In-Depth

The 2024 Microsoft Product Roadmap

Everything Microsoft partners and IT pros need to know about major Microsoft product milestones this year, including the next major Windows release, Microsoft Copilot, Windows Server 2025, Teams and more.

• By Gladys Rama
• October 01, 2024

UPDATED: Windows 11, Copilot, Fabric, Windows Server 2025, Dynamics 365

Windows 11 24H2
Released

Microsoft is firmly in its Copilot era, and that means an inevitable AI-centric refresh is coming to Windows this year. The next version of the OS, Windows 12, allegedly codenamed "Hudson Valley," is expected in the second half of 2024 (potentially as early as June, though that timeframe is unconfirmed).

Windows 12's biggest differentiator will be how thoroughly it incorporates AI, building on the Copilot capabilities that were introduced as a preview in Windows 11 23H2 last fall. In fact, Microsoft indicated at the start of the year that all Windows 12 devices (and new Windows 11 devices) will have a dedicated Copilot button, marking "the first significant change to the Windows PC keyboard in nearly three decades."

The Copilot button announcement also hints at Microsoft's aims for future Windows versions, starting with 12: "We will continue to build Windows to be the destination for the best AI experiences," the announcement read. "This will require an operating system that blurs the lines between local and cloud processing." [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

.NET 9 / .NET MAUI
Expected: November 2024

Microsoft ships new .NET versions every November during its .NET Conf event, with last November's .NET 8 sporting full-stack Blazor, AI and .NET MAUI as major highlights. This November, .NET 9 will continue to advance better performance, speed, support for cloud-native development and, of course, AI capabilities.

According to this GitHub roadmap, Microsoft's dev team is focusing on product quality across layout, control features and reliability of tooling experiences such as setup, build, deploy, hot reload, debug and diagnostics. Specific items being considered include interoperability with the Swift programming language, better integration between .NET MAUI and Blazor hybrid applications, customizable cursors and controls access via the Maui.Core layer. Specific items across the runtime, libraries and application models can be tracked on the company's Themes of .NET roadmap. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Visual Studio 2022 Updates
Expected: Ongoing

Though it's coming up on three years since Microsoft released the latest version of its flagship IDE, Microsoft has kept mum about the next version, with no indication so far that a Visual Studio 2024 edition is in the works. Editions since VS 2013 shipped every two years, but that pattern was broken when the company skipped a year and launched VS 2022, perhaps due to the pandemic. So expect to see incremental updates to VS 2022, which broke ground as the first 64-bit version of the product.

As of this writing, Microsoft is focused on getting VS 2022 version 17.9 out the door. Microsoft has described this upcoming version as a "transformation," not just an update, and as being very AI-focused.

"Imagine crafting perfect Git commit messages without a second thought, or seamlessly navigating complex code with advanced IntelliSense support for Unreal Engine projects," the company said last November when it rolled out Preview 1 of version 17.9. "We're not just enhancing features; we're rethinking the way you interact with your development environment." [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Semantic Kernel (AI SDK) Updates
Expected: Ongoing

As 2023 came to a close, Microsoft debuted version 1 of its Semantic Kernel SDK for AI development. The open source SDK serves as an orchestration layer for Microsoft's stack of AI models and Copilot AI assistants, providing interaction services to work with underlying machine language foundation models and AI infrastructure. While the version 1 release boasted advanced AI constructs including agents, plug-ins, planners and personas, in early 2024, Microsoft's dev team is focused on three core themes: AI connectors, memory connectors and additional agent abstractions. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

SharePoint Premium
Expected: First Half of 2024

Microsoft plans to make the AI-optimized SharePoint Premium product broadly available in the first half of 2024. First announced last fall at Ignite 2023, SharePoint Premium is essentially the old Microsoft Syntex product repackaged. Syntex tapped AI to surface an organization's data. Its rebrand to SharePoint Premium makes explicit Syntex's ties to SharePoint, as Microsoft's Jeff Teper explained at Ignite. "SharePoint is the base content management collaboration platform for Microsoft 365; SharePoint Premium [is] value-added services on top," Teper said. Those value-added services fall into three categories:

• Content experiences using AI with organizational content.
• Content processing that applies AI to "workflows and processes in bulk to help transform and enrich that content," offering consistency, workflow automation and less drudgery.
• Governance capabilities, along with advanced content controls.

Some components of SharePoint Premium became available at the end of 2023, but the complete feature set -- which Teper indicated will eventually include "Business Documents app, Documents Hub, and the enhanced file viewer" -- will become available when it publicly launches this year. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

SharePoint Embedded
Released

Currently in paid public preview, SharePoint Embedded (previously known as Syntex Repository Services) is expected to become generally available sometime in mid-2024. Microsoft described SharePoint Embedded as "a new API-only solution which enables app developers to harness the power of the Microsoft 365 file and document storage platform for any app, and is suitable for enterprises building line of business applications and ISVs building multi-tenant applications." [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

SharePoint Server Subscription Edition Updates
Expected: Spring and Fall 2024

Microsoft now mostly sells its application servers by subscription only, a plan announced during its 2020 Ignite event. At present, SharePoint Server Subscription Edition version 23H2 is the main product release. If past practice is a guide, Microsoft can be expected to release SharePoint Server Subscription Edition version 24H1 in March, followed by a version 24H2 release in September or November. These product releases, installed on customer infrastructure, aren't necessarily notable in terms of features, as Microsoft delivers new features monthly to the product via "Public Updates," which are supported for one year. A list of features for H-version releases can be found at this Microsoft documents page. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Fluid Framework 2.0
Expected: Summer 2024

Fluid Framework, Microsoft's open source document collaboration solution, is set to hit the Version 2 milestone this summer. In beta as of earlier this month, Fluid Framework 2.0 will feature support for Azure Fluid Relay and SharePoint Embedded. It will also include a SharedTree Distributed Data Structure (DDS) feature, which Microsoft explained is a new, intuitive programming interface.

"Like other Fluid Framework distributed data structures, SharedTree is designed to use the same patterns developers would use when working with local data structures such as an object model. The difference is that the data can be changed remotely and is kept in sync by the Fluid Framework," the company said. "SharedTree includes sophisticated merge semantics for working with arrays and supports features like atomic move operations that make working with collaborative data much simpler." [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Windows Server 2025
Expected: Fall 2024

Microsoft hasn't indicated when the next customer-premises version of Windows Server is coming, but with the current version approaching the three-year mark, it's not a stretch to expect the next major launch sometime in the later part of 2024.

At any rate, work is already well underway on Windows Server "vNext" (which may eventually be named "Windows Server 2025" when it is officially released). The latest preview build as of this writing, 26010, was released at the end of 2023, and more are on the way.

At Ignite last November, Microsoft revealed a few changes coming to the release, including an easier update process, a pay-as-you-go subscription option on top of the usual perpetual license, improvements to Azure Stack HCI, hotpatching, broad availability of SMB over QUIC and more. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Microsoft Planner
Released

A new, improved and AI-powered version of the Microsoft Planner product is coming in 2024, first as a component within Microsoft Teams in the spring, and then as a Web app later in the year.

According to details shared by Microsoft last November, the new Planner will combine its existing capabilities with those of Microsoft To Do (task management) and Microsoft Project (project management). It'll also have natural-language AI capabilities via new integration with Copilot. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Microsoft Copilot Capabilities
Expected: Ongoing

Copilot generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology is becoming omnipresent in Microsoft products, with CEO Satya Nadella recently declaring Microsoft to be "the Copilot company." There are discrete Copilot-branded products (e.g., Security Copilot, currently in preview, and Microsoft Copilot, launched this past December) in addition to Copilot-powered capabilities within Microsoft services (e.g., Microsoft Teams and Windows).

Copilot for Microsoft 365 for organizations reached general availability in November for enterprise customers, but Microsoft announced in January that it's also now commercially released to small and medium-size companies (Microsoft 365 Business Premium and Business Standard customers). Microsoft also broadened Copilot for Microsoft 365 sales to Office 365 E3 and E5 licensees and dropped a 300-seat purchase minimum requirement. Microsoft's Cloud Solution Provider partners are now selling Copilot for Microsoft 365 to commercial entities, as well.

Other Copilot products and capabilities are expected to become generally available this year. Here are some milestones to look out for:

• Microsoft Copilot for Service and Microsoft Copilot for Sales (expected "early 2024" and "Q1 2024,"" respectively) are two new Copilot for Dynamics 365 products, first announced back in November.
• Copilot in Outlook (expected Q1 2024) will help users prepare for upcoming meetings by surfacing information from related files, invitations and e-mails. Users will also be able to set up meetings from existing e-mails, from creating an agenda to determining who should get an invitation.
• Copilot in Loop (availability TBD) will let users of the Loop collaboration application turn existing projects into templates for future ones, as well as link documents to Copilot prompts to create more contextually relevant replies.
• Copilot in Word (expected Q1 2024) will show users any revisions that other collaborators have made to a document.
• Copilot for Microsoft 365 integration with Viva (private preview expected in Q1 2024) will effectively turn Copilot into "a single interface to guide employees, managers and HR leaders with self-service insights and experiences such as understanding team health, setting new priorities with OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) or upskilling for career growth," as Microsoft explained during last year's Ignite conference.
• Copilot in Viva Insights (preview expected Q1 2024) will give users the ability to create reports using natural language prompts.
• Copilot in Viva Engage (preview expected January 2024) will let employees and employers create AI-generated posts.
• Copilot in Viva Glint (private preview expected Q1 2024) will use AI to help employees pull insights from employee surveys.
• Copilot in Microsoft Fabric and Power BI (availability TBD) is currently in public preview, and designed to let users "create a well-orchestrated data estate that minimizes data fragmentation and makes it easy for business users to find continually up-to-date, accurate data."

Microsoft previously indicated that Copilot for Microsoft 365 for Microsoft 365 A3 and A5 faculty reached general availability, starting on Jan. 1, 2024. A 300-seat minimum requirement was similarly removed for these Academic licensees.

