News

Windows 2000 Experiencing Further Delays

• By Scott Bekker
• 01/19/1999

When ENT spoke with Craig Beilinson, Microsoft Windows 2000 product manager earlier this month, he was confident that the Beta 3 release would be out by the end of the quarter, with 5.0/2000 coming out by the end of the year.

Now, however, reports have the beta release in April and a final version pushed as far back as February 2000.

The new version has been a long time coming, now in year three of NT version 4.0. Beta 2 was released in September of last year, Service Pack 4 in October. A taste of Beta 3 was released last month with Release Candidate 0 (RC0). The real beta 3 release is still far off, however.

One reason for the delay could be the bugs in Active Directory. Microsoft needs to make sure its directory services are feature complete for enterprise users to migrate because many of them are already using products like Novell Directory Services (NDS). With a delay, however, Novell Inc. is collecting potential Active Directory users.

It seems everyone is ready for the release, including Intel Corp., who released its new Pentium III chip, code-named Katmai, to ship by the end of the quarter. It may have been useful to test out the new beta with the new chips but that may not be possible now.

One solution to Microsoft's problems could be a full interim release, such as Windows NT 4.5, but Microsoft hasn't commented on that. -- Brian Ploskina, Assistant Editor