Why is Windows 2000 Beta 3 so important?

When Microsoft's Deborah Willingham and Brian Valentine announced Windows2000 Beta 3 on Thursday, one thing became very clear: This isn't your usualbeta release. Unlike previous milestones on the road to Windows 2000, theBeta 3 release is the first feature-complete, production quality build theteam has created and it wants enterprise customers, developers, and otherbusiness customers testing it as early and as often as possible.

For Microsoft, this massive release--over 650,000 testers will receive Beta3--is particularly important. Aside from Microsoft's own deployment of thebeta OS, twenty three Rapid Deployment Partners (RDP) will be deployingWindows 2000 Beta 3 in production environments over the next three months.But it doesn't stop there: By evaluating Windows 2000 Beta 3 today, withvarious hardware and software configurations, corporate customers of allsizes can determine how best to deploy the OS when it's released by year'send.

"Windows 2000 Beta 3 is a huge step forward in enterprise readiness," saysWillingham. "Reliability is up, on both the client and server. And Windows2000 scales from the workgroup to the enterprise. Our Server product is atleast twice as scalable as the previous version (Windows NT 4.0)."

The benefits of Windows 2000 to businesses are obvious: The simplicityinitiative, as well as technologies such as Active Directory andIntelliMirror, has lowered overall total cost of ownership (TCO).Administrators and support personal will have an easier time supportingWindows 2000 networks. And Windows 2000 is "world ready" with globaldeployment and Multilanguage support.

Windows 2000 Beta 3 is important because it's the first release of thismassive OS that's ready for business desktops and servers. And businessesnow have at least five months to evaluate the first feature-complete versionof Windows 2000. Microsoft says that one out of every two corporations inAmerica will evaluate Windows 2000 Beta 3 before the end of the year.

"People need access to the code early," says Microsoft VP Ed Muth. "A broadbeta release [such as Beta 3] does this. Given our experience with other OSreleases and the excellent condition of the [Windows 2000] code today, weare confident we will ship this calendar year.