August 18, 1998, Seattle, Wash.

MR. ALLCHIN:NT has been a core part of my life ever since I came to Microsoft about eight years ago.And for the thousands of people that are in the development organization, it’s a way of life.Each release we’ve shipped has impacted more and more customers, and they’ve given us feedback, like you have, on each of those releases.Based on the feedback we have from NT 4, NT 5 is the most comprehensive platform we’ve ever built.It’s also been one of the most challenging.

The way we managed such a project inside Microsoft is through design reviews.In these design reviews we have the technical experts come in, and they share the progress, their challenges — they’re pretty intense.There’s a lot of fist-pounding, a lot of discussion, a lot of criticism, because we are trying to build the best product we can possibly build for customers.

This workshop hopefully is a little bit like those design reviews.We’ll have the technical experts come in and talk to you, more in a conversational way than a formal presentation.And I hope that you’ll give us the feedback, what you think of how we’ve done.We still have a ways to go.But I also hope you’ll see the passion we’ve got for it, and the vision for taking NT to be, you know, the richest, most advanced distributed platform that’s ever been built.NT 5 isn’t going to quite get us there, but it’s just another step along the way as we work to it.

We’ve been at NT for quite some time.NT 3.1, 1993, there were some challenges in NT 3.1.We were still incredibly proud of it, though.We were proud because of the microkernel.It was an extensible base.We had sort of shed the baggage of the way certain compatibility issues had just, you know, risen over time.So, we’re very proud of that.

We listened to feedback, and we really focused on size and performance.NT 3.1 was much, much larger than we had anticipated.So we had a lot of work to do.We came out with 3.5.1 about a year later — that focused on interop because customers told us that that was critical, and more compatibility in terms of 16-bit apps.

NT 4 was a major milestone.By bringing it into alignment with the new Windows 95 UI and adding additional Web support directly in the operating system.In ’97, we shipped the enterprise edition.Not a huge, huge radical change, but still a step up in terms of adding available clustering to our product line.In ’98, we shipped the terminal server.

What are we doing for NT 5?We plan to come out with both the workstation, the server and the enterprise edition all at the same time, and the features that we’re putting in the product are based on customer feedback.Now, what is some of the feedback we’ve heard from people?We’ve heard quality.Whether it’s the desktop or server, they want us to include quality.They actually think we have pretty good quality in NT 4.They want more.It’s not that we’re perfect.We have stumbled in terms of some server specs.We have been better in others.Every time that we make a mistake, we try to work on it and improve it.We are committed to quality, as you’ll hear throughout the day, and in particular Moshe’s presentation focuses on the process, about how we’re building this product.And we want to bring you in, if you will, to the whole experience, because it really is an amazing experience.And I think by the end of Moshe’s presentation, you’ll have some appreciation for that.

Customers asked for incremental deployment.You probably think of NT 5 as a huge monolith.By the time I’m done, hopefully, you will think, no, it can be done in incremental steps.We have spent a lot of time listening to customers about that.Ease of use, this isn’t the key focus for NT 5, but it’s something that we’re hearing from customers, and so it’s certainly going to play into what we do, a little bit in NT 5, but even more in future versions.

They also are saying for businesses, hey, I’ve got to get the best of the Web and the best of Windows.Windows has a lot of power there, but I need to be able to reach to partners, suppliers, I need to be able to touch customers, I need to be able to write the apps faster.I want to have the biggest reach down to a variety of desktops.So, all of those are in the top level of the customer feedback we’ve heard.

In terms of a desktop, they want a lower TCO, and that’s not something that was on our original slate when we started NT 5.We were not focused on this, and the customers made it very clear that we needed to be.So we backed up, and we started to focus on features to address that.And they’ve always been saying, hey, give me one-kernel technology that I can deploy in my business everywhere.We want the best of Windows 9x, but we still want all the power, security, scale, and the like of NT.

In terms of the server, I have a phrase called the abilities.Some people call them RAS, reliability, availability, serviceability, but the list goes on, manageability, and the like.So it’s all the abilities, that’s what they want out of their server platforms.They also want the distributed services.Well, we have a directory in NT 4 that’s nowhere near as comprehensive as it needs to be or what our customers have been asking.So, we just spent a great deal of time on that.

But it’s not just the directory, they really want comprehensive services.They want a distributed time system that they can keep, you know, with a satellite clock, or with other servers, or the like.They don’t want to worry about things like synching their server time or their desktop time.They want, of course, a public key system and a private key system because there’s benefit to both, and on and on.

They also want us to not forget the communications infrastructure they’ve got in the company.You know, so far the network switches and dialing environment have always been separate.So they’ve been saying, hey, tie all those together.This is the feedback we’ve been hearing.It was sort of the feedback that we heard when we started NT 5, and then as we worked with deployment customers who have been working with us pretty closely, they’ve been giving us more feedback, which has been honing these.

So, what are our overall goals? To have the business desktop, whether it’s desktop, if you will, or laptop, for businesses.There should be no excuses in what we’re trying to accomplish, and customer should be very satisfied.

Multipurpose server, we’ve always been multipurpose, but we want to be able to stretch that in a variety of ways to add the distributed services I talked about, so that you can go distributed if you want, or if you want to go very centralized with additional scale, you can do that.We also wanted to put a platform in place for writing business applications — that has continued to evolve, really to make this simpler.

Now, if you use them both together, we also wanted to up-level the capability.We wanted to think about the workstation independent from the server.And, in fact, the server usages independent from each other, and I’m going to spend a lot more time on that.The best platform, meaning that if you used the NT 5 Workstation and an NT 5 Server or the Enterprise Edition, you’ll get additional benefit from it.

