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One of the things that you're going to notice as you start to dig into some of the documentation on the Windows Server 2008 platform is the Vista connection. Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft's Vista have kind of been joined at the hip and as it turns out, Vista is designed as the client of choice for a Windows Server 2008 network. Now, this might raise a lot of eyebrows, okay, and we'll talk very honestly about Vista in just a second, but for right now understand that these 2 operating systems share a similar architecture. The fact of the matter is that a lot of the technology and architecture that's in Windows Server 2008 was actually included and kind of test run in Vista if you will. And it's probably a good thing. And the main thing we're talking about here is the .NET Framework version 3.0 and for that reason, you'll notice that Windows Server 2008 has a very similar look and feel to Vista and has some very Vista-like features. Now one thing that you do need to be aware of is that at the same time that Windows Server 2008 was released to manufacturing, or finally released to the public, there was a service pack released for Vista as well. Now, a lot of jokes out there about Vista, this quote is directly off one of Microsoft's white papers that came out with the Vista Service Pack 1 release and it says explicitly , ÒVista introduced major progress but also some challenges,Ó And Microsoft goes on to talk about in that same white paper the frustrations that a lot of their customers felt over Vista and to be honest with you, Vista began to solve a lot of security issues that Microsoft has had for a while, it began to really wrestle with some standards issues, Microsoft contends and continues to become more standards based and more standards oriented and that's just creating a problem for them, there's no other way to put it, and so they're having to deal with that. So Service Pack 1 takes care of a lot of those issues. Also, when Vista came out, it was the first time that they had implemented the .NET 3.0 Framework and so then when they came out with Server 2008 they had made some changes and they had to reconcile the two. Now as it works out, the 2 operating systems can actually share some of the binaries that run, an example of this is IIS 7.0 was actually released with Microsoft Vista, okay? Most home users don't know what a web server is, well maybe they know what one is, they certainly don't they have one on their operating system. But they certainly don't know what an Internet information server is. But it was in there in the software if you have Vista you can install IIS 7. However, Microsoft continued to make some changes to their architecture on IIS 7 and so when they released Server 2008, the Service Pack 1 had to go back and correct those changes in the IIS 7 that was part of Vista, okay? Now, let's talk about the 3 basic categories that Microsoft had to concentrate in the Vista Server Pack 1. Because they had some serious issues they had to deal with. The first category was security, reliability, and performance. And there's all kinds of issues in Windows Vista when it first came out. It took some time, a long time to copy files between folders on the same disc, and Microsoft handled that. There was all kind of places pauses for no apparent reason in the operating system when you tried to do certain tasks, and they've taken care of that. They've taken care of some of the security issues, they've done a lot of work with drivers and so forth. There's upgraded support for emerging hardware and software standards and I'll have to come to Microsoft's defense here, Microsoft is desperately trying to stay on top of such things as emerging XML technologies and some other hardware and software standards and it's a tough thing to do. So they've updated Vista to take care of some of those issues, and then just pure old optimization, making this thing run smoother, faster, making it more stable, trying to tweak out a little memory management issues, just all kinds of little things. So, Microsoft admittedly understands and accepts and they're not shying away from the fact that Vista had some problems and they very well understand some of the concern that administrators are going to have about saying, ÒWait a minute, if I go to Windows Server 2008, then you're telling me that to get optimum performance I've got to take all of my clients to Vista? Well no thank you. I don't think so.Ó But we have a service pack now, my recommendation real world would be to set this up in a virtualized test environment and make sure that your applications and everything will work correctly under Vista Server Pack 1. You're going to see some improvements. I certainly wouldn't go out on a limb and say it's going to fix every problem, but you should see some improvements on Vista. But the bottom line is this is where we're headed. You may want to hang on for another service pack or two maybe on Vista but I would say install Vista Server Pack 1 and then go ahead and start to test environment, test lab this thing. But there is a definite Vista connection to Windows Server 2008. This is the direction we're headed and I just wanted to make you aware of that.