Sales of Copilot Pro, a new product for individual users, were announced in January. Copilot Pro adds some Copilot for Microsoft 365-type AI capabilities, such as data protection for queries, Web search and Office apps integrations, and a model customization capability to build "Copilot GPTs" to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions.

The Copilot apps for iOS and Android phones reached general availability, as announced in January. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Microsoft Viva Updates
Expected: First Half of 2024

Touted as an "employee experience platform," Microsoft Viva is effectively the HR-oriented companion to Microsoft 365. Microsoft offers multiple Viva applications, or "components," which surface within the Microsoft Teams collaboration app. At Ignite last year, Microsoft spotlighted two new capabilities coming to specific Viva components this year:

• Integration between Viva Goals and Viva Engage is expected to occur in the first half of 2024. Viva Engage is Microsoft's social networking-like component that replaced the Yammer Communities app. Its integration with Viva Goals will, according to Microsoft, "bring mission, alignment and results into communities and conversation by helping customers build communities around goals, view goal progress from Viva Goals directly in Viva Engage and create divisional communities within Viva Engage designed to help leaders better communicate top-down interactions and initiatives, including delivering praise based on goal progress and achievement."
• Viva Amplify-to-Viva Engage publishing is expected to reach the private preview stage in Q1 2024. Publishing is pretty basic for Viva Amplify, which reached general availability last year. Organizations use Viva Amplify to review internal communications before they get distributed to readers, and to track the reads after messages get sent. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Microsoft Mesh
Released

Microsoft Mesh had its debut in 2021 when it was called "Mesh for Microsoft Teams." It lets organizations conduct online meetings in simulated spaces using avatars. At its Ignite event last fall, Microsoft indicated that Mesh will become generally available in January 2024, and it will let users create "custom immersive spaces" for their organizations, with relatively little coding.

Mesh, though, will be arriving even as Microsoft has cut back on its "mixed reality" development efforts more generally. The cutbacks were notable enough that Microsoft early last year gave assurances about its commitments to Mesh, the Dynamics 365 Guides and Remote Assist apps, and HoloLens 2, Microsoft's mixed reality headset. Some mixed reality cutbacks continued, though. In December, Microsoft indicated that it was removing its Mixed Reality apps from Windows, used for gaming. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Microsoft Teams Capabilities
Expected: Ongoing

Microsoft Teams is a collaboration service available in Microsoft 365 productivity suite products that emerged from an earlier Skype for Business messaging and videoconferencing service. Microsoft announced late last year that it had released "new Teams" replacement apps, which were generally available for Windows and Mac devices. The company later updated that announcement to tell subscribers that they will get moved to the new Teams in April 2024. "After March 31, 2024, any classic Teams users that haven't updated to new Teams, will be automatically updated to new Teams," the update indicated. The new Teams is very similar to the classic version, but it has speed and performance improvements, support for MSIX packaging and enhanced security for things like cross-site scripting attacks. Microsoft's new product additions all now go to the new Teams product version.

Teams remains the centerpiece of Microsoft's enterprise software portfolio, with 320 million monthly active users and counting. Microsoft releases multiple new features for Teams monthly. Here are some notable coming features, although about 90 new Teams features are slated for general availability in 2024, per a search of the Microsoft 365 Roadmap page:

• Immersive spaces (expected January 2024) works with Microsoft Mesh technology to let users create "metaverse" environments in which to hold Teams meetings.
• Enhancements to Copilot in Teams (availability TBD) will include live meeting summarization, the ability to create visualizations of meeting highlights in Microsoft Whiteboard, and the ability to create meeting notes that users can then share, edit and collaborate around. Copilot in Teams is described by Microsoft as being already available. It seems to be based on Copilot for Microsoft 365, and requires having that license.
• Voice isolation (expected Q1 2024) will use AI to filter unwanted noises in a Teams meeting or call.
• Teams chat and channel improvements (expected January 2024) will include the ability forward chat messages, create profile pictures for individual group chats, integration with Loop in Teams channels and more customizability. New channel management capabilities, including the ability to archive channels, are also on the way.
• More keyboard shortcuts (expected January 2024) will let users, for example, change their availability status or reply to their last received message with a few keystrokes.
• Shared channel improvements (expected January 2024) will help facilitate meetings with people outside the user's organization.

Microsoft also promised user interface tweaks this year in this announcement. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Dynamics 365
Expected: April & October 2024

For several years now, Microsoft has issued twice-a-year updates to its Dynamics 365 CRM platform, the first being dubbed "Release Wave 1" and the second "Release Wave 2." For 2024, Release Wave 1 is slated to become generally available on April 1 (though qualified customers will get Early Access to the new features starting Feb. 5).

At Ignite last fall, Microsoft detailed several Dynamics 365 features that were being developed, with some in the preview stage. Presumably, these features, listed below, will appear in their final (or near-final) forms as part of Release Wave 1:

• Copilot integration with Dynamics 365 Field Service to enable natural-language querying.
• Integration between Dynamics 365 Field Service, Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to provide users with faster access to revenue and inventory data.
• Expanded Copilot capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Microsoft noted in January that "the ability to generate content ideas, query customer data using natural language, and create customer segments and journeys using next-generation AI" would preview in Q1, with general availability in Q3, for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• The expanded preview of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Guides, which combines Microsoft's AI and mixed reality technologies to enable factory floor workers, for example, to visualize and troubleshoot mechanical problems using real-time data.

Release Wave 2 is expected to arrive in early October. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Microsoft Fabric Capabilities
Expected: First Half of 2024

Microsoft's "all-in-one analytics solution," Fabric, consists of multiple data platform tools and reached general availability in November. It's set to get a raft of new features and enhancements throughout the first half of 2024, such as integration with Copilot (which is currently in preview). In January, Microsoft explained that the Copilot in Fabric preview "includes Copilot for Power BI, Data Factory and Data Science & Data Engineering," which were made broadly available. During Ignite 2023, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella indicated that multiple Copilots for Fabric would arrive "by the end of March 2024."

The below Fabric components are all currently in public preview, with improvements slated for each:

Synapse Data Engineering

• Public preview of Spark autotune (expected Q1 2024)
• Dynamic lineage of data engineering items (expected Q1 2024)
• Public preview of Lakehouse data security (expected Q2 2024)
• Schema support for Lakehouse (expected Q2 2024)
• High concurrency in pipelines (expected Q2 2024)
• Policy management (expected Q2 2024)
• General availability of Environments (expected Q2 2024)
• Public preview of Notebooks in an app (expected Q2 2024)

Synapse Data Warehouse

• Public preview of Fabric mirroring (expected Q1 2024)

Synapse Data Science

• AutoML hyperparameter tuning with FLAML (expected Q1 2024)
• General availability of Semantic Link (expected Q2 2024)
• ML Model endpoints (expected Q2 2024)
• CI/CD support for data science items (expected Q2 2024)
• Integration with monitoring hub (expected Q2 2024)

Data Factory

• Data Factory Git integration for data pipelines (expected Q1 2024)
• Enhancements to output destinations in Dataflow Gen2 (expected Q1 2024)
• Incremental refresh support in Dataflow Gen2 (expected Q1 2024)
• Fast copy support in Dataflow Gen2 (expected Q1 2024)
• Data source identity management (expected Q1 2024)
• Get data experience improvements (expected Q1 2024)
• On-premises data gateway support added to data pipelines (expected Q1 2024)
• Enabling customers to parameterize their connections (expected Q1 2024)
• Data Factory Git integration for dataflows (expected Q2 2024)

Microsoft also is planning an integration with Microsoft Purview, its data governance solution, at some point. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Outlook Updates
Expected: Ongoing

Microsoft released what it called the "new Outlook for Windows 11" last September for individuals, as well as enterprise users getting Microsoft 365 enterprise channel releases. This release was deemed an "enterprise ready" release, by which Microsoft meant that it was a preview with the word, "preview," removed. The new Outlook shares a codebase with the existing Outlook on the Web app. Microsoft's development team explained that the new Outlook was built, in part, to simplify the product's codebase across platforms. However, as a consequence, some classic Outlook capabilities won't be available. In particular, COM add-in support is getting removed. The new Outlook instead will use Web add-ins.

Starting in early 2024, the new app will begin shipping as the default e-mail solution on new Windows 11 devices running version 23H2 or higher, replacing the Mail and Calendar apps.

Microsoft's planned updates for the refreshed Outlook app will happen throughout the year. Some notable coming enhancements include:

• Conditional formatting (expected January 2024).
• The ability to record and insert Stream videos directly from the new Outlook (expected January 2024).
• Integration with Teams search-based message extensions (expected January 2024).
• Offline support (expected January 2024).
• The ability to watch embedded Stream videos from within an Outlook e-mail (expected February 2024).
• Access to Teams meeting chats from within Outlook (expected February 2024).
• A cleaner interface to manage folders (expected March 2024).
• A "follow" RSVP option for meeting invitations (expected June 2024).
• The ability to open the To Do app from within Outlook (expected July 2024).

The new Outlook has generated some controversy. Its development team had suggested in September of last year that it would take about two years for it to have the feature equivalence of the classic Outlook, although Microsoft ended up releasing it to organizations in that same month. On top of possibly having thinned features, the new Outlook apparently will compromise user privacy for ad money. Geneva-based Proton, which makes privacy-focused software, noted this year that the new Outlook will send user data to 772 external parties, and would permit Microsoft to read e-mails. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Microsoft 365 Backup
Expected: Released

The new Microsoft 365 Backup solution has been available as a paid preview since December. It's expected to start rolling out in the first half of 2024, per a Microsoft blog from Ignite. At launch, the service will let users back up data from their SharePoint, OneDrive and Exchange environments. The ability to back up "other Microsoft 365 sources, such as Teams chat," will follow the general availability release, according to Microsoft. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Microsoft 365 Archive
Expected: TBA

Microsoft 365 Archive is designed to provide "cold" storage for SharePoint sites and it is currently released at the paid preview stage. Future general availability hasn't been indicated as yet. Microsoft 365 Archive, like its kindred product, Microsoft 365 Backup, is based on Microsoft Syntex (which was renamed "SharePoint Premium"). Microsoft described speed, metadata and storage cost savings benefits for Microsoft 365 Archive in this document, but it listed some limitations with the preview, as well. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Kurt Mackie and David Ramel contributed to this report.