So, these are the goals we have been working to.They’re very ambitious.Let’s just start walking through these core features.And one of the things I do want to say is that this presentation is the only one in which we’re really going to talk in terms of usage, in terms of how is it better in a mobile, how is it better in a desktop, or how is it better in a file/print, how is it better in Web, how is it better in application servers, in each of the server categories?

What we decided to do, since it’s going to be more like those design reviews, is have the functional areas come in and talk.In fact, the outline you just heard about is like my average scheduled meetings through the month, it’s the technical areas.So, when you get the presentations from each of those technical areas, pull back and think about it in terms of the usages I’m going to talk about here, because this is how we’re actually going to communicate it with customers.And so far this is working very, very well, and fits exactly with the model that they have in their minds.

In terms of the workstation itself, separate from the server.Let’s suppose you’ve got NT 4 servers, or NT 3.5.1 servers deployed, and you just want to upgrade the client, these are the benefits that you can get.There are even others, but it gives you an idea here.The easiest Windows yet.We’re not making huge strides here, but we are including things that haven’t been done even in Windows 98.We have personalized menus, the demo that we’ll show you in just a few minutes.Take some of the technology that you might have expected or seen already in Office 2000 and we’re making that a native part of what’s in the operating system.

Internet support, this is going to have the new, improved Internet Explorer technology as a core part of it.Mobile support, we have a technology called One-Stop Synchronization, where you can synchronize a whole set of your data sources at one time.So, when you’re ready to go run for the plane, you can just push basically one button, and your mail, your files, your Web favorites, your Web pages can all be synchronized, and you can go offline.When you come back in, they’ll be synchronized back.

NT power, well, just like NT 4, if you add enough memory, NT performs better than Windows 98, greater than 32 megs and NT starts pulling ahead of the current Windows 9x family.That will still be true in NT 5.

Security, we already had security systems, but what people asked for in the mobile case in particular was encrypted file storage.So, now this encrypted file system has improved NTSS in that way.

Reliability, fewer reboots, which Moshe is going to talk about, but I can say that this is an area where we’ve definitely focused hard.We focused by listening to customers on the configuration, when they had to change a particular configuration and a reboot was required, whether it be plugging in a PCMCIA card or starting up a TCP stack, or changing an IP address, or whatever, we’ve removed a great number of those things.We’ve also focused on blue screens that have happened by coding around the situation where the hardware failed and the like.So this is an area where we’ve focused quite a bit.

The best of Windows 98, and Windows 98 improved certain things we had in Windows 95.We worked on adding those to NT, whether they be in the hardware area of USB, 1394 and the like, and Plug and Play system as well, or whether it be more in the graphics area, where we’re adding DX-6 to the system and are bringing NT up to be basically the premier desktop in that area.

And as I mentioned, lowest TCO.This is an area where we didn’t start off so well, but we’ve spent an amazing amount of time on this area, just an amazing amount.And it’s stuff that you may not see right off the bat, but I think as you spend time during the next few days, you’ll probably get an inclination of how much we’ve focused on improving the way data is stored on your local desktop.

We’ve basically segregated the state into different pockets where there’s state for the operating system, you know, the code files, if you will.There’s state for the regenerable, things like when we come up and we can detect Plug and Play devices.There’s state dealing with what the user has created, and on, and on.So, we’ve segregated those.Actually, on a fresh install, we move things around from where they were before.So, we’re trying to take a very — a more rigid view of what System 32, if you know that directory, is, what’s stored in there.What’s stored in the profiles.What’s machine specific and what’s user specific.And we’re not done in beta 2, but you’ll be able to get a pretty good idea.On an upgrade, you can’t move everything around, but on an actual fresh install, we do focus on that.

We’ve also heard that deploying NT has been a real problem, where what customers wanted to do was wrap up everything just the way they want it on the desktop, including the applications, they’ve got it all configured, all the important things like color, and then they basically freeze-dry it, put it on a diskand then they want to distribute that.That wasn’t possible before.It is in NT 5.We actually back-ported some of that to NT 4.But with NT 5, we take it even farther.

We also have things like the set-up manager, which lets you customize answering questions to the set of install scripts.So the result is, you’ll be able to take and freeze-dry an NT workstation image, put it up on the server, and then use our deployment capability to fault that into the client, virtually with no questions asked of the user.

Management, the Windows installer, dll hell.We haven’t done a very good job there, along with the rest of the industry, in terms of making rules so that shared dlls and the conflicts that happen there can be managed.While we don’t solve the problem in NT 5, we’ve certainly improved upon it a lot.And so the Windows installer is a native service in NT 5, which I believe as we move on Windows applications will greatly help this problem.

Administration, a key problem we had was that we didn’t have a common interface or instrumentation on the desktop.And we spent a lot of time on that, and we think we’ve made great strides in the WBEM area in terms of one common interface to get you all types of instrumentation.And we also have an event system to be able to push out some of those events, although it’s not as grandiose as what we’re going to do in the future.But it gives you an idea.Now, every one of these can be done without changing your server infrastructure.They’re just benefits of the client used in a standalone way.

And Yusuf is going to come back out and give us a little demo of the enhanced UI as well as the mobile support.

MR.Medhi:Sure.Okay.So, one of the things that I want to talk to you about is that, on the user interface, one of the areas you focused on is really improving ease of use.Business customers have basically said to us that the Windows 95 desktop provides some good enhancements, but that their users continue to struggle with basically launching applications, finding information that they needed on the Web or on their own computer.And then basically trying to implement in international organizations and multinational corporations.

