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Windows Server 2003 Update Coming in 2005
IT professionals will get longer Microsoft product support and improved Exchange Server 2003 spam prevention.
by Jim Minatel
Tech•Ed, May 25, 2004
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Andy Lees
Corporate VP for Server and Tools Business, Microsoft
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IT professionals will receive several new tools for Windows Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2003, and improved support across many Microsoft business software products. These improvements all aim to reduce the time spent troubleshooting and firefighting existing infrastructure and applications.
The key component administrators will see affecting all new Windows Server System products is Microsoft's Common Engineering Roadmap. Andy Lees, Microsoft's corporate vice president for server and tools business, introduced in his Tuesday Tech•Ed keynote the roadmap defining the beginning of a set of common-compliance criteria for all future Windows Server System products released after January 1, 2005.
The first version of this roadmap, the Common Engineering Criteria 2005, requires all new servers to ship with a Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) management pack at launch so every new server product will be manageable through MOM. The roadmap's 2005 version also requires that these server products make core training and prescriptive guidance for usage scenarios available within 90 days of product launch.
Windows Server 2003 users should look forward to a server upgrade release—referred to as "R2"—at an unspecified time in 2005. Organizations with branch offices or other remote locations could benefit from two new features demonstrated at Tech•Ed.
First, a new hub-and-spoke model for branch offices makes it easier to set up and consistently use file replication. Remote offices as well as remote and traveling users will see faster network access on replicated files, thanks to the planned Remote Differential Compression feature. With this enabled for replication, replication transfers only the changed file bits when a user edits a replicated file, resulting in much smaller data transfers over the network. These smaller data transfers also reduce the time the user must wait for the save to complete, and save network administrator bandwidth as well.
"R2" also adds an Active Directory Service called Active Directory Federation Services. Businesses implementing cross-company collaboration services using this will exchange public keys giving their AD structures the ability to work with one another for user authentication and policies. "Anywhere Access" in "R2" reduces the complexity for users accessing file shares and terminal servers remotely, in some cases eliminating the need for a VPN. You can configure "Anywhere Access" more granularly than a VPN by specifying which applications or shares a user can access remotely, providing more controlled access and security.
Longer Support Life Eases Upgrade Pressure
Lees also announced a new support lifecycle policy for business and developer products that extends the total support life for many products from seven to 10 years. Products in the "mainstream support phase," which lasts five years after the products' general release, will see their "extended support phase" lengthened from two years to five years. Additionally, online self-support for these products will extend to an additional 10 years, at least—instead of eight—after mainstream and extended support ends. The policy clearly excludes consumer products such as Windows XP Home Edition, and unfortunately excludes Windows NT 4, which is too old to meet the requirements for the extended support.
An additional caveat to the policy extends mainstream support even longer if a new product version isn't available within three years of a product's release. If this is the case, mainstream support will extend past the five-year minimum until at least two years after an upgrade version releases, so customers will have at least two fully supported years to upgrade to the new version, easing the pressure to rush an upgrade to stay supported.
Exchange Server Takes Another Shot at Spam
Demonstrating a "caller ID" for e-mail specification submitted as a standard last week to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Lees showed how the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter (IMF) for Exchange Server 2003 reduces incoming spam by using reverse DNS lookup to increase the odds that an e-mail message is coming from the domain it purports to be from. This increases Exchange's ability to block spam coming from spoofed e-mail addresses.
IMF runs on the Exchange server, reducing the desktop client burden of blocking spam and giving end users the same anti-spam features whether they use the Outlook desktop client or Exchange's Outlook Web Access client. In a separate announcement, Microsoft and Meng Wong, the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) creator, said they have converged their two proposals into one, hoping to lead the industry with a cutting-edge e-mail identification solution to be considered by the IETF.
Exchange Edge Services aims to stop spam at the SMTP level before it enters the corporate network. Edge Services separates SMTP services for Exchange onto a separate server running in a DMZ, so the incoming traffic can be inspected and either passed or rejected before coming through the firewall into the corporate network.
While none of today's many announcements were groundbreaking, taken as a whole, the numerous incremental upgrades show a solid continued commitment to easing IT administration workloads and improving the end-user experience. Windows Server 2003 "R2" features some welcome improvements, and if the Exchange anti-spam features work with no unintended ill effects, it's hard to imagine any Exchange 2003 shop that wouldn't consider them valuable. For some businesses, any period of support will never be long enough, but the extended support policy is good for almost all businesses using Microsoft products.
About the Author
Jim Minatel is the Wrox Press editor for Microsoft tools and languages as well as Web standards at Wiley Publishing.
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