Longhorn beta testing feedback
The government of Georgia's Fulton County, where Atlanta is located, has been testing Windows Server 2008 for almost three years. Before installing the operating system, the county's biggest need was tighter security, according to Keith Dickie, its assistant director of IT. For instance, he said that the county's libraries are under constant attack from hackers via the Internet as well as the public access terminals located inside library branches.

"With Windows Server 2003, it's hard to figure out what ports need to be open or closed," Dickie said. By comparison, Windows Server 2008 has made it easier for county IT staffers to lock down unused ports and manage network firewalls with domain controllers. Workers have even been able to make the domain controllers read-only, so "if somebody hacks that box, they can't take it over," Dickie said. Overall, he added, "we're able to reduce the surface area of attack."

Similarly, Microsoft's NAP (Network Access Protection) technology, a new feature in Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, is enabling Fulton County to block insecure servers and client systems -- think teleworkers whose systems haven't been properly updated -- from accessing its network.

"We tried to do this with Active Directory and domain policies. But now we can really enforce what used to be just a paper policy," said James Tabor, the county's network administrator.

NAP also will become available in the Service Pack 3 release of Windows XP, which is due in the first quarter of next year. That will let Fulton County "buy more time" before upgrading PCs from Windows XP to Vista, Tabor said.

The main detriment to Windows Server 2008 cited by Fulton County officials is a lack of support for the operating system by key third-party applications. For instance, the county's VoIP and unified messaging systems rely on Cisco's CallManager 4.1 software, which the county bought a little over six months ago. But CallManager 4.1 runs only on Windows 2000 Server, according to Jay Terrell, Fulton County's deputy director of IT.

Also, the country has had to run Internet Information Services 7.0 in Windows Server 2003 compatibility mode on systems running Windows Server 2008 in order to get some Web applications to work properly.

As a result, the county doesn't expect to move most of its third-party applications to Windows Server 2008 until a year from now, Terrell said. "We're not rushing to put anything into production that would hurt our users," he noted.

In contrast, Quixtar, which sells health and beauty products online through a network of independent business owners, is running Windows Server 2008 in production mode with Active Directory and on Web servers that are based on IIS 7.0 -- although in the latter case, it is using the Windows Server 2003 compatibility mode like Fulton County.

Matt Behrens, supervisor for IT infrastructure at Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Quixtar, said that with Active Directory, the biggest improvement has been in the time it takes to replicate the database. "What used to take five to six days now takes four to five hours," Behrens said.

The operating system's password policies also have been improved, according to Behrens. He said that with Windows Server 2008, he can require that workers with administrator-level access to systems create much more difficult-to-crack passwords than lower-level users must have.

As for IIS 7.0, Steve Cole, who heads Quixtar's Web operations, said that once the company got past some bugs in the Web server software in the first two beta releases of the OS, it hasn't had any further application compatibility issues. He added, though, that his staff has "had to do a fair amount of reconfiguration as it's a completely new architecture."

Cole likes new administration features in IIS 7.0. "It's doing things that we'd been wishing for for years," he said. But for now, raw performance on returning requested information to end-users is only about as good as Quixtar was seeing with IIS 6.0. "Our goal is to see this get at least 15 percent better, and at least 20 percent better in terms of (processing) capacity," Cole said. "Microsoft knows that's on the top of our list."

Microsoft also said that an RC0 version of its Windows Media Services 2008 software is being made available for download, as well as a Community Technology Preview release of the IIS 7.0 Media Pack.