Microsoft Corp. officials defended the fact that some of Microsoft's own applications, like Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2000, won't run on Windows Server 2003, saying the development focus with Exchange was how to provide the best messaging and collaboration experience.
"We had to focus the engineering effort on getting things like directory replication and performance—essential for Exchange and Windows server—which meant in some cases assuming a new version of Exchange and Windows Server 2003. So the orientation was making sure that as customers moved to the new platform, they got highly performing, reliable and manageable solutions," Bill Veghte, the corporate vice president of Microsoft's Windows Server group, told eWEEK in an interview.
Most of the product versions that would not work with Windows Server 2003 were in the NT 4.0 product wave, and Veghte told his engineering team to first focus on the migration, as this offered a lot of value in the improved experience.
Legacy versions of Microsoft's SQL Server database (versions 6.5 and 7.0) also will not run on Server 2003 at all, while SQL Server 2000 will only run with a server pack. Gordon Mangione, the corporate vice president of the SQL Server team, told eWEEK in an interview this week that the vast majority of SQL customers had indicated that they were going to be deploying its latest version on the latest operating system.
News source: eweek.com
