First Longhorn beta aimed at IT administrators

At its Worldwide Partner Conference, Sanjay Parthasarathy, Corporate VP of
Microsoft's Developer and Platform Evangelism Group announced details about
the first beta of Longhorn, due this month. According to him, the first beta is
aimed at IT administrators. Features such as user account protection services,
simplified corporate image deployment, secure startup for protecting laptops and
a Windows System Assessment Tool to analyze graphics, processor, memory and
hard-drive performance will be included.

However, several end-user features like the new user interface will be
missing till the second beta of Longhorn, which is expected to hit sometime next
year, Sanjay informed.

The next Windows version will include Meeting Space, a peer-to-peer
collaboration tool; inbuilt support for RSS; Internet Explorer 7; Windows
Workflow Services and Virtual Folders, a visualizing, organizing and search
tool.

Microsoft has also advised partners to use WinFX programming model and Indigo
Web services stack, for building apps and Web services.

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