It should be starting any day now, I should imagine. "Windows 2003 Server - making serving the Internet easier!" You know the drill: accompanying the comming release of Microsoft's new flagship server line will be a blitz of adverts designed to make us all believe that Windows 2003 Server in its various flavours will be the answer to everything. But is it?
Lastest reports reveal that the Windows 2003 Server line shows little changes over Windows 2000 Servers, other than the inclusion of IIS 6 and the XP style interface. Indeed, Eweek.com are claiming here, that the whole thing is more befitting a service pack or Second Edition release than a full, new product in its own right. Perhaps the title Windows 2000 Server Second Edition would be closer to the truth. But there are some changes:
"For IIS users, the new, cheaper Web Edition of Windows Server will bring cost savings when expanding IIS Web farms, a competitive response to the low cost and maturity of Linux- and BSD-based Web servers. IIS adds a number of Unix-style playing cards to its hand in this release, including text-file-based configuration, much tighter security defaults, user-level instead of administrator-level privileges, and a kernel-mode HTTP request handler and cache."
More here. In fact, if you are that interested, there's a whole lot here.