consumer and professional OS’s
Several years ago, Microsoft trailed the year 2000 as likely to herald the convergence of
its consumer and professional operating systems and whilst Windows 2000 Professional goes
significantly further than Windows NT 4.0 Workstation in this respect, it is still not
quite there. It is likely that we will need at least one more operating system revision
before that is achieved and this could be a problem for a number of SMEs who have been
considering weaning their users from Windows 9.x to Windows 2000 Professional. Much work
has been done on simplifying the installation mechanisms inside Windows 2000 with a new
unattended installation program as well as a bulk installation program called Sysprep.
This product has recently been made available for Windows NT 4.0 under a limited access
agreement giving it to just OEM’s and customers with corporate licensing agreements.
What is exciting, however, is the introduction of the new recovery console to help you
recover damaged or corrupted installations. This is required because of the new security
that can be applied to hard disks to remove the need for system and boot partitions to be
placed on a FAT drive. This improvement to the security will be a welcome boost for many
sites especially after the problems with Service Pack 4 updating machines to NTFS 5 and
thereby invalidating many customers’ Emergency Repair Disks.
Service packs have also been given an extensive overhaul with Microsoft now supporting
slipstreaming for service packs. Currently, when you install any base component, you need
to reapply the latest service pack. This creates extra reboots and is time consuming, not
to mention irritating. The result is that your distribution/installation share for Windows
2000 will now be updated with service pack components making the whole process simpler to
manage. There has also been a change to the way that applications use service packs in an
attempt to minimise the service pack wars that seem to be going on. If you have installed
an application over the last few months, you may have noticed that some, and in particular
SQL Server 7.0, come with mini-service packs. One of the problems is that these service
packs can make changes to key system files and this can have the effect of destabilising
an installation. Worse still, there is no formal installation mechanism to determine which
order applications and service packs should be installed. The result is that you can take
several machines, install applications and their service packs in a different order, and
then get a different set of installation problems and bugs. With Windows 2000, Microsoft
is tightening up the contents of service packs and how this entire process is managed.
There is just one potential problem here because only those who sign up to the new Windows
2000 logo program will currently be bound by this mechanism. Microsoft needs to actually
make this applicable to all existing logo programs to really solve the problem.
User friendly
Several new user orientated initiatives have been significantly enhanced. One of the more
welcome enhancements has been to look at the usability of the interface and how customers
actually respond when asked to carry out a series of tasks. One of the most telling of
those tasks was to uninstall a program from the desktop, something that often has to be
done by home workers, teleworkers and mobile users. In all these scenarios the users are
often in a position where they need to remove an installed application.
Microsoft has also discovered what many of us have known for a long time, that the
Add/Remove Programs item in Control Panel is never used. Instead, users simply delete the
files either through Explorer or by dragging them to the Recycle Bin. As a result, the
registry is not cleaned up and problems start. Starting with Professional, whenever you
attempt to delete a program, if it is Windows 2000 aware then it will uninstall itself
correctly even if the user simply drags the icon over the Recycle Bin. This is achieved as
a result of the new Windows Installer Service which takes complete control of all
application management. If you have had any experience with the Office 2000 Beta then you
will already have seen part of this product in action.
Microsoft’s successful Windows NT 4.0 Server Terminal Server Edition has now been
completely subsumed into both the Windows 2000 Server and Advanced Server products. The
additional components inside the Advanced Server will include load balancing but Microsoft
has backed away from some of the improvement talked about at the PDC last year. With NCD
building its ThinPath client on the Remote Desktop Protocol, it is looking as if Microsoft
is still playing a waiting game on its own advanced development of the protocol.
There are a significant number of other enhancements, additions, applications and new key
components inside Windows 2000, so much so that we could take an entire issue just giving
them no more than a cursory look. Suffice to say, over the next few months we will be
scrutinising many of these components, the different versions of Windows 2000 itself and
the implications for your organisation of this software. So far, it looks far more
promising than any previous product from Microsoft.
