Windows 2000 to RTM in November, ship in December

According to a report in Computer Reseller News that corroborates information I've received, Microsoft Corporation is now planning to release Windows 2000 to manufacturing in November and ship it to customers by December. This plan verifies my report, first published in WinInfo months ago, that the company is planning to use Fall Comdex in Las Vegas as the blow-out introduction for Windows 2000.

Under this revised official timeline, which apparently circulated to the Windows 2000 team recently, Windows 2000 Professional, Server, and Advanced Server will "go gold" or "RTM" before or during Fall Comdex, which takes place November 15-19. The CRN report quotes an unnamed Microsoft representative as saying that the company plans to publicly announce the Windows 2000 ship date during its Microsoft Marketing Day on October 25th. Microsoft released the final major pre-release version of Windows 2000, known as Release Candidate 2 (RC2), a week ago. RC2 was shipped to hundreds of thousands of technical beta testers and partners on CD. Corporate Preview Program members and MSDN Universal subscribers will receive RC2 on CD over the new few weeks.

Once Windows 2000 ships, Microsoft can look ahead to some of its short term improvements to the operating system, including DataCenter Server Edition, due to ship 90-120 days after the other editions, add-ons such as AppCenter Server, and a 64-bit version of Windows 2000 that is due in mid-2000. Microsoft is also planning to release quarterly service packs for Windows 2000, in sharp contrast to its willy-nilly approach for updating Windows NT. Windows 2000 service packs can be "slipstreamed" into the operating system, bypassing the need to manually reinstall fixes every time an application is added to a system.

As always, visit my SuperSite for Windows to stay up-to-date on the latest developments with Windows 2000