I want to give you just a couple of things, and we’re going to dive into the details on the second day of what we’ve done to improve overall ease of use.One of the things we see here, just off the top, is that it is pretty much the consistent look and feel that you had with Windows 95.So we don’t make radical changes to the desktop.What we’ve done actually is sort of behind the scenes made a couple of things to make the system overall smarter.

So one of the top problems maybe many of you have seen is that when you buy a PC and you go and you look at the Programs menu, you’re seeing sort of cascades of programs that are on the computer.And users have a tough time trying to figure out, well, what application should I launch.And even in the business scenario that is a problem.

One of the nice things that we have is basically personalized menus, which, as you can see here, what they do is they just show you the couple of applications that you use most frequently, and by coming down and hovering in here, we can pop up all the other applications that maybe are run on the system.So when I go run Excel, for example, what it will do it is will run Excel, and it will now add Excel to the programs menu, then if I come back and take a look at the start button, what you’ll see is that the system has sort of adapted and added Excel to the menu. And so as you use the system, it gets smarter about what you use, and if things aren’t used after a while it will drop them off one level below.So the system adapts.

The second area of improvement we noted was basically going to open and find programs.Again, sort of a similar problem that we’ve seen before, for example, when we go and do a File Open, again, if you think of opening up into the directory tree, there are just lists, for example, of applications or files, and it’s hard for people to find what they need.What we’ve done here is we’ve added a bar here that basically puts some of the most frequently used areas of the product right at the click of a button.For example, my documents folder, or the desktop, or even a most recently used folder, which basically lists all the applications.

What we’ve found is that people tend to use the same applications or the same programs, and they don’t have to essentially go search their hard disk.So this has been a nice addition in usability testing.And we’ve done a lot of little things.For example, as I start to type in the name of the program, it will auto-complete, based on what’s in that folder.So just to give you a feel for some of the nice things we’ve done there.

One of the last areas that people have struggled with is really just finding and searching information.And we’ve done this both in the case of just using the computer, Windows NT 5 Workstation without the server, and then with the server.With the server we can talk about searching the Active Directory for printers.Even without it, though, just go looking at your own computer, we’ve done some enhancements.

So, for example, if I show you the search view here, what we’ve done is we’ve basically continued to integrate and incorporate HTML, even in this case, as a search window.So that I can come in and look at particular topics.If I come in and click Type, the UI will adjust, give me the drop-down, and I can choose from the types, for example, do search now, and that will list the documents.And again, I can come in and hover on a particular picture, and it will pull up the HTML view.So lots of little things we’ve put into user interface, to basically make it smarter and make it easier for people to get their business tasks done.

One other example of what we’ve done is really in the area of multilingual support.And this is obviously a very important thing for businesses that have corporations in many countries.And one of the tough problems today is that, as a user moves from, let’s say,one country to another, and they come and sit down at that desktop, what happens is they have to basically use the system in the localized language of that country, of that computer, they can’t use it in their own language.

So, for example, if we pull up a particular document, and I want to come in and type in that document today, you’re limited to sort of the English character set.So if I can come in now and basically switch the language set, so I can choose Arabic here, I can come in and actually type in, in that language.So now at any computer now a user can move between basically subsidiaries, sit down at that computer and compose in their own language.

MR. ALLCHIN:There’s no system, to our knowledge, that has the level of power that we’ve got here, because it’s actually a single worldwide binary, including all the — (inaudible) — languages.So we’ll be able to correct some of the problems we’ve heard from customers of wanting a single service pack from a binary perspective that can hit all machines, that’s one problem.The second problem was that you could log in, in different — from a user profile perspective, into different languages, and the user interface would switch on the fly.I don’t believe anyone else has anything like this.It’s something that we’ve been working at since 3.1, when we first put in unicode.So it’s been a long, long path.

MR. Medhi:Okay.So just as Jim said, what he just talked about, I’ve taken that exact same machine that I was just working on in English.I logged off, I logged back on now as the userlet’s say from the Japanese subsidiary, and as it comes up what you’ll notice is that Windows NT can now adjust, and the font set now for using the program has adjusted to Japanese.So this is an amazing thing for companies, where today they basically have to have, about, let’s say up to 30 different versions of Windows NT and languages, and when you have a service pack you have to have three different versions of the service pack.Now, we’ve just reduced that management issue down to essentially one version of NT, one version of the service pack.

Okay.We want to walk over here, and Jim wanted to show you some of the things that we’ve done in terms of mobile support.So I’m just going to give you a brief glimpse here of a couple of things.One of the things, obviously, is support for PCMCIA, and running it on the laptop.I don’t know if you can see the laptop here, but we have a laptop running.And what we can do now, in addition to obviously doing all of the power management and support for our PC card, we can now more easily set up network connections.And one of the troubles for users, is basically in using a particular laptop, is that when they go to set up a network connection, the places to set up network connections used to be all over the user interface.

So if you wanted to set up a virtual private network, or a RAS, or a point-to-point dial up, you had to know different places to go.Now what we’ve done is we’ve aggregated those all into one area, and we have a nice wizard that basically automates that process.So, as you can see here, I can choose what type of connection I want to make, walk through a couple of very simple dialogues, and when I’m done, we’ve now set up the connection.

MR. ALLCHIN:And any stacks that haven’t been loaded, appropriate drivers, they’re all dynamically loaded.So it’s very, very simple.We’ve gotten a lot of good feedback on the progress here.It’s still not quite as easy as we want, but I think that once you play with this, you’ll say we’ve made a lot of progress.There was some ridiculous number, 20-some steps, including several reboots that you had to go through if you didn’t have the TCP stack, or whatever stack you were using, loaded.So it’s a big, big improvement.

