How much longer till we're done with 2003?

[Thinka]

Hey people,

This is for Windows Admins and such like, and I guess to some degree Windows users. I am basically trying to find out people's thoughts and predictions - When will Windows Server 2003 and related technologies become "outdated"? When will there be a greater proportion of 2007 servers than 2003? It's kinda like asking, when will the Vista forum on Daniweb reach the 10,000+ threads that XP has? Or to put it a different way, how quickly? It's almost reached the number of 9x and Me threads, and already has more posts.

I'm asking because I'm trying to figure out how quickly I need to start getting serious with Exchange & AD 2007, so as to be able to keep up with demand.

All thoughts welcome, cheers peeps!

[jp10558]

Well, it's server 2008 as far as I know, but I don't think we'll see Server 2003 going anywhere soon. People are still migrating off of NT4 in places, others are just moving off of 2000. That said, Server 2008 has some nice benefits that don't require changing out the entire infrastructure to get, so knowing it won't ever hurt.

[Thinka]

Yea sorry I did mean Server 2008, but I was thinking of the technologies, which are Exchange 2007 etc. :-p

[BillBrown]

If there was a published timeline indicating when certain types of advancements within the Windows arena were likely to be achieved over a 50 year period of time, I would think that estimating the shelf-life of an OS's usefulness would be significantly easier.

As it stands, Windows 2000 works and it works well for what it does. Windows 2003 (in the Web hosting industry, at least) with its inclusion of IIS6 was obviously leaps and bounds ahead of 2000. The advent of multiple custom application pool was incredibly useful. If 2008 also proves to be a huge step forward, causing Windows administrators to say "Holy .. how did we ever live without this before?!" then I can certainly see large-scale adoption; however, I doubt that they'll want to go through the hassle of updating existing 2003 servers just for the sake of having the latest and greatest.

Then again, I may be wrong.

Bill

[jbennet]

companies wont move because they want to maximuse thier investment. If you spend tens of thousands, you want to spread the cost over a large number of years, so most companies use the software for the whole lifecycle

NT4 is still used in places, mainly because of the difficulty of upgrading a domain cleanly to windows 2000. However, many have since left to go to 2003, as it has plug and play, and less security holes than either system, as well as better migration tools.

2003 is very popular and will remain so for many years to come.

Server 2008 does provide a huge speed boost in network communication though (anyone who has used it will know what i mean, file transfers are much faster, particuarly with vista clients.)

[Thinka]

Thanks for all the replies, it's kind of what I expected really. 2003 is still very much valid, but with (probably very long) time people will shift to 2008.

[DimaYasny]

people do shift to 2008, for quite a few reasons, but 2008 is too raw and MS has disredited itself too much with vista, for the OS to kick in easily. after all, it is intended to be used on servers - mission critical computing, and not home desktops, which you can restart or reinstall without any real business impact

[jbennet]

2008 has some nice features though like Hyper V