Microsoft Tuesday released a handful of software products that are key elements in its drive to develop a comprehensive management platform for Windows. The company also released the first beta of its newest corporate patch server.

During his keynote at Microsoft’s IT Forum conference in Copenhagen, Bill Gates, chief software architect for Microsoft, announced the general availability of Microsoft Operations Manager 2005, Virtual Server 2005 and the Virtual Server 2005 Migration Toolkit. Gates also announced the availability of two feature packs for Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 for device management and operating system deployment.

Gates also unveiled the long-awaited beta of Windows Update Services, a free Windows server add-on that runs behind a firewall and automates the acquisition and deployment of patches. The software, which was originally due in May 2004, will now ship in the first half of 2005.

While Gates did not announce anything that has not been expected, the software is among the first pieces of Microsoft’s Dynamic Systems Initiative, a 10-year plan to create a platform to support a self-managing Windows environment built around applications that can signal to the network their management needs.

"The distributed nature of computing makes it challenging for customers to manage the cost and complexity of their technology investments," Gates said in a statement released by Microsoft. "We are committed to a unique approach that builds operational knowledge into the applications themselves, enabling customers to reduce complexity now and in the future."

Rivals such as IBM, HP and Sun are developing similar utility computing platforms.

Next year, Microsoft will rollout System Center 2005, an integration of MOM 2005 and SMS 2003, and the next version of Visual Studio codenamed Whidbey, which will introduce a core component of DSI called the System Definition Model (SDM).

Microsoft considers MOM 2005 and its management packs for servers such as Exchange and SQL Server to be Version Zero of SDM. The MOM management packs monitor the inner workings of particular servers and supply data to MOM. SDM is defined by XML-based documents that are embedded into applications to communicate management and operational needs to the network.