MR. Medhi:Yes.So no reboots there, a much faster way to connect.

And then the last thing I want to show you is, in addition to making connectivity easier, once you’re connected we’ve also done a lot of work with helping users keep track of their information.And that’s one of the biggest things.When you’re moving quickly beyond — back and forth between the laptop, I think one of the things that probably you all struggled with is essentially trying to keep your information in synch.So, for example, when you came over and you brought your laptop, for those of you who brought laptops, you probably had to synch up your mail file, copy down documents, maybe copy a few Web pages to read off line.What we’ve done now with Windows NT 5 is we’ve basically enabled a centralized service command to do all that for you.

I’m going to give you an example. I’m going to set up this system as if I’m going to take this laptop off line, to show you how much easier we’re going to make it now to keep your data in synch.The first thing I’m going to do is go ahead and take a particular Web page, for example, let’s say I want to read the Web page about Sidewalk in the city that I’m going to go to, go ahead and make this available offline.What that will do now is make a copy locally, and it will set it up for caching offline on a regular basis.

In addition, I’m going to go to a public network server, in the corporation, and here’s where a lot of people in this user group keep their files, up on this network server.I keep mine in this directory here.I have a set of files, for example, that I’m going to keep.What I’m going to do is I’m going to mark this folder now for offline.And so what happens now is that it’s going to basically make this folder and all the subfolders available for offline, cache them, and so now when I decide to go mobile, I’m able to basically have this automatically synched up.

I’m going to show you a step here that most users wouldn’t go through, but just to give you a feel for what’s going on behind the scenes.We have a service called the Synchronization Manager, it’s essentially the engine that does all of the synch-ups.So what you can see here is the things I’ve decided to bring offline with me, the Web page, the file, basically just my share of the network server, and email.

What I can do is I can set up each of these things by connection.So there’s a lot of depth in here that we’re going to get into and explain to you.But, for example, if I have a slow link connection, I can decide just to synch up the most minimal amount of email, if I have a fast link, I’ll basically cache all of the data.So you can set it up by link, by connection, a number of other settings I’m not going to go into now.I’m going to close it, and now what I’m going to do is I’m going to go ahead and log off.And what you’ll see is when I log off, it goes ahead and automatically copies all these files.So think about now when you have to exit the office, you don’t have to manually go and get all those things.You can actually just log off quickly, and it will automatically copy the files down.

As soon as we log off here, what I’ll do is go ahead and take us off the network.So I’m going to take off the PCMCIA card, log back on, and what you’ll see now is that the system will work in the offline state.So, for example, if I come in and take a look at that Web page, I can come in, pull up the browser, work offline, and I’m able to go to my favorites, and obviously view the favorite sites.So there’s a favorite site offline.In addition, I can come to the network share, it will prompt me and say, do you want to work offline, or do you want to connect?I’ll say, work offline.And what you’ll see now is that we have just my folder, and this is a great thing for users, again, in terms of ease of use, because it sustains essentially the same user interface, the same processes which they act with that server, and now it’s just seamless whether they’re offline or connected.

MR. ALLCHIN:You can create files, you can delete files, it makes no difference.So, I can create subfolders, and any of the things that you might typically do.

MR. Medhi:So I’ve made a change to that file, and now basically what I’m going to do is, I’m going to reconnect with the network, and we’ll come down, we’ll just reestablish the connection here.Give it a second to connect.There we go.Okay.So now we’re connected, and what you’ll see is, I’ll come back to the server, and sure enough there are all the other folders on that server, as well as mine, and the changes I’ve made to that document.So an example of just a couple of things we’ve done.

MR. ALLCHIN:Good.We feel really good about the progress we’ve made in this.We have work to do in terms of fit and finish, and you’ll see it in this beta.But, we’re going to take a lot of customer feedback about ways to make this offline, mobile experience much simpler for users.Most of that will be easy for us to do just in terms of a simple UI.

I’m going to switch to the server now.Now, let’s assume you don’t upgrade your clients at all.You’ve still got your, say, NT 4 or Windows 9x systems.File and print, and I’m not going to be able to, in this presentation, drill into how we’re making each of these better.I’m just going to give you a sample.If you have file service today, you can just go take an NT 5 server CD, flop it in there, and you will get better performance.You will get the encrypted file system, you will get quota support, something we’ve been really beaten up about from customers, that they’ve been asking for.You will get incredible support for enterprise storage, something we’re going to give you a demonstration on in just a minute.The idea is that you can just walk up, just make this file server better.

Ditto with the print systems.We’ve spent a great deal of time just making the print system better.If you measure the performance it takes, in the NT 5, to exit from doing the start of the print to the time it’s actually in the spooler, it could be up to 200 percent faster.So, performance is just one of the benefits we’ve done.Once you actually look at the printing system, just that alone is very nice.We automatically put the drivers back to the clients, you don’t have to think about drivers as much anymore if it’s a network printer.We’ve done a lot of things from that perspective.

All right.What about Web servers?If you’ve got a Web server, it’s got NT 4 running on it and you upgrade it.Well, guess what, you get better things.You get DAV support, you know that particular term, Distributed Authoring and Versioning we added.We also have — we’re fixing something that we considered to be problems, apps could run away with the CPU in current NT 4 with IIS 4.Why, because there was no CPU throttling.There was no limit on it.On NT 5 we added a technology in the kernel called Job Object, where you can put limits on what people could do, meaning processes.And IIS 5 takes advantage of that facility, so it actually can limit the amount of CPU for particular applications that may be running as part of the Web server.

