Learning Windows Server 2003

Appendix A. The Future of Windows Server 2003

This book has focused on the currently available, released version of Windows Server 2003. Although many updates and enhancements have been released since the product’s birth in April 2003, as of this writing in October 2004, the first service pack is still at least six months away. The next major revision to the Windows Server 2003 product, currently referred to as “R2,” is due in the middle of the 2005 calendar year.

In this appendix, I’ll take a look at some of the improvements and fixes that will be integrated with Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, describe the scope of the project, and then take a brief look at what Windows Server 2003 R2 will bring to your IT environment.

Service Pack 1

Slated to arrive on the market in the first quarter of 2005, Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1 for the remainder of this appendix) will include not only all the security hotfixes and vulnerability corrections released to date, but also several enhancements to security operations. Those of us with early access to the beta versions of the service pack agree that this release is akin to Windows XP’s Service Pack 2, both in scope and in the degree of modification of the OS.

The product contains the following fixes to some problems in the release version of Windows Server 2003:

• A correction to the way Certificate Services provides service to Microsoft Outlook clients, resolving the problem where clients are asked multiple times for their passwords. ...