2022 Roadmap Archive
The following products were featured in our 2022 Microsoft Product Roadmap. Click on a product name to jump to that section.

Windows 11
Released

In a departure, Microsoft's current flagship client OS will only receive one feature update per year (called the "General Availability Channel"), instead of the twice-yearly updates normalized by Windows 10. These once-a-year feature update releases will have "24 months of support for Home or Pro editions, and 36 months of support for Enterprise and Education editions," according to Microsoft.

In making that change with Windows 11, Microsoft acknowledged some IT pros' grumblings that biannual Windows 10 feature update releases were just too frequent. The once-per-year Windows 11 feature updates also promise to be less disruptive for end users. Microsoft uses artificial intelligence to gauge machine readiness for feature updates, and also tracks a user's active hours to optimize update deliveries. Windows 11 advances from Windows 10 with a rounded corners design change, plus more stringent security hardware requirements. [ BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Microsoft Teams: Mesh, Teams Connect and Loop
Expected release: Throughout 2022

Microsoft Teams is in everything, and everything is in Microsoft Teams. Microsoft has taken pains over the past few years to make the collaboration platform inextricable from much of its product stack, greatly expanding its usability. Out of the many components within Teams, there are a few standout features and capabilities that are expected to hit major milestones in 2022.

Mesh for Microsoft Teams, first announced at Ignite in November, is at the forefront of Microsoft's "metaverse" play. In a nutshell, Mesh for Microsoft Teams promises to deliver new options for digital collaboration that include personalized avatars and 3-D environments. Microsoft plans to issue a preview of Mesh for Teams sometime in the first half of 2022, with general availability to follow later in the year.

Teams Connect, currently in private preview, is also expected to launch in 2022. Teams Connect will let organizations use Teams with other organizations, bringing capabilities such as chat, as well as document sharing and real-time coauthoring, plus online meetings, via a "shared channel."

Microsoft Loop has already been released to Microsoft 365 "commercial customers" using Teams, though Microsoft plans to update it over 2022 with new features. Touted by CEO Satya Nadella as "the next big breakthrough in Microsoft 365," Loop delivers little applications within Teams, letting users create notes, task lists and tables on the fly, which can be messaged to collaborative team members. [ BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Microsoft Defender for Business
Released

Microsoft's portfolio of "Defender"-labeled security products underwent yet another major rebrand last November, during the Ignite event. Amid the myriad announcements of new names for old products, Microsoft also debuted a brand-new solution called Microsoft Defender for Business.

Currently in preview, Microsoft Defender for Business is a security solution for SMBs that may lack a full-blown or deeply experienced IT department. It's designed to thwart malware and ransomware via antivirus and endpoint detection and response capabilities, protecting devices running Android, iOS, macOS and Windows operating systems. MSP partners can manage it using Microsoft 365 Lighthouse.

While Microsoft Defender for Business is a new product, it'll be included in the subscriptions of current Microsoft 365 Business Premium users when commercially released (presumably sometime in 2022, though Microsoft hasn't confirmed that yet). The product is not exactly free, though, as Microsoft is planning to increase the price of those subscriptions by $2 on March 1, 2022. [ BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Dynamics 365
Release Wave 1: Released
Release Wave 2: October 2022

Once again, Microsoft is expected to update Dynamics 365 via two "release waves," one in the spring and one in the fall. The timeline for Release Wave 1, according to Microsoft, is as follows:

• Jan. 25: Release plans published
• Jan. 31: Early access program begins
• April 1: General availability

The Release Wave 1 period will extend from April to September. As of this writing, the exact dates for Release Wave 2 haven't been released. [ BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

SQL Server 2022
Released

SQL Server 2022 reached the private preview stage back in November and there's been no recently announced product advance or updated plans announced since that time.

The new product is bringing various Azure support enhancements, but Microsoft also added improvements to the core database engine. As noted by Microsoft MVP Joey D'Antoni, SQL Server 2022 will be capable of near-zero-downtime migrations to Azure SQL Managed Instance. More importantly, an added database restore capability will permit organizations to move back to on-premises SQL Server.

The Query Store feature in SQL Server 2022 is getting a write capability for readable secondary databases in Always On availability groups. It will permit the tracking of query activities in SQL Server and Azure SQL Database secondaries. Query execution is expected to improve with a maximum degree of parallelism (MaxDOP) enhancement that better optimizes row scanning. Query speed improvements that overcome suboptimal parameters are also part of the product plans.

Support for Kerberos authentication is getting added to the product. It'll help developers who had based their products on Active Directory for identity management. "One of the headaches faced by Azure SQL Managed Instance customers was that they had to switch their client applications from connecting with traditional Active Directory connections, which used Kerberos, to using Azure Active Directory authentication, which relied on more protocols like OAuth and SAML," D'Antoni explained. The added Kerberos support in SQL Server 2022 is expected ease such transitions.  [ BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Exchange Server Subscription Edition
Expected release: 2025

Microsoft first described its plan to release subscription-based editions for its application server products in the fall of 2020. The idea is that customers install these servers on their own hardware, then pay Microsoft an annual or monthly subscription fee to use it. Since that initial announcement, Microsoft has released subscription editions of SharePoint Server and Project Server.

The subscription edition of Exchange Server is presumably forthcoming in 2022 (along with the subscription edition of Skype for Business Server), but Microsoft has said little about its release plans so far. However, in a statement to ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley, a Microsoft spokesperson said, "We're finalizing plans for our other on-premises server products, and we'll share the details in 2022." [ BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Skype for Business Server Subscription Edition
Expected release: TBA

Microsoft first described its plan to release subscription-based editions for its application server products in the fall of 2020. The idea is that customers install these servers on their own hardware, then pay Microsoft an annual or monthly subscription fee to use it. Since that initial announcement, Microsoft has released subscription editions of SharePoint Server and Project Server.

The subscription edition of Skype for Business Server is presumably forthcoming in 2022 (along with the subscription edition of Exchange Server), but Microsoft has said little about its release plans so far. However, in a statement to ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley, a Microsoft spokesperson said, "We're finalizing plans for our other on-premises server products, and we'll share the details in 2022." [ BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

System Center 2022
Released

Microsoft first described the next version release of System Center during a promotional event for Windows Server 2022 last September. Microsoft has a free browser-based Windows Admin Center management product, but System Center is still billed by Microsoft as its top suite of tools for managing enterprise-grade workloads that have a need to scale. New features coming to System Center 2022, as reported in this September RCP article, were described by Microsoft as follows:

• System Center Operations Manager will have integration with Microsoft Teams to receive alerts and mitigate issues.
• System Center Operations Manager will get custom roles to be defined by users.
• Data Protection Manager users will have a folder-level restore for VM backups with recovery points.
• Parallel restoring will be available for multiple VMware VMs managed by a vCenter instance.

Since then, Microsoft has stated that System Center 2022 will become available in the spring of 2022. Aside from the aforementioned features, Microsoft also plans to deliver "new hybrid capabilities" to the product and add "support for Azure Stack HCI 21H2 and VMware 7.0 hosts," among others. [ BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

PowerShell 7.3
Expected release: 2022

The last stable release of the PowerShell scripting solution, version 7.2, was only just released in November, but Microsoft is already at work on its successor. Preview 1 of PowerShell 7.3 has been available since December, and Microsoft has said additional details about the release will come in the first quarter.

PowerShell 7.2 was notable for its integration with .NET 6, a pivotal release for Microsoft because it represents the transformation of the traditional Windows-only .NET Framework into a more open (and open source) developer product. Similarly, according to Microsoft, the forthcoming PowerShell 7.3 will be "built on .NET 6.0." [ BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Windows Server 2022 Datacenter: Azure Edition
Released

The Datacenter, Standard and Essentials editions of Windows Server 2022 all reached general availability in September, but the Datacenter: Azure Edition (or simply the Azure Edition) is still in public preview, and has been since last summer. As of this writing, Microsoft hasn't indicated when this product will exit public preview and become generally available, but presumably it'll be sometime in 2022.

Windows Server 2022 Datacenter: Azure Edition is limited to running on either Azure virtual machines or on the Azure Stack HCI on-premises product. However, it does have some notable features, according to this RCP article:

• Hot-patching, an in-memory process that dispenses with restarts and reboots. It's an Azure Automanage feature that requires using Server Core.
• SMB over QUIC, described as a secure "alternative to the TCP network transport" providing VPN support for telecommuters and mobile users.
• Azure Extended Networking for moving apps to the cloud that need to maintain the same IP addresses. It preserves "on-premises private IP addresses, when migrating into Azure."

A Microsoft table comparing the different Windows Server 2022 editions shows that the Datacenter: Azure Edition may be the most feature-complete of the bunch. Like Microsoft's other Windows Server products, this version will get updated via the long-term servicing channel release model. [ BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Visual Studio 2022 for Mac
Expected release: First half of 2022

The development road of Visual Studio 2022 for Mac has been riddled with problems. Microsoft expects to release it sometime in the first half of the year, putting it months behind the Windows version of Visual Studio 2022, which launched back in November.

The first Visual Studio 2022 for Mac preview became available last fall, featuring support for .NET 6 and C# 10, speed and stability improvements and a better Git user experience. Subsequent preview releases (as of this writing, it's four previews in) have been focused more on fixing numerous bugs and less on delivering major new features and capabilities. However, Microsoft has hinted that it plans to add support for Apple's M1 processors at some point in the preview process.