We spent a great deal of time in terms of robustness as well.And we also get performance.There’s a change that we’re doing, so that if you actually — I’m going to change this a little bit.If you have IE 5, on the client, and you have IIS 5, that is if you do upgrade a Web server and you have IE 5, in whatever means, even if you didn’t upgrade the NT Workstation, then you’ll get a lot better performance because we added a way to sense the protocols between them and be able to go to a compression mode that gives you better performance.The point is, if you upgrade your Web server you get better capability.

Application servers, now I mean this in two ways, first is line of business applications, it could be — I don’t know, SAP, PeopleSoft, Baan.You run that on NT 5, you’ll get better scaling.You’ll get a bunch of other capabilities, again, without changing the directory, without changing anything else, just by running it. Scaling is probably one of the key things that you’ll get.We also make databases better, in terms of the availability, the improvements that we’ve done in clustering, again, just upgrade those machines and you get better performance.

Communications servers, we’ve spent actually a lot of time in this area.It’s one area many of you may not have had a chance to really look at all the things that we have done.In this area I sort of lump all the things we’re doing as far as dialing.I’m lumping all the things that we’re doing, say, with IP stack, and some of the other security technology and the networking.I’m lumping in the fact that we’re adding a very advanced version of the streaming technology in the system.So if you have a communication infrastructure machine, it’s a great upgrade.If you’re using any of the routing support that we have, NT 5 Server is much, much faster with some technology called Fast Path, with blinding performance in that — if it’s used in that way, and on and on and on.

The infrastructure servers, now these are what you typically — what we call the domain control.So, you could upgrade all of these things I just talked about without changing your DC, you could leave them all as NT 4s.Now, let’s suppose that you want to put an NT 5 DC on the system.Well, just go grab a DC that’s there and upgrade it.Then you can decide when it is that you want to promote it to be a full DC running all of the NT 5 Active Directory capability.And during the next two days, you’re going to see a lot of detail about that.The point is, it’s actually an incremental move you can do.And we’re going to give you some demonstrations about how not only is it incremental in adding the infrastructure server, but you can use the technology a company may already have, like Exchange, to be able to propagate in a faster way the directory infrastructure.

So, I’ve talked about the client separately.I’ve talked about the server separately.What if you use them together?Well, the key things that we’ve been trying to do in this area is to really hammer on decreasing costs in the TCOs.So we have this technology, Intellimirror, which is sort of like an extension beyond what you just saw with what we call technology-wide client-side caching, and it gives you the ability to basically roam everything with you.That’s what we mean by that.Directory-based admin gives you a lot of flexibility to centralize, logically centralize your distributed environment.

The other thing that customers have been asking for in the TCO area is machine replacements.Well, we’re not perfect in machine replacement.We won’t be in NT 5.But we’ve come such as long way from what the environment is today.Today, it’s a nightmare.If you have a machine that has a disk that burns up, and you’ve got a lot of information on that machine, with some of the capability if you take both the client and the server together, we can make that machine replacement much, much, much easier.And, at the end of the two days, you’ll know the warts that we’ve got in that area, the problems we’ve got, but you’ll also see that we’ve worked pretty hard in this area to try to make improvements.

But that’s not it, because we actually make it a better platform.You can take advantage of the directory-enabled applications.This is in terms of what companies like Cisco are taking advantage of in the directory for making administration of their routers easier, or switches easier, but it’s also line-of-business applications that are leveraging the directory.So, you can go to one central place to make changes.And Web-based line of business, we have improved with things like DAV the ability to write applications on this platform in a better, simpler way.Integrated communication, you know we have a vision of one wire has all types of media support running on it.One API can give you access to everything.And we’ve worked very hard on TAPI to be able to do some of this.There’s some stuff in the product which, again, we want feedback on.We’ve worked on multiconferencing video support.We’ve got a little applet in there, mainly just to show off the power of what can be done within TAPI.

The point is, if you use them both together, it isn’t again required, but we’re trying to drive decreasing costs, even beyond what we can do independently, and increase the value.So, I want to walk through with Tanya some of the demos that you’ll be drilling into further during the next two days in terms of enterprise storage management, and in terms of the directory service.

MS. VAN DAMM:So, as you talked about, Jim, incremental upgrades to the server.What I’m going to show is a quick little peek on why someone would want to upgrade their file server.What I have here on the screen is MMC, or the Microsoft Management Console, that shows how we’ve configured this particular file server.There are actually eight disks here.And, in fact, we show here a striped set and a mirrored set.And we show different configurations that make it easier to manage this system.

I’m going to go ahead and simulate a very busy file server.As you can see here, it’s actually copying a lot of information onto this particular disk.So, when I go back to this disk, I’m a little concerned that this only has 200 megs of information.That’s a lot of information being copied there.So, I’m going to go ahead and make that bigger.

So, what we’ve done in NT 5 is include a nice new wizard that automatically detects — (inaudible) — and lets me then extend the size of this particular volume.Now, as you’ve noted, we’ve recreated the disk, and at the same time I’m still copying information to this disk.Which means your users, or people’s users will continue to access that server while I’m doing administrative tasks.

MR. ALLCHIN:This is just one little piece of all of the technology we’ve put in the enterprise storage.And you’re going to see a lot of that during the next two days.And there’s a machine down here in front someplace to give you the power of what we can do with the higher core storage management that we added to the system, the media management capability to employ applications from the device dependencies that they might have, and to do all this without reboot, which is a key thing we’ve focused on.

