OneCare for Two

Joe Wilcox News Brief. Are you testing Windows Live OneCare for Server? Some 5,000 testers may be.

Maybe because it's RSA Conference week, late Monday, I got some communication from Microsoft PR about the company "recently" opening up a OneCare for Server beta, which is limited to 5,000 testers. The invites went out to people already testing Small Business Server 2008.

Perhaps coincidence, but methinks not, Microsoft started testing Windows Live OneCare 2.5 last week. OneCare 2.5 is a maintenance release, meaning no new features are planned. I haven't seen the server product, but it's reasonable to wonder about the similarities between the two OneCares.

The shortlist of OneCare for Server features I got from Microsoft PR sounds eerily familiar:

• automatic data backup
• consolidated management
• performance tune-ups
• select—and presumably, unnecessary —file removal

Live OneCare 2.0 and 2.5 beta share these same attributes. From a development perspective, it would be more efficient to work from a common code base, branching select features or their modifications for different products. That's what Microsoft does with Windows 2008 and Windows Vista, which share much of the same code base.

Product synergy could make even easier the server-side management of desktop clients. Microsoft's development philosophy is all about integration, of cross-integrating features among different products.

The OneCare team could teach a thing or two to their Windows peers. OneCare development is on a rapid refresh cycle. Windows Live OneCare testing started in summer 2005, with final release about 10 months later. About six months after the 1.0 release, version 1.5 started testing. The software released about three months later, in January 2007. Six months later, OneCare 2.0, a major upgrade, started beta testing and later released in November 2007.

Since the 1.0 release, no more than six-month periods have separated betas and new versions. That's an impressive development cycle, compared with many other Microsoft products. Some advice to Microsoft: Make ongoing improvements the priority for enterprise hosted products like CRM Online.

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