News is coming out of Redmond that the next version of Windows Server software, codenamed "R2," will ship in about a year. Industry insiders are buzzing that the details, pricing and licensing - even the packaging of the product - are, essentially, finalized. But, as far as I can tell, no one outside of Redmond has seen a beta version of the software yet.

Now this isn't the same product as "Blackcomb" (the successor to Windows Server 2003, still due in 2007) nor does it have much to do with "Longhorn" (the successor to Windows XP, due either late next year or early 2006), although it has more to do with Longhorn than with Blackcomb.

R2 is more than just a roll-up of service packs for Windows Server 2003 though, as some industry pundits would have you believe. It's also the necessary link in the "chicken and egg" problem (see http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/nt/2003/0512nt2.html) that Microsoft is having with different versions of its desktop and server operating systems.

While Windows NT 4 and Windows 2000 shipped in both desktop and server versions, the two platforms have been split since then with Windows XP (for the desktop) shipping first and Windows Server 2003 shipping later. This means the most recently shipped operating system would have some features that the other platform can't take advantage of.

Longhorn, which is coming in late 2005 (maybe), will have features that require new functionality in the servers it interacts with. Since it will be two years after the release of Longhorn before Blackcomb is released, Microsoft needs to get an interim server release into the marketplace. Thus, R2.

Among the new, modified or improved features still touted as being in R2 are:
* Active Directory Federation Services (a.k.a "Trustbridge").
* Rights Management Server.
* SharePoint Portal Services Version 2.
* File Server Migration Toolkit.
* Network File System (NFS) support.
* Services for Unix.
* Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM).
* 'Corral' Storage Resource Management.

There's nothing radical in that list, but because some of the improvements rely on changes in other modules, it won't be possible to pick and choose which new features to install. Microsoft hopes that its own internal testing is enough to ensure that there'll be few problems with rolling out R2 to the Windows Server 2003 platform (as there were with recent service packs for Windows XP), but until there are some beta testers "in the wild," we can't really know what problems might occur.