I've been quite busy recently and working on a lot of very interesting topics. One of them is a Technical Review of a Book, and at one section I thought it's a good idea to mention the
Common Engineering Criterias (CEC). Those are a set of guidelines and and requirements all new Windows Server System Products must meet. However I'm familiar with the topic of CEC, however I was not aware that one of my visions of the past is now in the CECs for 2006: Service Discovery from Active Directory. Back in the Windows 2000 days I requested that more services are discoverable from Active Directory, and that client applications are supposed to use those for retrieving their (closest) server service. A pretty good example is DFS - what we all use for Sysvol (the store of GPOs and Logon-Scripts) - the locations of DFS are discoverable via AD and DNS, and the client uses the "cheapest" Server (in the terms of WAN-Traffic) to connect to. Now it seems that future Windows Server System Products are required to publish their service informations in AD - way to go!
Another topic is "Product Globalization" - I've filed so many bugs in that area about different products - it's really about time that Microsoft realizes that many of their customers are living outside the US and the GMT-8 Timezone. So way to go that it's in the CECs for 2006 as well.
So just another time to be excited about the future!