Microsoft announces Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 RTM, and associated thoughts

Yesterday July 22, Microsoft announced the RTM of both Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7. I believe the last time Microsoft announced RTM of Windows client and server software at the same time was for Windows 2000 – that’s been a long time.

If you’ve followed my blog for a while, you may have realized I’m not the greatest fan of Vista. I’m looking forward to running the Windows 7 client on 64-bit hardware – I need lots of memory to support my development environment (multiple virtual machines) when I’m writing books, and I’ve made a career the past two years out of avoiding Vista. So its time.

In terms of Windows Server, OpsMgr 2007 R2 fully supports it as an installation platform. This and related information will be covered in the upcoming eBook that is the successor to System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed (Sams, 2008). However, the other thing I think about when I think about Server 2008 R2 is my good friend Matt Hester.

Matt is a Microsoft IT Pro Evangelist. That means he does events such as TechNets and a ton of other stuff. I’ve known Matt for years, he took my position as a trainer when I moved on to other things – and after I arrived at Microsoft, I encouraged Matt to apply for a position as a Technical Specialist in the South Central District.

Earlier this year, I received an interesting email from Matt. An editor had asked if he was interested in writing an admin book about the upcoming Windows Server 2008 R2 release. After he picked himself off the floor, he contacted me to see what I thought about it. To tell you the truth, I tried really hard to talk him out of it! Writing a book is a lot of work and takes a ton of commitment, and I wanted to be sure he understood what he’d be getting into. Matt decided to write the book, and we get together as often as our schedules permit to discuss the process (see Matt’s thoughts on all this at http://blogs.technet.com/matthewms/archive/2009/07/17/writing-with-mongo... [1]). After mentoring him at Microsoft, now I’m mentoring Matt as an author!

If you’ve ever seen Matt present, you know he has a LOT of energy. He’s now applying that energy to his writing effort, and hopes to complete the authoring process around the time Windows 2008 R2 launches – meaning it will be available the first part of next year (http://www.amazon.com/Windows-Server-Administration-Instant-Reference/dp... [2]). I’ve reminded him he needs to mention the System Center family as adding value to Windows 2008, let’s see how much he says!