Today in San Francisco, Microsoft launches the long-awaited Windows Server 2003, the Windows 2000 Server sequel that the software giant hopes will convince customers who are holding on to Windows NT Server 4.0 to upgrade. Described as Microsoft’s biggest product launch of 2003, today’s event will also see the release of the Visual Studio .NET 2003 software development suite and SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition (64-bit), a version of Microsoft’s popular relational database server that runs on 64-bit versions of Windows 2003. But the release of Windows 2003 itself is, of course, the main event. This product was long in the making and has important repercussions for Microsoft, its partners, and its competitors.
As ever, Microsoft are offering 180-day evaluation versions of Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Server and both the CD set or direct download are free, minus small postage fee required for physical media.
The “Resource Kit” is unreleased as yet, but the core tools can already be downloaded.
