Real World Computing

Exclaimer Store Compressor doesn't cost very much: if you run Small Business Server, it's just £99 plus £20 per year support for any number of mailboxes on a server. If you're on full Exchange Server, it starts at £139 (plus £30 per year support) for 25 seats. There are volume discounts for lots of seats, 1,000 users costing £1,420 plus £285 a year. Overall, it works like a charm, and applying its light touch to your Exchange Server storage management can pay off extremely well, easily justifying its low cost. Highly recommended.

Yep, it's another Windows release...

The leaked news that Microsoft is aiming for a late 2009 release of the next version of Windows is something that brings me out in a cold sweat. Maybe the news isn't really true and just a mischievous rumour. But the mere fact that the news is circulating is enough to give the topic its own credibility. Naturally, I'm not helping, but "am I bovvered?"

The reality is that Vista has redefined the term "slow burn" in the business space. It's clear that lukewarm doesn't even begin to describe the installation rate, but there are many places where Vista has been a huge success. The forthcoming Service Pack 1 has, as usual, caused many to press the hold button, awaiting evaluation of the new build. In truth, though, evaluations should already be under way if there's any likelihood to get Vista installed this calendar year.

The news, correct or not, that Microsoft is pushing the release of the next release of Windows into late 2009 will do nothing other than to add more lethargy to a slow market.

For myself, I am concerned about just what Microsoft will do for this new release. History suggests this should be a "marketing release" rather than a "technical release" - in other words, adding in geegaws and other twiddles rather than hard-core changes to the centre of the product.

But if that's the case, who's going to be impressed by more icing on the Vista cake? The problem is exacerbated by the reality that we have a big server-side release this year, which won't be followed up by a second big technical release within 12-18 months.

So are we talking about client-side changes only? This would appear to be the case, but there are some areas where client-side technology could be deployed to good effect. The most likely is one of self-hosted virtualisation on the desktop, allowing you to decide in which security sandbox an application should run, with each sandbag running at a different level of high security.

There's much to merit this point of view, but the timescales for such a major core rewrite of the product are nothing if not tight. It's clear that Microsoft needs to come up with a clear strategy that dovetails with its server-side operations, but which adds considerable sizzle to the company desktop. I don't envy Microsoft the task.

Jon Honeyball

Roaming again

As you may recall, last month I started looking at roaming profiles and folder redirection in a mixed-mode Windows XP and Windows Vista network. The last thing I said was that one of the things to bear in mind when doing this is that you need to create your Group Policy Objects (GPO), and that you're going to have to do this from a Vista box. The reason for this is that if you don't do it from Vista, you'll miss out on a whole new set of redirection capabilities. So, what are these new capabilities, and just how different to XP's are they?

Continued....