"To enable this support, we will be moving the IDE to run on the .NET 6 CLR (Common Language Runtime)," senior program manager Jordan Matthiesen was quoted as saying in this Visual Studio Magazine article about preview 3. "This is a major architectural change bringing with it improvements for all our users on both Intel and M1 processors. In our initial lab tests we're already seeing improvements in performance, with large solutions loading in half the amount of time it took in the v8.10 release." [ BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

.NET MAUI
Released

.NET MAUI (which stands for "multi-platform app UI") is now due to arrive early in the second quarter of 2022, after initially being slated for a November 2021 release.

Microsoft first unveiled .NET MAUI during its 2020 Build developer conference, touting it as the cross-platform .NET model for which developers have long wished -- essentially, the next evolution of Xamarin.Forms. Covering the Build 2020 event, Visual Studio Magazine's David Ramel described .NET MAUI as "a single-stack UI framework that supports all modern workloads: Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows (but not Linux, other than possible 'community' driven support)."

Microsoft had originally intended to release .NET MAUI alongside the equally landmark .NET 6, but told developers last fall that it needed to "slip the schedule" to continue refining the product. The current (as of this writing) test version release, preview 11, is expected to be the final preview before Release Candidate 1, which will likely roll out in the first quarter. [ BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

.NET 7
Released

Microsoft is set to release version 7 of .NET this November, one year after the landmark release of .NET 6. A few .NET 7 features are already in preview, according to this Visual Studio Magazine article by David Ramel, including the ability to "allow static abstract members to be declared in interfaces."

Microsoft's Azure Functions team has also stated plans to support .NET 7 in the serverless computing platform. "We plan to support .NET 7 on day 1 exclusively in the isolated model," the team was quoted as saying in another Visual Studio Magazine report. "We expect that you'll be able to migrate and run almost any .NET serverless workload in the isolated worker -- including Durable Functions and other targeted improvements to the isolated model."

.NET 7 will be released alongside Entity Framework Core 7, the next version of Microsoft's object-relational .NET mapper. Entity Framework Core 7 will represent a turning point for Microsoft, according to Ramel. "It continues the company's move from the old Entity Framework scheme that was part of the Windows-only .NET Framework, which was supplanted by the cross-platform, open source 'Core' lineup, which itself subsequently dropped the 'Core' designation for just .NET 6, .NET 7 and so on." [ BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Kurt Mackie, David Ramel and Chris Paoli contributed to this report.

2021 Roadmap Archive
The following products were featured in our 2021 Microsoft Product Roadmap. Click on a product name to jump to that section.

• Windows 10X
• Windows 10/11
• Exchange Server vNext
• SharePoint Server vNext
• Skype for Business Server vNext
• Project Server vNext
• Office for Windows and Mac
• System Center Operations Manager 'Aquila'
• Windows 365 Cloud PC
• Dynamics 365 and Power Platform
• .NET 6
• Windows Server 2022

Windows 10X
Delayed Indefinitely

Microsoft's original plans for dual-screen devices running Windows 10X were scrapped last year in favor of single-screen devices instead. In a May 2020 blog post, Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay said the "flexibility" built into Windows 10X "has enabled us to pivot our focus toward single-screen Windows 10X devices that leverage the power of the cloud to help our customers work, learn and play in new ways." He added that Microsoft will "continue to look for the right moment" to launch dual-screen devices running Windows 10X.

Well-sourced ZDNet reporter Mary Jo Foley expects the first of these single-screen Windows 10X devices to debut in the spring of 2021, with dual-screen devices rolling out a full year later. A leaked screenshot presumed to be of Windows 10X has drawn comparisons to the lightweight Chrome OS from Google. The first Windows 10X devices are expected to be aimed at home and education users, as well as firstline workers.

According to Foley's sources, Windows 10X will run on "third-party Intel-based devices only," at least at the outset, with no support for Win32 container applications. The lack of Win32 application support may be offset by integration between Windows 10X and the forthcoming Cloud PC product, Foley surmised, though that's still unconfirmed by Microsoft. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Windows 10/11
21H1: Released
21H2: Released
Windows 11: Released

Microsoft had settled on a spring/fall update cadence for Windows 10 the past few years, with the spring update generally being a bigger to-do than the fall update. However, the arrival of Windows 10X, also projected for this spring, may change things.

Citing information from her sources, ZDNet's Foley speculated that "Microsoft may end up releasing just one feature update per year for Windows 10 starting in 2021 to free up more engineers to be able to focus on both Windows 10X and Windows 10." The idea is that the spring 2021 update may not be a Windows 10 update at all, but will instead just be the Windows 10X launch. The actual Windows 10 update may not come until the fall of 2021, according to this theory.

The notion of a bigger-than-usual fall update is supported by a report by Windows Central's Zac Bowden indicating that "the biggest Windows 10 UI refresh we've seen so far" is slated to roll out in the later part of this year. This update, reportedly code-named "Sun Valley," will include a redesigned interface and new productivity features, according to Bowden, citing unnamed sources. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Windows Server 2022
Released

The next Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) release of Windows Server, officially called Windows Server 2022, will be released "later this calendar year," Microsoft announced in March during its 2021 virtual Ignite conference. A preview is now available to download. As of Ignite, Windows Server 2022 is at least two preview builds in; build 20292 was released in early February, followed shortly by build 20298.

According to Microsoft's announcement, Windows Server 2022 "includes advanced multi-layer security, hybrid capabilities with Azure, and a flexible platform to modernize applications with containers." [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Exchange Server vNext
Expected release: Second half of 2021

The next edition of Exchange Server is one of several application server products coming in the second half of 2021 that will be available only on a subscription basis, renewable either monthly or annually. Microsoft announced the licensing shift last fall, though it didn't provide exact details on pricing, availability or final naming.

Microsoft did indicate that users of Exchange Server 2013 and newer will be able to perform "in-place" upgrades to Exchange Server vNext. Exchange Server 2019 users, in particular, will have a two-year window in which they can upgrade to Exchange Server vNext. "We highly recommended that customers with existing Exchange Server 2013 or 2016 deployments and who expect to keep on-premises servers in the future should start planning and installing Exchange Server 2019 today," Microsoft said in a blog post. "Once the next version of Exchange is released, they will then be able to perform an in-place upgrade to that version, making the move to 2019 the last major upgrade they will ever need to do."  

So far, Microsoft hasn't gone into much detail about what's new in Exchange Server vNext. In an Ignite 2020 talk, however, it did say that "the new version...will be built to support long term servicing, maintenance and easy upgrades." [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

SharePoint Server vNext
Expected release: Second half of 2021

SharePoint Server is also switching to subscription-based licensing when its next version is released in the second half of this year. Details of the vNext release are still scant, though.

Microsoft did indicate that Project Cortex -- a SharePoint-adjacent product that Microsoft has billed as an AI-powered "knowledge network" -- will see some feature improvements this year. According to an Ignite 2020 presentation, the SharePoint Syntex component of Project Cortex will receive "enhanced capabilities," "advanced content experiences" and "taxonomy" improvements in early 2021. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Skype for Business Server vNext
Expected release: Second half of 2021

Skype for Business Server will also see a new version release in the second half of this year, and it too will be subscription-based only.

A Microsoft blog post indicated that users of Lync Server 2013, Skype for Business Server 2015 and Skype for Business Server 2019 will be able to upgrade directly to the new version. Additionally, users of Skype for Business Server 2019 will be able to perform in-place upgrades to the new version for up to two years after release.

"We highly recommended that customers with existing Lync Server 2013 or SfB Server 2015 deployments and who expect to keep on-premises servers in the future, should start planning and installing SfB Server 2019 today," Microsoft said in the blog. "Once the next version of SfB is released, they will then be able to perform an in-place upgrade to that version, making the move to SfB Server 2019 the last major upgrade they will ever need to do." [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Project Server vNext
Expected release: Second half of 2021

The next version of Project Server, due in the second half of 2021, will also be subscription-based. So far, Microsoft hasn't shared many details about vNext.

However, an Ignite 2020 presentation did outline some updates coming to Project in "CY21 H1" (first half of calendar year 2021), including improvements to "team member experience," "people management," "project management," "collaboration" and "gov cloud support." [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Office for Windows and Mac
Office LTSC: Released
Perpetual license: Oct. 5

A new "perpetual release" of Office will arrive in the second half of this year for both Windows and Mac clients. Perpetual licensing, in Microsoft-speak, refers to onetime, non-subscription software purchases that don't expire. The perpetual-license release of Office does not entitle users to receive major feature upgrades from Microsoft, unlike Office licensed through subscription services such as Microsoft 365. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

System Center Operations Manager 'Aquila'
Expected release: Q1 of 2022

Microsoft is reportedly planning to spin up a managed, cloud-based version of the System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) datacenter monitoring solution in a project code-named "Aquila." Aquila was first reported by ZDNet's Foley in November, when she indicated that a private preview was expected "in the relatively near future."

According to Foley, citing unnamed sources, Microsoft is aiming Aquila at organizations that are reluctant to offload their operations management tasks to the cloud-based Azure Monitor. Microsoft itself has been using Azure Monitor internally for the bulk of its monitoring.

"Aquila is going to be a fully Microsoft-managed instance of SCOM that can run in Azure, Windows Server Datacenter and edge-computing systems," Foley wrote. "It will support container-based deployment, rather than virtual-machine-based deployment. It will be compatible with SCOM running-on-premises. Aquila will support migration from on-premises SCOM in a way to guard users' SCOM management packs. And it will integrate with Azure Monitor, Microsoft's Azure-based monitoring and telemetry service." [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Windows 365 Cloud PC
Released

A virtualized PC solution from Microsoft is reportedly in the works, with a possible release sometime this spring.

The so-called "Cloud PC" effort was first mentioned in a Microsoft job posting last June. It described the Cloud PC as "a strategic, new offering that is built on top of Windows Virtual Desktop to delivering [sic] Desktop as a Service." It will take the form of a managed service, possibly part of the Microsoft 365 suite, that's hosted in the Azure cloud and billed at a "a flat per user price." Essentially, Cloud PC will turn users' devices into thin clients, with access to the Windows desktop and Office applications delivered via VDI.