MS. Van Damm:So, the next thing I want to show, a lot of people ask me all the time, you know, I’m deploying Exchange so what is the quickest way for me to get ready for Active Directory.So, what I have here is Windows NT Server 5.0 with the Active Directory running.What you see here, in fact, is that nothing has been populated in this directory right now.This is a fresh install.

So, what I’m going to do is go over to Exchange, and what I have here is a typical example of an Exchange mail server, where I have the directory completely populated.And in here you can see the reciprocity set associated with Exchange.The important thing here is that customers have spent a lot of time going out and deploying Exchange, and you want to make sure that all of the information that I’ve put in the Exchange directory moved over to Active Directory.So, I’m going to go ahead and show that.

So, the way that I do that, basically, is, I’m going to go ahead and replicate that.Go back over to the Active Directory, and you can see all that information has been populated.So, if I drill down on Cynthia like I did before, all of her information that I had in the Exchange mail server now has been forwarded over to Active Directory.So Exchange really does help customers get ready for Active Directory.

MR. ALLCHIN:So, the key thing here is, this is not one way.This is bidirectional.So, in case a customer does make a mistake and goes back to the Exchange administration tool and adds a user, deletes a user, changes those properties, it will be replicated back over to the NT system.What customers are telling us that they actually want to do, though, is to do the migration one time, and then have the Active Directory just push it out, back into any Exchange servers that haven’t been upgraded yet.And then, in the future version of Exchange, it will totally rely on the NT directory.But, in the meantime, this is the way for us to just push up that information bidirectionally.

MS. Van Damm: So, the next thing I’m going to show is, the other questions customers ask is, what about NDS?So, what we have here is a NetWare 4 server with the NDS installed in the directory here.If I drill down in this one particular organizational unit, click on Cynthia, again, Cynthia has a lot of rich properties associated in NDS.And, again, I’ve made a lot of investment here.So, the important thing is to make sure that all of this information gets properly moved over to Active Directory.So, I’m going to go ahead and show that.

So, here I have the Active Directory Manager again, and I’m going to show the migration tool.I’m going to go ahead and create a new project.It’s just going to, again, simply walk me through the wizard.And what you can see here is, this is actually reading the Novell Netware Server.I have two things here, one is a Netware 3x bindery, as well as a Netware 4 NDS.So, I’m going to go ahead and drill down on the NDS part of this, go to the accounting organization unit.And that’s the part of the directory I want to migrate over to NT.I’m going to go ahead and finish the wizard.

It’s now going back to the NDS database, reading all of that information. One thing we’re doing here is that it also keeps a nice log for people so that if there are any changes or differences between the NDS directory and the Active Directory, it’s noted.Now, when I drill down, you can see that Cynthia’s information is already prepared for the Active Directory.

MR. ALLCHIN:Right.Now, this is actually not a bidirectional, what she just showed, this is a migration.We are working on technology to be able to do bidirectional as well, but it’s not here today.

MS. Van Damm:So, the next thing we want to show is what enterprise vendors are doing to integrate with Active Directory.And this is a really important area that we’ve been working on for the last six months or more.And what I’m showing here is a typical front, Web front end a lot of customers have put in front of their ERP applications, say, from SAP or from Baan.

So, the first thing I’m going to do is actually flip over to the directory.And you’ll see that I have — I’m stored in the directory, and that I’m a member of the manager’s group in the directory.So, when I go back over to SAP, go into the purchasing area, you’ll notice that SAP applies business rules to the manager’s group.So, in this case, the manager’s group has only $1,000 spending limit.

So, I’m going to go ahead and try to purchase some hardware here against SAP.And, as you can see, it doesn’t allow me to — the hardware was more expensive than I’m allowed to spend.So, now I’m going to go back to the directory.And, in most cases, if I belong to the HR department I would have these rights, and I’m going to change my membership.So, I’m going to make myself a member of the vice president’s group.I hope that’s okay with you.

And when I go back and refresh, you’ll notice that I’ve changed the business rules or actually by changing my membership in the Active Directory from the manager’s group to the vice president’s group, SAP is recognizing quite a different sort of business rules.So, when I go and try to purchase that hardware again, you’ll notice that I’m allowed to go ahead and do that.

MR. ALLCHIN:Thank you.We did the same thing in the routing switch area as well, and we’ve demonstrated some of that technology before.That’s also in here.And using the directory as a central repository for this logical centralization.

Now, we wanted to sort of switch and now show both the client and server together.And show some of the intellimirroring.And, unfortunately, there is so much power here, we’re not going to be able to show but just a little bit.But during the next two days, you’re going to get all the details.

So, Yusuf, what are you going to show?

MR. Medhi:Okay.Go ahead and pull these up.So, basically, one of the top things we’re trying to tackle with Intellimirror in Active Directory is when you have both Windows NT Server and Windows NT Workstation on the client is cost of ownership.And there are a lot of things that go into that.But one of the big things, really, is just managing the desktop, managing user settings.That’s a big, costly thing for a corporation.And one of the great things we get now with Windows NT 5 both on the client and the server is a more powerful way to do that with the Active Directory Intellimirror.

What we’re looking at here is two screens, basically.On the far right is a picture of the server, Windows NT Server, and the left is a standard Windows NT Workstation Desktop 5.0.And what we’re going to look at on the server here is, we’re looking at essentially the Active Directory for a particular company.And if you can see within the domain we have a number of groups, one of which is research.What I’m going to do is, I’m going to come in and I’m going to basically manage some group policies for that particular group, and show you the ease with which now you can do management of desktops.

