A flood of information about Vista's successor will become available

Aug 19, 2008 12:43 GMT  ·  By

Forget about Windows Vista, and even Vista SP1, Windows 7, the next iteration of the Windows client is slowly taking center stage. And even with Microsoft struggling to keep the limelight on Vista, Windows 7 is bound to attract increasing focus and to push its precursor to the background, a move that Vista never managed to accomplish entirely with Windows XP. But the fact of the matter is that Microsoft is gearing up to make public more and more information about Windows 7, in addition to PDC2008 (Professional Developer Conference) and WinHEC (Windows Hardware Engineering Conference) 2008 scheduled for the end of October and the start of November respectively, in Los Angeles. The company is preparing to take the Windows 7 road show out of the U.S, namely at the Tech■Ed IT EMEA Professionals 2008 conference between 3 - 7 November in Barcelona, Spain.

While PDC2008 features a total of four Windows 7 centric sessions (a list which will be expanded), Tech■Ed EMEA IT Pros 2008 will treat participants with a menu of seven items spanning across a variety of areas of the operating system. According to the session data published so far, Microsoft is preparing to discuss Windows 7 PKI and strong authentication, but also deployment, management, networking, search, security, virtualization.

"The biggest investment in Windows 7 PKI is the introduction of a new certificate enrollment protocol that enables seamless interoperability scenarios. This session will focus on the new architecture and design of Windows PKI and will dive into the details of our new enrollment capabilities. In addition, the session will cover new PKI functionality that improves deployment of existing technologies and scenarios: Network Access Protection (NAP), Internet Explorer (IE), Smart-card and Suite-B algorithms (ECC)," Microsoft revealed.

The Redmond giant indicated that Windows 7 will bring to the table the evolution of the imaging and deployment capabilities and tools that have become associated with Vista. In this context, Tech■Ed EMEA IT Pros 2008 will be the place where Microsoft will unveil "Windows 7 tools for image management and delivery, user file and setting migration as well as updates to deployment process and integration tools," the company promised.

In addition Windows 7 will be built to help streamline the tasks and processes that are an integral part of desktop management. Such simplification is synonymous with new technologies being built into Vista's successor by default. What the Redmond company is essentially getting ready to do, is present the new manageability and diagnostics features of Windows 7.

"Building upon the networking foundations of Windows Vista, Windows 7 provides new networking features that support additional flexibility for mobile and remote users. We will discuss the core networking features of Windows 7, explore their usage scenarios and understand how to manage them in an enterprise environment," Microsoft added.

Windows Search 4.0 is already available today for Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3, and its evolution will be felt with Windows 7. The next version of Windows will deliver a new level of optimized data access functionality, it will increase manageability, and generally boost the scenarios supported today by Windows Search 4.0.

And last but not least, Microsoft will also discuss Windows 7 security and virtualization: "building upon the security foundations of Windows Vista, Windows 7 provides IT Professionals security features that are simple to use, manageable and valuable. We will discuss the core security features of Windows 7, explore their usage scenarios and understand how to manage them in an enterprise environment. [And we] will explore how Windows 7 will enable further opportunities to increase IT agility and improve user experience by working with virtualization technologies."