A Microsoft watcher who goes by "WalkingCat" later leaked other details allegedly related to Cloud PC. For instance, Microsoft apparently plans to offer it in three subscription tiers -- Medium, Heavy and Advanced -- based on workload. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform
Release Wave 1: Released
Release Wave 2: Released

As usual, Microsoft plans to issue two update "waves" this year to its Dynamics 365 and Power Platform solutions. The first release wave, scheduled for general availability on April 1, was made available for organizations to test drive in early February.

"This first release wave of the year offers hundreds of new features and enhancements, demonstrating our continued investment to power digital transformation for our customers and partners," Microsoft said in a January blog post. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

.NET 6
Released

Development on .NET 6 is already underway at Microsoft, though the landmark .NET 5 release was issued just a few months ago. Microsoft is set to roll out .NET 6 this November as a long-term support release.

As David Ramel wrote on RCP sister site VisualStudioMagazine, last year's .NET 5 release was integral to "Microsoft's effort to move from the aging, proprietary, Windows-only .NET Framework...to a new open source, cross-platform direction that started with .NET Core." However, some features that Microsoft originally planned to include in .NET 5 were delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Those features are now expected to show up in .NET 6.

For instance, .NET program manager Richard Lander said a blog post that Microsoft had intended to "take .NET Core and Mono/Xamarin implementations and unify them into one base class library (BCL) and toolchain (SDK)" in .NET 5. However, he said, "unification will be truly completed with .NET 6, our Long-Term Support (LTS) release. Our vision hasn't changed, but our timeline has." [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

2020 Roadmap Archive
The following products were featured in our 2020 Microsoft Product Roadmap. Click on a product name to jump to that section.

• Windows 10 and Windows 10X
• Azure Sphere
• SharePoint Spaces
• Project Cortex
• Dynamics 365
• Microsoft 365 Life
• .NET 5
• PowerShell 7
• Windows Server vNext

Windows 10 and Windows 10X
Spring 2020 (20H1): Released
Fall 2020 (20H2): Released

Microsoft's spring/fall release cadence for Windows 10 feature updates is rote by now. The next major update, known widely as "20H1," is expected to be released in March sometime. Microsoft is changing its naming convention for this release, though; rather than call it Windows 10 "2003" (two digits for the year followed by two digits for the month), the company said 20H1's official version number will be "2004." The move is an effort "to eliminate confusion with any past product names (such as Windows Server 2003)," Microsoft said last November.

As of this writing, Microsoft is believed to be in the last few stages of testing 20H1, and will presumably begin testing the first preview builds of 20H2 (expected to arrive in the fall) soon.

Also expected to debut this fall is Windows 10X, a new flavor of the operating system that's designed to run on foldable tablet devices that Microsoft and some of its hardware partners are planning to release in the later part of the year. Microsoft's Surface Duo and Surface Neo, announced last October, are two such devices that feature a foldable form factor. Microsoft describes Windows 10X as optimizing the existing Windows 10 code "for flexible postures and more mobile use." [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Azure Sphere
Released

Microsoft is set to launch Azure Sphere, it's innovative new approach to IoT security, in February 2020, nearly two years after first unveiling it at the 2018 RSA Conference and running it through its paces in a private preview.

Microsoft touts Azure Sphere as a "turnkey solution" to help organizations secure their ever-expanding networks of connected devices. The solution has three layers -- a microcontroller unit, an operating system and a cloud-based management service. Microsoft has partnered with several chip partners, including Qualcomm, NXP and MediaTek, to develop the silicon behind the service. As for the OS, it notably runs on a Linux kernel and will act as a defense-in-depth security platform. Finally, the Azure Sphere Security Service will enable ongoing security monitoring, over-the-air software updates and device deployment capabilities.

To secure older devices, Microsoft also offers "guardian modules," a related Azure Sphere service. Guardian modules will enable newer microcontrollers to connect older (or "brownfield") IoT devices to the Azure Sphere solution, letting organizations extend Azure Sphere's security capabilities to their less-advanced or even discontinued equipment. A few guardian modules have been available since last fall from partners like Avnet and AI-Link, though Microsoft has indicated that others will arrive to the market in the future. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

SharePoint Spaces
Expected release: Fall 2020

SharePoint Spaces grabbed headlines when Microsoft first announced it in mid-2018 at the SharePoint North America event. The feature brings 3-D and mixed reality experiences to SharePoint Online -- for instance, allowing users to easily create a 3-D catalog page in SharePoint. Other Microsoft demos have shown SharePoint Spaces enabling users to remotely "tour" Microsoft's campus while wearing virtual reality headsets.

Since then, SharePoint Spaces has been in limited preview. Microsoft has said that while more than 1,800 customers have applied for the preview, only a "handful" of them are working directly with Microsoft on its development. Microsoft has said very little about its progress on SharePoint Spaces otherwise.

That is, until last fall's Ignite conference. As noted by several media outlets, in a podcast interview during Ignite 2019 with the VR/AR Association, Amy Scarfone, principal design manager in Microsoft's mixed reality division, said that a preview of SharePoint Spaces will become publicly available "ideally in Q1 but certainly in the first half of 2020." [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Project Cortex
Expected release: Throughout Q4 2020

The second new service to launch under the Microsoft 365 product umbrella (following Teams) is Project Cortex, an AI-powered "knowledge network" that debuted at last November's Ignite conference. Following a rigorous private preview run, it's expected to become publicly available in the first half of this year.

With its roots in SharePoint, Project Cortex aims to use "AI to reason over content across teams and systems, recognizing content types, extracting important information, and automatically organizing content into shared topics like projects, products, processes and customers," according to Microsoft's announcement. "Cortex then creates a knowledge network based on relationships among topics, content, and people." It mines information from Microsoft's product stack, including the Graph, Office 365 and SharePoint, as well as from various third-party sources (e.g., Salesforce, ServiceNow and MediWiki) by using external connectors.

Microsoft envisions Project Cortex as another way for its customers to interact more intelligently with its products. For instance, one way Project Cortex presents itself to users is in "topic cards" that pop up when a user encounters specific words, phrases or names in a document. The topic card will display relevant information that Project Cortex has surfaced from other applications. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Dynamics 365
Release Wave 1: Released
Release Wave 2: Released

As it did in 2019, Microsoft plans to issue two major sets of updates to Dynamics 365 in 2020. The first, dubbed "Release Wave 1," will roll out in April while "Release Wave 2" will be offered in October.

Specifically, April 1 will mark the "production deployment" of Release Wave 1, followed by "regional deployments" on April 3. Prior to that, however, Microsoft will let organizations test out Release Wave 1's features in non-production environments; this "early access" program will begin on Feb. 3.

Microsoft plans to give a detailed picture of what features and changes will be included in Release Wave 1 on Jan. 27, when the update's release notes will be made available. One change of note is the new Dynamics 365 Human Resources product, which will replace the "core HR capabilities" of the existing Dynamics 365 Talent application starting Feb. 3. "Eligible customers who are utilizing the core HR capabilities within Dynamics 365 Talent will have their service continued under Dynamics 365 Human Resources licensing with no disruption in service. No migration is required," Microsoft said in a December 2019 announcement. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Microsoft 365 Life
Released

Microsoft spun out Microsoft 365 from its older Secure Productive Enterprise product back in 2017. The suite bundles together Windows 10, Office 365 and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS), which itself is a combo pack of Azure Active Directory, Intune and other Microsoft security services. There are different tiers of Microsoft 365 aimed at enterprises, SMBs and educators, but a fourth version aimed squarely at consumers is reportedly in the works.

Citing unnamed sources, longtime Microsoft reporter Mary Jo Foley said in a late-2019 blog post that Microsoft plans to launch "Microsoft 365 Life" sometime in the spring of 2020 (though it had initially been planned for a mid-2019 release, apparently). According to Foley, this new consumer-focused Microsoft 365 edition will essentially be a repackaging of Office 365 Personal and Office 365 Home, with similar pricing. However, it's also rumored to include a password manager, setting it apart from its more productivity-focused brethren. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

.NET 5
Expected release: Released

Following a preview release sometime in the first half of 2020, .NET 5 is expected to become generally available this November.

Microsoft is changing its nomenclature with this coming release, forgoing the usual "Core" and "Framework" that's typically appended to the version number. That's reflective of the milestone that .NET 5 represents; as David Ramel wrote for RCP sister site Redmond, .NET 5 "will mark the transition from the aging, proprietary, Windows-only .NET Framework to a modern, open source, cross-platform .NET."

Microsoft is promising developers a common framework and runtime with .NET 5, no matter the platform. "With .NET 5, your code and project files will look and feel the same no matter which type of app you're building," the company said last May. "You'll have access to the same runtime, API and language capabilities with each app. This includes new performance improvements that get committed to corefx, practically daily." [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

PowerShell 7
Released

At first slated for a January 2020 release, PowerShell 7 is now expected to become generally available in "early February." That delay was announced after Microsoft decided to make last-minute adjustments to the product following December's release candidate (RC1) rollout. Microsoft now intends to issue RC2 in January before the final February release.

PowerShell 7 is conceived as a replacement for PowerShell Core 6.x and Windows PowerShell 5.1. PowerShell 7 will be closely tied to .NET, including the forthcoming .NET 5. "With the 7.0 previews, we've worked more closely with the .NET team than ever, not only tracking with .NET Core 3.0 and 3.1 previews, but working hand-in-hand with .NET developers to improve the performance of PowerShell," wrote PowerShell Program Manager Joey Aiello in the blog post announcing RC1. "We intend to continue taking advantage of new .NET features coming in .NET 5 and beyond that we can use to make PowerShell 7 even better."

Among PowerShell 7's key features are a Pipeline Chain Operators tool, a new null assignment operator, a new Get-Error cmdlet and the return of the Get-HotFix cmdlet. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Windows Server vNext
Spring 2020 (20H1): Released
Fall 2020 (20H2): Released

As its moniker of "20H1" suggests, the next major update release of Windows Server will roll out in the first half of 2020. More specifically, though, it's widely expected to land sometime in the spring, mirroring the timing of Windows 10 20H1. In keeping with Microsoft twice-a-year release schedule, it'll be followed by a second update in the fall of 2020.

