By Peter Pawlak [bio]
Posted: Apr. 3, 2006

The following is an illustration accompanying an article published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. More samples of our content, as well as a list of upcoming articles and reports are also available.

In Feb. 2006, an SMS 2003 service pack (SP) and two SMS betas—SMS 2003 Release 2 (R2) Beta 1 and SMS Version 4 (v4) Beta 1—were released. However, SMS 2003 R2 will ship between 6 to 12 months earlier than SMS v4. In addition, customers wanting to deploy Windows Vista with SMS 2003 or SMS 2003 R2 will require an update to the SMS 2003 OS Deployment (OSD) feature pack that will ship at the same time that Vista becomes available.