Microsoft is eating its latest brand of dog food, this one is named Windows Server 2008, and so far it says it is quite satisfying.
The company's global leader of the Windows Server and Tools Group, Andrew Lees, has been on a tour of Australia this week spruiking the latest version of its server product to CIOs and customers.
Like preceding versions of Windows server OSes, the company has used staff machines, internal servers and its Microsoft.com site as the test bed. Lees said the company internally refers to using beta software of its products as eating its dog food.
Microsoft.com, with an average of 270 million unique users a month, has bee running a beta of Windows Server 2008 since July.
"We feel good about where we are at with it," he said.
However, Lees admitted the company is still selective in what it eats.
The Windows Update site, which on average scans 4.5 million Windows machines a day; and Hotmail, with 260 million users and petabytes of storage, still run on Windows Server 2003.
The server, which provides greater native support for virtualisation over its predecessor, is slated to be released on 27 February, 2008. It is currently in its first Release Candidate phase (known as RC 0), with a second due before year's end.
Lees said the company was happy with the progress of Windows Server 2008 and that the February release timeframe is very realistic.
"We are on a very good glide path."
He said there have been over one million downloads of the beta.
Between now and release the main task of his server group is to iron out and address any bugs that beta testers identify. If anything major pops up, said Lees, the company won't hesitate in delaying the February release date.
"Product quality is the primary thing that is important to us," he said.