Microsoft has been putting Windows Server 20H1 through its paces since mid-2019, releasing test builds to the Insider program every few weeks. Those builds have given some insights into Microsoft's planned improvements to Windows Server 20H1. They include faster PowerShell speeds (an improvement of as much as 30 percent) and a 40 percent reduction in container base image size (compared to Windows Server Version 1903, released last May). [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

2019 Roadmap Archive
The following products were featured in our 2019 Microsoft Product Roadmap. Click on a product name to jump to that section.

• Windows 10 '19H1' and Beyond
• Windows Server 'vNext'
• System Center 2019
• Dynamics 365
• BizTalk Server 'vNext'
• Visual Studio 2019
• Azure DevOps Server 2019
• HoloLens 2
• SQL Server 2019

Windows 10 '19H1' and Beyond
Spring update: Released
Fall update: Released

Microsoft is widely expected to release the next major version of Windows 10, thought to be version 1903 and code-named "19H1," in April 2019. The desktop operating system follows a biannual (or "semiannual") upgrade release cycle, with major OS "feature updates" arriving in the spring and fall. Microsoft offers Windows 10 as both a semiannual channel Windows as a Service product, and as a more traditional long-term servicing channel product where new updates arrive every two or three years.

Preview builds of Windows 10 19H1 have been rolling out to users enrolled in the Windows Insider program since July 2018. Besides minor feature additions and some tweaks to the UI, a couple of more significant changes have come to light, including the brand-new "Windows Sandbox." Expected to be part of the Pro and Enterprise editions of Windows 10, Sandbox is described by Microsoft as a walled-off computing environment where users can run new apps in isolation, keeping the rest of their PC protected. "Any software installed in Windows Sandbox stays only in the sandbox and cannot affect your host," Microsoft said in its announcement. "Once Windows Sandbox is closed, all the software with all its files and state are permanently deleted."

Another new capability expected in Windows 10 19H1 is the "Reserved Storage" feature, which will set aside about 7GB of a PC's disk space for new Windows 10 updates. This reserved space will help ensure that applications are able to properly run after an OS update, according to Microsoft.

"Without reserved storage, if a user almost fills up her or his storage, several Windows and application scenarios become unreliable. Windows and application scenarios may not work as expected if they need free space to function. With reserved storage, updates, apps, temporary files, and caches are less likely to take away from valuable free space and should continue to operate as expected," the company said in a January blog post announcing the feature.

Beyond the spring release, Microsoft is expected to roll out the year's second Windows 10 feature update around October. A report by veteran Microsoft reporter Mary Jo Foley suggested that Microsoft may break with tradition regarding this second release's code name, calling it "Vanadium" instead of the expected "19H2." At any rate, the earliest public test builds of this second release are expected to appear in the early part of 2019 as development for Windows 10 19H1 wraps up. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Windows Server 'vNext'
Spring update: Released

As of this writing, the next major version of Windows Server is three test builds in, the first build having arrived back in November 2018. Like its desktop OS counterpart, Windows Server gets "feature updates" on a biannual (or "semiannual") release cadence, which go by version numbers. There's also a long-term servicing channel product option, where new upgrades arrive every two or three years.

Microsoft also releases a more traditional Windows Server product. Windows Server 2019, released back in October 2018, was the last such product. It doesn't get OS upgrades as frequently as the vNext semiannual product offering. The name and timing of the next traditional Windows Server product hasn't been announced.

Organizations can expect the first Windows Server vNext feature update release, perhaps version 1903, to arrive sometime in the spring (likely in April, coinciding with the release of Windows 10 19H1). A second feature update release is planned for the fall.

Outside of Microsoft's perfunctory release notes for each Windows Server vNext test build, the company thus far hasn't spotlighted any major changes or improvements to expect. Microsoft did hint at "new innovations in networking" when it issued test build 18298 in December, but said further details won't come until "the early new year."

The last test build as of this writing, build 18317, also spotlighted a new feature that enables organizations "to support multiple CI [code integrity] policies." [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

System Center 2019
Released

The "2019"-branded iteration of the System Center management suite is due sometime in the first quarter of the year, according to a Microsoft document (PDF download).

System Center is a suite of eight products, called "components," that consist of Configuration Manager, Data Protection Manager, Operations Manager, Orchestrator, Service Manager, Service Management Automation, Virtual Machine Manager, and Service Provider Foundation. Microsoft delivers major updates to System Center on a biannual (or "semiannual") basis in the spring and fall, a practice that started for the whole suite with the release of System Center version 1801 last year, although the Configuration Manager component is an exception in that it gets major updates three times per year. A long-term servicing channel version of the product, which gets new "feature updates" every two or three years, is also available.

System Center 2019 will incorporate "[n]ew features and enhancements including integration, support and alignment with Windows Server 2019," according to the Microsoft document. It'll also include "[s]torage optimization and improvements to RBAC [role-based access control] in VMM [Virtual Machine Manager]."

Microsoft's Q1 release of System Center 2019 will be the first long-term serving channel release of the product, according to a detailed blog post by Microsoft MVP Thomas Maurer. It'll bring greater integration between servers and Microsoft's Azure datacenters with coming "hybrid cloud" improvements, he noted. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Dynamics 365
April '19 update: Released
"Release Wave 2": Released

As of last July, Dynamics 365, Microsoft's enterprise resource planning solution, became another Microsoft product on a twice-yearly "feature update" schedule. The first of these updates, scheduled to be released on April 5 (following a Feb. 1 preview), will be a big one.

The April 5 "general availability" release of Dynamics 365 will be "the first major update where all of our customers across Dynamics 365 will be on the latest version and on a consistent update schedule," Microsoft explained in an announcement at the end of 2018. "It's also a template of how major updates will be done going forward in April and October every year."

Microsoft's release notes for this so-called "April '19 update" of Dynamics 365 became available just last month as a massive 315-page .PDF that the company plans to update in February as more features emerge. Already, the document lists "hundreds of new capabilities" coming in the April '19 update, including mixed reality and artificial intelligence enhancements across the entire suite.

The update will also integrate Dynamics 365 with Microsoft's Power Platform, which combines the company's various business analytics services -- namely PowerApps, Power BI and Flow. This integration will let Dynamics 365 users "build higher-quality reports, apps, and workflows more easily, while still supporting more advanced enterprise and administrator requirements," according to Microsoft. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

BizTalk Server 'vNext'
Anticipated release: Second half of 2019

It's been well over two years since the last major release of Microsoft's enterprise integration server, BizTalk Server, became available. The next generation of the product is due sometime in mid-2019, based on the broad timeframe that Microsoft gave in an August 2018 announcement. At that time, Microsoft indicated that it would release BizTalk Server "vNext" about nine months after Windows Server 2019.

The official launch of Windows Server 2019 came in October 2018 (though problems with the update caused Microsoft to subsequently pull the product and then rerelease it about a month later). That would put BizTalk Server's release somewhere after the mid-point of 2019.

Microsoft so far hasn't revealed much about its plans for BizTalk Server vNext, though its August 2018 blog post did indicate that it "will contain all previously released feature packs, platform support for the latest versions of Windows Server, SQL Server and Visual Studio, as well as a supported upgrade path from BizTalk Server 2013 R2 and 2016." The new release will have also "vNext" versions of the BizTalk Adapter Pack and Microsoft's Host Integration Server (HIS). [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Visual Studio 2019
Released

Microsoft first signaled that the next major release of Visual Studio was in the works back in the summer of 2018, soon after it acquired the open source code repository GitHub. Visual Studio 2019 is expected to be released sometime in the first half of 2019, roughly two years after the last current flagship version, Visual Studio 2017, rolled out.

As of this writing, Microsoft has released two preview versions of Visual Studio 2019, the first in late 2018 and the second in January 2019. According to reporting by our sister site, VisualStudioMagazine.com, the new release will include (among other things) AI-enhanced coding capabilities via the IntelliCode feature, improvements to the UI and collaboration capabilities, and enhancements to the "core IDE experience." It will also incorporate improvements aimed at Python, C# and mobile .NET developers. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Azure DevOps Server 2019
Released

The successor to Microsoft's Team Foundation Server (TFS) product, Azure DevOps Server 2019, had its first release candidate back in November 2018 and its second just this January. That second release candidate is the product's last before becoming generally available, Microsoft said at the time, so its likely that the production-ready version of Azure DevOps Server 2019 will roll out sometime in the first quarter.

Among the product's key features are a new UI based on Microsoft's Fluent design philosophy, integration with SQL Server and support for the Azure Pipelines automated development service. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

SQL Server 2019
Released

It's still early days for Microsoft's next-gen database platform. SQL Server 2019's first public outing was at the 2018 Ignite conference last fall, when Microsoft made it available as a Community Technology Preview (CTP). As of this writing, Microsoft has issued just one other CTP build back in December. Though Microsoft hasn't given a definitive timeline for release, it's fair to say that SQL Server 2019 likely won't hit the general availability milestone until later in 2019 -- perhaps November, to coincide with the 2019 Ignite event.

Microsoft has a lot of enhancements planned for SQL Server 2019, a big one being SQL Server Big Data clusters. SQL Server expert and Redmond columnist Joey D'Antoni described Big Data clusters as "a scale-out, data virtualization platform built on top of the Kubernetes (K8s) container platform." Also new to SQL Server 2019 is a feature called Accelerated Database Recovery (ADR), which expedites the process of undoing and rolling back database transactions.

Improvements are also coming to SQL Server's Always On Availability Group stack and the Always Encrypted security solution, as well as overall database performance. Microsoft is also promising support for Apache Spark and the Hadoop Distributed File System, as well as the ability to deploy Python- and R-based applications on clusters. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

HoloLens 2
Released

It's been roughly four years since Microsoft first debuted HoloLens, its augmented reality headset, which is being positioned as an industrial diagnostic tool on top of being a gaming peripheral. HoloLens was ground-breaking technology at the time, but as the rest of the industry caught up with other mixed-reality, virtual-reality and 3-D platforms and devices, that first-generation headset is now, as Redmondmag.com columnist Brien Posey put it, "starting to show its age."

