SMS remains Microsoft's software distribution choice--for the moment.
Until Windows 2000's Active Directory sees more widespread deployment, Microsoft appears to be using its old standby, Systems Management Server (SMS), as a placeholder product for software distribution.
David Hamilton, Microsoft's lead product manager for management technologies, predicts that SMS is likely to stick around for quite some time on enterprise networks, despite the distribution capabilities of Windows 2000 servers.
"We'd love to get there, but it's going to take a while now before we can assume that Windows 2000 servers are present in a particular enterprise environment," Hamilton says.
Many solutions providers say they still sell and recommend Windows NT rather than Windows 2000 because there are more applications available for the older platform. And despite Microsoft's push toward W2K migration, Hamilton says the company geared the latest release of SMS to its finding that the long-time product is being used even more these days by large organisations, rather than less.
For the most part, these organisations are using Service Pack 2 for SMS 2.0 to migrate 32-bit Windows users to the W2K Professional desktop. But the new pack also is being used to distribute the W2K server itself, and to send out applications and updates for older environments like NT 3.0 and Windows 3.11 and 3.1.
Service Pack 2 contains a couple of new capabilities for W2K rollouts, Hamilton says. These include improved algorithms for software compression, plus a new "checkpoint restart" feature for jump-starting incomplete distribution attempts. Microsoft also has furthered its teamwork with Novell, initially evidenced in NT 4.71, around smoother compatibility between Windows servers and NetWare 4.0 and 5.0.
SMS, he notes, has "bigger beta programs" than virtually any other Microsoft product, due to the need for hefty support of so many different environments. Hamilton also didn't rule out the prospect that the basic functionality of SMS might be incorporated into some future product, possibly to be known under some other name.
If so, that would hardly be a first. Microsoft's recently announced Internet Security & Acceleration Server 2000 will include some of the capabilities of the current Proxy Server. Similarly, the upcoming Commerce Server 2000 will expand upon Microsoft's current Site Server Commerce Edition.