I’m going to go ahead and edit the policy here, and what you’ll see is that there is a very rich set of things we can come in and manage with the Active Directory.So, for example, on User Setting, we can set all sorts of things, like permission, scripts, et cetera.I’m going to talk about one thing in particular that really costs a lot of time, and that’s basically managing applications.It’s the whole process of managing, from the time that you install an application to the time that you have to manage it and then delete it when there’s a new version.

So, let’s start with the basic thing.I’m going to go ahead and basically add two applications to the desktop, and I’m going to basically assign and publish.We’ll take Project, and I’m going to publish it, and I’m going to come back and talk to you about other means to publish.This means this Project is now on the list.I’m going to go ahead and also assign Visio.I did now assign those to the desktop.What we’ll do is, we’ll walk over here to the desktop.

Let’s take a look at the programs folder, and what you’ll see is, at the moment we just have Word and Excel on that.And that’s what’s on that desktop.If you look on the server, you can see up on the server that we have Word and Excel up on the server.Now, what I’m going to do is, I’m going to ahead and log off and log on.What will happen is, we have actually assigned those — the application that gets assigned will show up on the desktop, and will be easily ready for install by the user.

We’ll go ahead and log on.

MR. ALLCHIN:This is using the Windows Installer technology that I mentioned as a base service, but it’s also using the directory and the profile management system to be able to do this.

MR. Medhi:And so what we’ll do is we’ll take a look at the Start button here, and as you can see now Visio is now on the list.So Visio has now been assigned to that desktop.And when the user clicks that desktop, we can go ahead and install that application, and as Jim said, using the installer, we can package it up, so that the user does not have to deal with any prompts.

Let me give you an even better example, how many times has someone sent you a program in email.And you get the program and it’s in some format that requires an app that you don’t have on your system.And you have to go out and find that application, install and use it.Well, that happens in corporations, as well.So for example, Project might be something that some users in the corporation have, but not others.If you were to get this project in email, you’d actually have to go and install Project by hand.Now, though, with Windows NT 5, with the Publish Application, I can click on it, the system knows that application has been published for the user, so they can go up to the network share and auto-install the application, as it’s doing here, and what it will do is as soon as it’s installed it, it will boot up that Project file.It’s a dramatic, easy to use simplification, both for the user and for the IT manager.

MR. ALLCHIN:So you can actually wrap legacy applications, current applications, with this installer technology.There’s a lot of benefit for the new applications, using this installer technology, which we’ll cover in the presentation, I believe, in set up.

MR. Medhi: One last thing I want to show you is really on the advanced end now.That’s one thing to go ahead and install an application for the first time.Let me show you one thing that would go even beyond, which is basically being able to upgrade applications on a system.So, as you can see here, we have Word and Excel ’97.And when Office 2000 comes out, the IT manager is going to have to come in and basically not only install these applications, but uninstall the old ones.And I’m going to show you how we make that easier, as well.

So here’s Office 2000.I’m going to go ahead and assign it.I’m going to use some advanced deployment settings.And what this is going to do is basically pull up some user interface that will allow me to go ahead and specify which applications I want to upgrade, and which ones I want to leave intact.So it’s not like I have to upgrade the entire Office suite.I can upgrade maybe just the applications that I want for this particular group.

MR. ALLCHIN:Now, what we’re not going to show right now is that you can do this with service packs, and with operating system– (inaudible) — or even the QFE.You can go and publish, or assign that — using the same technology, and it’s a way for us to push out releases to the client.

MR. Medhi:So I’m going to go ahead and basically mark Excel for upgrade, and I’ll go ahead and mark Word for upgrade.And I’ll click okay.And now what will happen is, now I’ve assigned Office 9 or Office 2000 to the desktop, and what happens is in addition to assigning them, I’ve marked those two applications for upgrade.So I’m going to come in and we’re going to log off here.And, as you recall, we had Word and Excel 97 on the Start button, and what we’re going to do is we’re going to go ahead and log back in.This should take about a minute or so, because the Active Directory is going to essentially update itself.

MR. ALLCHIN:One of the things that we’re focused on, as I mentioned earlier, is machine replacement.So if you can publish the applications and publish the operating system, and you have the client-side caching, a lot of data can be up there.But, let’s suppose the whole disk is just roach.You’re totally down, what do you do?Well, we have a technology that can be used in either one of two ways.One, if there’s a boot problem on your network card, and it’s the Net PC or anything with a boot problem, we’ll just boot that way, and through the Active Directory we’ll be able to pick, or an administrator can assign what operating system has come to that client.And I’ll go through the full set-up process.But, it could be totally quiet.

The second approach is probably more common, because everyone doesn’t have the boot problems.We’ll have a diskette, or we’ll have a series of boot problems over a wide variety of network cards, and you just plug that in, and we’ll boot from it, and then it will go through the same process as if there were a boot problem in the network card.So it’s a way to go from like a dead stop back to where you were, what operating system you had, what applications you had, and what data you had and float it back to the client.

MR. Medhi:Okay.So just to finish out the scenarios, you can see now, up on the programs menu, we’ve actually removed Word and Excel, and we’ve added all of Office 9 to the programs menu.So it’s just a dramatic simplification, and the ability for an IT manager to manage corporate desktops, in this case, with applications.

