Microsoft Shipping Windows 2000 Beta 3
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Microsoft Shipping Windows 2000 Beta 3 |
from the Executive Software Team
This week, Microsoft is shipping Beta 3 of Windows 2000 to 650,000 beta testers, bringing us closer to probably the most anticipated operating system release ever. In addition to beta testers, some PC makers will ship limited numbers of computers loaded with the upcoming operating system. Other PC manufacturers who are not loading Windows 2000 on shipping computers will be launching readiness kits and Web-based support.
This promises to be a very exciting release. How exciting? Well, for those of you who have not had the opportunity to run Windows 2000 or see it demonstrated, here is an encapsulated version of a demonstration recently done at Spring COMDEX/Windows World in Chicago. I've included a link at the end of this article so you can watch a Web video of the demonstration, if you like.
For the demonstration, a mock insurance company was set up, with three different basic omputing areas demonstrated by three different people. One was a sales person and a claims adjuster, who would be both in the office and on the road; one was a finance person, working in a finance group within the "company"; and one was an IT administrator, responsible for keeping everything up and running. The gentleman hosting the demonstration (Chris Capossela who, in a humorous touch, was reprising his appearance at last year's show at which his demo of Windows 98 crashed), acting as the "finance person" for the demonstration, would also be giving a demonstration to the "board of directors" at its conclusion.
Acting as the IT administrator, Doug Groncki demonstrated Active Directory, showing how policies were set and applications were specified for different groups in the company, all from a central location. He opened a group's application directory, and showed the applications specified for that group. He also demonstrated configuring users' configurations for an entire group; as an example, he disabled the "run" function from the user start menu so that users could not start and run applications that weren't specified for them, and also disabled the registry editing tools.
Chris Capossela, acting as the finance person, then logged into his workstation, which was running Windows 2000 Professional, and showed that the "run" function was not in the Start menu. He then tried to click on an icon and run an application that was not specified for his group, and it indeed would not run. Conversely, he also demonstrated selecting an application that was specified for his group. The application simply downloaded and started, and was ready to go in less than a minute. All the questions normally asked by numerous dialogue boxes (such as "full installation, minimal installation," etc.) had been pre-answered by the IT administrator, so the user didn't have to worry about it. And to demonstrate how robust this system actually is, Chris deleted one of the executables while "cleaning off his hard drive". Upon clicking on the icon once again, the application downloaded once more, and was again ready to go in less than a minute.
Next, a video conference was set up, and one of the participants was coming across rather shakily due to a high amount of network traffic. Doug Groncki, acting as IT administrator, then chose the Quality of Service Admission Control, chose a policy for the sales group, and increased the bandwidth for the sales group from 10,000kb to 100,000kb. The video conference then proceeded nicely.
The "claims adjuster", being played by Keith White, then connected his laptop to the network so as to get the most up-to-date version of a claim file prior to going on the road. He found the file on the server, right-clicked on the file, chose "make available offline", and the file was synchronized to a cache on his local hard drive. Keith also showed the various options available for synchronization - from automatically synchronizing all files whenever connected, down to only specifying certain files and manually synchronizing others. Keith then went out "on the road", connected from his remote location, and showed how everything was still available to him - in the most current versions - on a secure connection.
To close the demonstration, Chris Caposella then did his presentation to the "board of directors". This demonstration was done with one PC connected to nine monitors, connected with three graphics cards with four ports each, to show Windows 2000's multi-monitor support. Chris put a PowerPoint demonstration up on one screen, and dragged it to another, then put a video up and expanded it to all the monitors.
At the conclusion of the demonstration, Bill Gates said, "Windows 2000 represents the biggest investment we've ever made in a new piece of software." I have to say, it really shows!
There was, of course, a lot more to this demonstration, as each step was shown in much more detail so the audience could see how it actually worked. It's really worth seeing. To view the demonstration, which was part of Bill Gates' keynote address at COMDEX/Windows World, go to:
http://www.zdnet.com/zdtv/freshgear/specialevents/story/0,3679,2242161,00.htm
This information was provided by Executive Software, maker of the Diskeeper defragmenter and Undelete for Windows NT. Visit their web site at
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