Microsoft News Tracker

Tech companies hate leakers (just ask Apple), but Microsoft has come up with a new twist:

Microsoft Corp. is taking tough measures to find out who leaked a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Windows Home Server to The Hotfix.net blog after the software preview was posted on the site by a user named “Richard” soon after it was released to a small group of testers.

In a e-mail to testers obtained by the IDG News Service, Kevin Beares, the Windows Home Server community lead at Microsoft, wrote to Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) whose name contain “Richard” that they will not have access to the beta until he finds out who leaked the software to The Hotfix.net site. MVP is a title Microsoft gives people who are active and helpful in communities for Microsoft’s different product groups, and many MVPs end up being early testers of products.

“For right now, you have no access to the beta until I can find the Richard who posted the WHS (Windows Home Server) CTP on this site,” the e-mail said. “I will work with the Connect Admin team to determine which one of you is the real culprit of this leak.”

Beares apologized for having to punish all MPVs with the name “Richard” by withholding the CTP, and said if the person who posted the release “comes clean,” he may “have some discretion as to what actions I take.”

Apparently there’s a clue shortage in Redmond, but I guess the MVPs are lucky that the leaker didn’t sign up at www.thehotfix.net with a chosen user name of “Richard, Bill, Steve, Tom, Dick & Harry.” Or “Kevin Beares.” C’mon Kevin - if it is really that important, you know how to arrange for attribution tracking of the copies.

Mike Neil, Microsoft’s GM of Virtualization Strategy, today revealed that the schedules for the public beta of the Viridian feature of Windows Server Longhorn and the release of Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 are slipping:

The public beta of Windows Server virtualization will ship in the second half of 2007, not in the first half as previously disclosed.

The final version of Virtual Server 2005 R2 service pack 1 now will be available in Q2, not Q1 as previously stated. In the interim, customers and partners can download a Release Candidate (RC) version later this month - this is code complete and an update to the current beta 2.

The cause for the Virdian beta delay was that more performance and scalability work was needed, but Neil is emphatic that Windows Server Longhorn is still on schedule as is Viridian, although as currently planned Viridian will lag the 2H07 Longhorn release by up to 180 days. As for Virtual Server 2005 R2, integration of support for three additional operating systems (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, Solaris 10, and the latest CTP of Longhorn) gets the blame