Microsoft now appears set to unveil version 2 of HoloLens sometime in the first half of 2019. Possibly, it'll make an appearance at the Mobile World Congress event in late February, per some reports.

Details are scant about Microsoft's HoloLens 2 plans. However, Microsoft did confirm at its 2018 Build conference that it is resurrecting its old Kinect motion-sensing device with plans to turn it into an intelligent camera for the new HoloLens (among other use cases).

Microsoft has also described its work around developing an improved "holographic processing unit" for HoloLens that will leverage AI to process deep neural networks. Reports also suggested that the new device will run on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 850 system-on-a-chip. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

2018 Roadmap Archive
The following products were featured in our 2018 Microsoft Product Roadmap. Click on a product name to jump to that section.

• Windows 10
• Teams and Skype for Business
• Office 2019
• SharePoint Server 2019
• Exchange Server 2019
• Dynamics 365
• Windows Server and "Project Honolulu"
• Visual Studio 2019
• BizTalk Server "vNext"

Windows 10
"Redstone 5": Released
"Redstone 4": Released

Microsoft's semiannual release schedule for Windows 10 is less of a novelty now than it was back in 2015, when Microsoft ushered in the OS under a new "as-a-service" model. Three years and five version updates later, Microsoft is expected to stick to an update model it nailed down last year, with one major update release coming in the first half of the year (usually spring) and another in the second (usually fall).

The first major update, code-named "Redstone 4," has been in the works since August 2017, when the first preview build was made available to Windows Insider testers. Based on each subsequent build's release notes, Redstone 4 looks to be focused largely on feature refinements and usability improvements. There's more support for fonts and languages. The touch keyboard and handwriting features are constantly getting improvements, along with the Edge browser and the Windows Shell. New connectivity and power management enhancements are in the works. And with each build, Microsoft is activating more fluent design components.

There are a couple of brand-new additions, too. In the works for Redstone 4 is a new "Near Share" feature that lets Windows 10 users exchange files with PC users in their vicinity via Bluetooth. Microsoft is also reinstating the "Timeline" feature, which had originally been slated to appear in last October's Fall Creators Update. Timeline essentially lets Windows 10 users keep a record of their recent activities in any given app, making it easier to resume a task when they pull up that app again. And in a more recent build, Microsoft debuted a privacy app called "Windows Diagnostic Data Viewer" that gives users and administrators a better handle on the kinds of telemetry data that Microsoft collects from Windows 10 devices.

Redstone 4 will be followed by another release code-named "Redstone 5" in the later part of 2018. This early in the year, it might be too early to forecast exactly what Microsoft has planned for this second release, though there's at least one feature that Microsoft has already bumped from Redstone 4 and into Redstone 5. "Sets," which first cropped up last November in a Redstone 4 build, is a workspace-management interface that revolves around tabs. Microsoft described Sets as a way "to make sure that everything related to your task: relevant webpages, research documents, necessary files and applications, is connected and available to you in one click." Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it was pulling Sets from future Redstone 4 builds, though it will restore the feature in a "post-RS4 flight." Presumably, that means Redstone 5.

For those waiting for future Windows Mobile/Windows Phone developments, however, don't hold your breath. Microsoft's mobile efforts have been stagnating for some time now, but a Tweet earlier this year from Senior Program Manager Brandon LeBlanc put another nail in the coffin: "No mobile builds are coming." [BACK TO 2018 PRODUCT LIST]

Teams and Skype for Business
Teams updates: Throughout 2018
Skype for Business Server 2019: Released

Barely a year old, Teams is already being positioned by Microsoft as an integral piece of its enterprise collaboration portfolio. The Office 365 chat service launched last March as Microsoft's answer to the popular collaboration startup, Slack. Since then, Microsoft has taken significant steps to bolster Teams' enterprise bona fides through regular updates, providing IT management tools, mobile app support, integration with popular third-party apps like Dropbox and Google Drive, and a "guest access" feature that lets users collaborate with members of outside organizations. Microsoft has also been stumping for Teams in the academic space, offering it to schools through the no-cost Office 365 for Education plan, and rolling out UI features designed specifically for students and teachers.

Now, Microsoft plans to advance Teams even further by making it the company's primary unified communications (UC) offering, effectively replacing Skype for Business. Microsoft first announced the planned transition last September at the Ignite conference, calling the move part of its "new vision for intelligent communications." That vision entails Teams inheriting Skype's voice calling and meeting capabilities, as well as AI and machine learning capabilities via the Microsoft Graph, while running on Skype's infrastructure for the back-end.

Those Skype calling capabilities became available in Teams last December. By the end of Q2 2018, Microsoft also expects to add screen-sharing, third-party video support, voicemail capabilities and transcription/recording services. Other features, including "location-based routing," "group call pickup," "call park" and "shared line appearance," are due by year's end, according to Microsoft.

Despite its seeming demotion, Skype for Business isn't going away anytime soon. For one, the Teams-to-Skype transition could take upward of three years, industry watchers estimate. For another, Microsoft has promised to continue supporting Skype for Business Online and Skype for Business Server, with a new server release expected in the second half of 2018. Microsoft is also expected to enable Skype for Business-certified devices to work on Teams sometime in Q2. [BACK TO 2018 PRODUCT LIST]

Office 2019
Released

Cloud may be king at Microsoft nowadays, with the Office 365 productivity suite taking much more of a leading role in Microsoft's product development efforts compared to its on-premises or retail "boxed" counterpart, but Microsoft hasn't thrown in the towel on its old-school Office software yet. At its Ignite conference, Microsoft announced that it was readying the next version of the on-premises Office product, dubbed "Office 2019," for public release sometime in the second half of 2018.

In a blog post announcing Office 2019, Microsoft Office General Manager Jared Spataro characterized the upcoming release as an olive branch to organizations that are still wary of making the move to the cloud. "Cloud-powered innovation is a major theme at Ignite this week. But we recognize that moving to the cloud is a journey with many considerations along the way. Office 2019 will be a valuable upgrade for customers who feel that they need to keep some or all of their apps and servers on-premises," he wrote.

Microsoft expects to roll out a preview of Office 2019 sometime in the second quarter, with general availability in the second half of 2018. New features coming down the pipeline, according to Spataro, include enhancements to the inking feature, improved data analysis capabilities in Excel, expanded PowerPoint animation features and better security. One notable limitation that Microsoft announced early this year: Office 2019 will not be supported on Windows versions older than Windows 10 (which means the still-popular Windows 7 is out of the running). [BACK TO 2018 PRODUCT LIST]

Visual Studio 2019
Anticipated release: First half of 2019

The next major version of Visual Studio is "now in the early planning phase," Microsoft said in June, over two years after the release of Visual Studio 2017.

This announcement represented Microsoft's first official mention of Visual Studio 2019. It was prompted by the company's freshly announced acquisition of GitHub, where Microsoft's developer teams do a lot of their work.

The Visual Studio 2019 announcement was light on concrete details, but John Montgomery, director of Visual Studio program management, gave a broad outline of what developers can expect:

Expect more and better refactorings, better navigation, more capabilities in the debugger, faster solution load, and faster builds. But also expect us to continue to explore how connected capabilities like Live Share can enable developers to collaborate in real time from across the world and how we can make cloud scenarios like working with online source repositories more seamless. Expect us to push the boundaries of individual and team productivity with capabilities like IntelliCode, where Visual Studio can use Azure to train and deliver AI-powered assistance into the IDE.

Montgomery added that Visual Studio 2019 previews, whenever they roll out, will be able to run on the same machines as Visual Studio 2017.

As far as a release date, however, Microsoft has offered no timeframe so far, indicating only that it will "say more in the coming months." [BACK TO 2018 PRODUCT LIST]

BizTalk Server "vNext"
Anticipated release: By the first half of 2019

Microsoft began sharing the earliest details of its next-gen BizTalk Server product in early August, including an estimated release timeframe of "within roughly 9 months of the general availability of Windows Server 2019." That Windows Server product is slated for release sometime in the second half of 2018, which ostensibly pushes the BizTalk Server "vNext" release into early 2019.

According to Microsoft's August announcement, the next BizTalk Server product will contain previously released feature packs, and will support "the latest versions of Windows Server, SQL Server and Visual Studio." It will also be possible to upgrade to the new BizTalk Server product from BizTalk Server 2013 R2 and BizTalk Server 2016. [BACK TO 2018 PRODUCT LIST]

SharePoint Server 2019
Released

Microsoft also said at Ignite last year that it plans to release the next major version of the on-premises SharePoint Server in the later part of 2018, in tandem with Office 2019. The company hasn't been too descriptive about what changes and improvements are coming to SharePoint Server 2019, but it did share the following "big bets" in a blog post in October:

• "Next-Gen Sync Client support
• "Modern UX throughout the product
• "Flow/PowerApps integration
• "Other SharePoint Online innovations"

Another anticipated -- but as-yet unconfirmed -- component of SharePoint Server 2019 could be the potential for continued support for InfoPath, Microsoft's now-deprecated electronic forms software, even though Microsoft is grooming PowerApps and Microsoft Flow to be InfoPath's successor.

