by
Brian Madden
I
reported on Microsoft's project "Bear Paw" in my blog
last month, after
Eric Rudder,
Microsoft SVP for Servers and Tools (
view
his blog) gave a
speech in which he indicated that the next update to Terminal
Server was due out as a Windows add-on before Microsoft's FY04 ends in
June 2004.
It now appears that Rudder was not supposed to say anything about Bear Paw,
and Microsoft has since made it very clear that at this time, Bear Paw's
features are not confirmed.
Shortly after Rudder's speech, a lot of people tried to get more details
about Bear Paw from Microsoft. According to an posting
to a web forum by Joel Stocker, a systems engineer for Citrix, internal communication took place between Citrix and Microsoft that further clarified things. Chandra Shekaran, (Terminal Services Group Manager
at Microsoft), told Citrix that Eric Rudder's reference to Bear Paw in
his speech was premature, and he was not supposed to mention it. Furthermore,
he reports that Rudder's boss (Bill
Veghte) has spoken to him about it and that at this point, nothing is
finalized with regard to features or release dates.
Stocker also wrote that Shekaran confirmed to them that Bear
Paw will NOT be released on its own. Shekaran specifically mentioned that it
could be part of Windows 2003 Service Pack 2, or it could be part of Longhorn
server, but nothing has been decided. (This represents a reversal of what Rudder
said.)
So, at this point, Microsoft is publicly backing off their Bear Paw comments
and only confirming that Bear Paw is the codename for the next release
of Terminal Server. Features and dates are undefined.
Note: This entry was originally posted on Sunday, September
6,
2003 at 4:32 PM. The references to Joel Stocker and the internal Citrix communication were originally attributed to Steven Bink of www.bink.nu. This happened due to a
technical error on Bink's website that caused the "source" of his report to look
like it was from him instead of from the Log*in forum. Bink called me and informed me
of the error on his site, and I updated this article. The content of my original
article remains the same. It's just that what was originally attributed to
Steven Bink should have been attributed to Stocker.
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