MR. ALLCHIN:Great thanks.So this is an area that we’ve spent a lot of time on.We’ve been working with deployment customers.We actually had a design before for the way we remote boot and some of that capability worked.They told us that it wasn’t the right approach.And we went back and revisited what we were doing.And what you’re seeing here is what we plan to ship.So we are listening a lot about addressing the TCO problems, but we’re trying to do it in a way that doesn’t usurp more network bandwidth, in a way that doesn’t usurp reams of disk storage, which were concerns that customers had.So our approach here, is much more efficient in terms of network bandwidth, which is basically almost no overhead, compared to what we have today, and in terms of disk space, it’s very controlled about what people want.And because of separating code from data, we’re able to single-instance that code, so it can be used through lots of different clients.

I’m going to switch gears for just a minute, and Moshe is going to spend a lot of time on this.But, I wanted to sort of give you my philosophy about shipping this product.A lot of people doubt a lot of different things. I hear lots of different comments.Let me tell you what’s driving us, as a development team.We won’t ship until customers tell us that it’s really ready.Did we solve the problems that we set out to solve, and you know, does it have the quality that they need.So we’ve mentioned the rapid deployment program several times, and we will hold this product until those customers are well into deployment, and I can say that there is at least one, long before what we wanted, that’s already using the directory as an– (inaudible) — production directory.With beta 2, if we finish up beta 2, you’ll hear more about those customers moving into the deployment.And we’ll be listening to their feedback.No sub-one bugs, things like data corruption.We would never ship a product that we knew about anything like a data corruption, or a mission critical show-stopper, from any of the large beta sites.And we do very, very large betas.

Microsoft must run on it.These are, in my opinion conservative numbers, for what we’ll accomplish.Thousand-plus servers, 20,000 clients running it.They’re already — I don’t know the exact number.But, there’s hundreds of servers and there’s, you know, thousands of clients already running it.

Internal test passes higher than NT 4.We’ll have better application compatibility.We will have passed at a higher stress rate than we did with NT 4.We are going to achieve higher quality than we had in NT 4.We’ll measure that quantitatively through our internal stress mix that we run on the system.And hardware compatibility, that’s one of the key things that customers also mentioned to us.They wanted greater compatibility with a much wider variety of printers, and scanners and the like.And we’re well beyond where we were at NT 4.We’re just going to continue to push on this.

So these are not what I would call hardcore ship criteria, because it’s much more detailed than that.There’s like reams of documents on what we must achieve.But it gives you a general philosophy of the things that are driving it.Customers, Microsoft as one of those customerswe can push a little bit faster, and internal tests.NT 5 is just another step along the way.We don’t consider it to be the be-all, end-all.We’re going to continue working on this technology base, and stretching it, and extending it, permanently.

Enterprise, we’re going to focus on power. Customers are asking for 64 bit.They’re asking for more scaling.They’re asking — in terms of clustering.They’re asking for a much richer integrated store, beyond what we’re going to show today, in terms of enterprise storage, and want it to be a comprehensive storage system that totally envelopes the client as well as the server.

Data-center-class management.We are hardcore about this.We’re hearing much more about this than we are about scaling.So this is an area that we’ll spend a great deal of time on in the future revisions of NT.We’re also hearing a lot about consumer simplicity.Customers are saying, hey, these things are still too complicated.And you know, they’re right.They are.It’s something that in NT 5 we tried to put down the base infrastructure for this great platform for businesses, but when we swing around after NT 5, we’re going to go hard core to try to continue to improve the simplicity edge and the consumer level people are expecting.These are just some of the keywords, buzz words that we think about internally.

Today it’s still a mix of Web interfaces and Win 32 interfaces.Now, each rev we get a little bit closer, the thing that we did last year in terms of the option pack in NT 4, that improved things a lot.But, we still have a lot more work to do.So we want to get a unification of the Web interfaces and the Windows interfaces.Now, I’m not talking about UI, I’m talking about programming interfaces.So that people can write one common way to write a form, for example, and have the biggest reach in the simplest way to leverage our tools.

Location independence, people want to move data back and forth, they want to move objects back and forth, and they don’t want to think about it.Now, I hear a lot about this.Well, I’ve been doing distributed systems a very long time.This stuff is super, super hard.It’s easy to get it sort of working.It’s very hard by the time you scale to millions of machines.It’s very hard when you think about all the failure cases.That’s our longterm target.So, you know, we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.XML is a very key part of our future in being able to describe data and keep data separated from the view of that data.So it’s a fundamental thing that developers are asking.There is a lot of that capability in NT 5, we’re just going to carry that ahead in the future.

Last, we’re going to take NT not only up into the enterprise, up into the mainframe area and, if you will, into the broader reaches of the home market, but we’re also going to go after new markets.And by new markets, I mean markets that you may not have thought about NT in.We’re going after the embedded market, and trying to take NT and the same common kernel and make that in an environment which can be custom tailored for the particular market, such as printers, such as routers, switches, dial in systems, even set top boxes.We have a project underway for some time to take this technology and use it without a disk, a very small amount of memory, flashed, you know, control what features are in it.So that’s an area that we’re really going to push on.

Real time is something that NT today, although it has kernel-level streaming, for things like NetShow, and some of the driver capability, it really doesn’t have what I would call pure real time.And that’s something that we’ll be working on.And a unified programming and management model that takes advantage of the fact that you can have NT in routers, NT in switches, NT in the servers, NT in the client, and be able to give a more consistent management model to everyone.

That’s sort of a run through, very quickly, of how we’re thinking about the workstation separate from the server, the server in the different usages, and then the benefits that you can get with both of them together.Sort of the heart of this is we think we’ve got the features the customers want.We’re probably going to have to make some changes as they continue to play with the product.Our focus now is on quality, and making sure that this is something that is resilient, and that we feel incredibly proud of it.And there are already customers and our internal tests all show that it’s something to be proud of.