Most of Microsoft's improvements come first to the SharePoint Online product, with some (but not all) filtering down to the server product via Feature Pack releases. Microsoft's SharePoint Online roadmap, unveiled in May, promised things like a new SharePoint Admin Center, OneDrive Files on Demand and improved search, but exactly which features SharePoint Server 2019 will get is unclear. Microsoft also launched the SharePoint Framework in 2017 to support client-side customizations using open source tools for SharePoint Online, but also promised to deliver SharePoint Framework support for the server product, too. [BACK TO 2018 PRODUCT LIST]

Exchange Server 2019
Released

Microsoft has been more reticent in describing details about the upcoming Exchange Server release compared to the other 2019-branded server releases that are on tap this year. The company has confirmed that the timing of the Exchange Server 2019 preview and release milestones will mirror those of SharePoint Server 2019, Office 2019 and Skype for Business Server 2019, but beyond those details, Microsoft has been mostly mum. Microsoft did indicate in a Tweet at September's Ignite event that the next version release of Exchange will focus on security, compliance, usability and manageability. [BACK TO 2018 PRODUCT LIST]

Dynamics 365
Anticipated release: Fall update coming October 2018

The last 12 months have proved to be a mixed bag for Dynamics 365, Microsoft's repackaged CRM and ERP cloud suite that first debuted in late 2016. Last spring, the company began integrating Dynamics 365 with LinkedIn, giving sales teams new ways to tap the vast well of information from the professional social network's 500 million registered users. Microsoft also launched the first of the "Dynamics 365 AI Solutions" at Ignite. Dynamics 365 AI Solutions is an initiative that links Dynamics 365 with Microsoft's various AI, machine learning and enterprise search offerings to solve what Steve Guggenheimer, head of Microsoft's Developer Platform & Evangelism unit, called "high-value, complex enterprise scenarios." New Dynamics 365 application components also debuted throughout 2017, including Dynamics 365 for Retail and Dynamics 365 for Talent.

There have been some off notes, too. For instance, the long-promised integration between Dynamics 365 and Cortana, Microsoft's digital assistant, still hasn't come to fruition -- at least, not in the way that Microsoft had initially planned. In early January 2018, Microsoft announced in a short blog post that it would be "discontinuing the current Cortana integration preview feature that was made available for Dynamics 365," and instead "focusing on building a new long term intelligent solution experience, which will include Cortana digital assistant integration."

Microsoft also caused some consternation among partners last fall when it proposed a white-labeling model for Dynamics 365 under the code name "Tenerife." Microsoft course-corrected a bit after that announcement was met with a general outcry. Instead, the company is now promising a more streamlined Dynamics 365 model that's slated to take effect in the spring of 2018. The company broadly sketched out its plans in a September blog post:

Microsoft will offer a single collection of Dynamics 365 applications for customers of all sizes and complexity to digitally transform their organizations across all lines of business -- Marketing, Sales, Service, Finance, Operations, and Talent -- at their own pace. Instead of offering separate editions (e.g. "Business edition" and "Enterprise edition"), we will focus on enabling any organization to choose from different price points for each line of business application, based on the level of capabilities and capacity they need to meet their specific needs.

As part of the revamp, Microsoft also plans to release two new NAV-optimized Dynamics 365 offerings for partners in the first half of 2018. One of these offerings will be a Dynamics 365 cloud app sold through Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners, while the other will be an application development platform for ISVs that qualify for Microsoft's ISV Cloud Embed program. [BACK TO 2018 PRODUCT LIST]

Windows Server and "Project Honolulu"
Windows Server 2019: Released
Project Honolulu: Released

Most of the excitement around Windows Server last year -- from a roadmap perspective, at least -- was generated from Microsoft's move to transition the product to the same biannual servicing model that Windows 10 and Office ProPlus now use. Under this so-called "semiannual channel" release cadence, Windows Server receives two major feature updates each year -- one in the spring and one in the fall. Users enrolled in the Windows Insider program can get early access to each semiannual channel release for testing purposes before it becomes generally available. The first Windows Server (and current) semiannual channel release was "version 1709," which hit general availability last October. The next semiannual channel release, dubbed "version 1803," is currently in the testing phase and should become available in March or April. Microsoft is offering this biannually updated product alongside its more traditional Windows Server 2016 product, where feature updates aren't as frequent.

An obvious advantage of jumping on the semiannual channel train with Windows Server is the opportunity to get new and major feature changes, but organizations have some restrictions. They can only use the Server Core installation option for production workloads with Windows Server version 1709, or they can use Nano Server, but just for hosting containers. Management of Windows Server version 1709 comes via a remote tool called "Project Honolulu," a browser-based solution that replaces the earlier Server Management Tools product. Now in technical preview, Project Honolulu is expected to become generally available "sometime in 2018," according to a Microsoft infograph from Ignite.

In contrast to this new semiannual channel model, Windows Server 2016 continues to follow the more traditional update model. Microsoft has taken to calling this the "long-term servicing channel," where major updates are available every two to three years (akin to the old "service pack" approach). Given that Windows Server 2016 was commercially released in the fall of 2016, there's a chance that the first early test builds of Windows Server "v.Next" could see daylight in late 2018. [BACK TO 2018 PRODUCT LIST]

Kurt Mackie contributed to this report.

2017 Product Roadmap Archive
The following products were featured in our 2017 Microsoft Product Roadmap. Click on a product name to jump to that section.

• Windows 10 'Creators Update'
• Dynamics 365 Components
• Azure Stack
• SharePoint Server and SharePoint Online Improvements
• Microsoft Teams
• Visual Studio 2017
• SQL Server 2017 and SQL Server on Linux

Windows 10 'Creators Update'
Released
Fall Creators Update: Released

Previously known by its code name "Redstone 2," the upcoming "Creators Update" will focus on realizing the creative possibilities of the Windows 10 operating system. This is a departure from Windows 10's first major refresh, 2016's "Anniversary Update," which was mostly notable for delivering enterprise-friendly features like added security. In contrast, many of the forthcoming features that Microsoft executives detailed during the October 2016 launch event for the Creators Update were aimed toward creative professionals, students and consumers.

"I believe the next 10 years will be defined by technology that empowers profound creation," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at the New York event. "At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We are the company that stands for the builders, the makers, the creators. That's who we are. Every choice we make is about finding that balance between consumption and creative expression. I am inspired by what I have seen in the Minecraft generation, who see themselves as not players of a game but creators of new worlds they dream up -- the new forms of creativity and the expression we can unleash. This is what motivates us about Windows 10."

Among the new "creators"-oriented features coming to Windows 10 are some much-expanded 3-D capabilities. Microsoft promises to give users the ability to create and manipulate 3-D models within popular apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Microsoft Paint. The update will also bring expanded partner support for Microsoft's HoloLens mixed-reality technology; VR headsets from the likes of Dell, HP, Lenovo, ASUS and Acer are expected to ship with the Creators Update preinstalled, enabling users to work with 3-D models in the real world for as little as $300.

Microsoft is also enhancing the digital inking capabilities in Office. And for gamers, And for gamers, Microsoft is introducing a new technology it acquired in August called Beam into both Windows 10 and Xbox One. Beam will let viewers interact in real-time with a player who is streaming a game. For example, a viewer could throw in challenges to the game or change the player's weapons.

These new creative capabilities coincide with a pair of brand-new Surface products from Microsoft: the Surface Studio and the Surface Dial. The Surface Studio is an all-in-one PC whose biggest distinguishing feature is it's 28-inch, high-resolution display that can tilt downward until it's nearly horizontal -- the ideal angle for drawing or writing. The Surface Dial, meanwhile, is a puck-sized peripheral that can work as a normal wireless mouse or, when it's placed on top of the Surface Studio touchscreen, can interact directly with the application that's currently being used (similar to the Surface Pen). The Surface Dial is already available and retails for $100, while the Surface Studio is expected to ship by the end of the first quarter, with pricing starting at $3,000.

Other features coming with the Creators Update include faster access to contacts with the new Windows My People feature, new privacy features and IT management controls, a new "Windows Defender Security Center," the ability to block Flash, and more.

Microsoft is currently putting the Creators Update through its paces via the Windows Insider testing program, with general availability expected sometime this spring. Like previous Windows 10 updates, the Creators Update will be free. Beyond the Creators Update, Microsoft is reportedly planning as many as two more "Redstone" updates throughout 2017, though Microsoft has yet to confirm this. [BACK TO 2017 PRODUCT LIST]

Dynamics 365 Components
Anticipated release: Summer 2017

Microsoft dramatically retooled its business solutions portfolio last year with the launch of Dynamics 365, which combines the main CRM and ERP functions of the company's original Dynamics products into a cloud-based application suite.

Dynamics 365 comprises seven apps -- Sales, Customer Service, Operations, Financials, Field Service, Project Service Automation and Marketing -- that are bundled in two different editions. The Enterprise edition is designed for businesses with 250 or more employees, and includes the Sales, Customer Service, Operations, Field Service and Project Service Automation apps. The Business edition, designed for companies with fewer than 250 users, includes the Financials, Sales and Marketing apps. Microsoft also offers different licensing options for each edition, giving businesses the flexibility to tailor the solution to their needs and usage levels.

Though Dynamics 365 officially became available for purchase in November 2016, several key components are still waiting in the wings. For instance, while the Enterprise edition leverages Adobe's Marketing Cloud suite as its marketing component, that module is still unavailable for the Business edition. Microsoft said last fall that the Dynamics 365 for Marketing app will arrive for Business edition users in the spring of 2017, replacing the older Dynamics Marketing app that was a major part of Dynamics CRM Online.

Also missing in action is the Sales app for the Business edition. Microsoft expects to roll that out in the second quarter of 2017, according to reports.

As for what's still to come to the Enterprise edition, Microsoft's Dynamics 365 roadmap page lists multiple features and capabilities as being "in development," although there are two standouts: a "bulk data loader" feature and integration with the Cortana machine learning platform.

Microsoft describes the data loader as a cloud-based service designed to "enable bulk import/export of data into Dynamics 365." Organizations will be able to use the data loader to "upload large data files to cloud staging tables where [they] can perform light data-quality functions, and then push the data into Dynamics 365." Meanwhile, the integration with Cortana will let Dynamics 365 users query the digital personal assistant for information about sales activities and accounts "across both personal and professional sources," according to Microsoft. The company did not give a timeframe for when either of these features will be released, though the Cortana integration is currently in public preview. [BACK TO 2017 PRODUCT LIST]

Azure Stack
Released

Microsoft first unveiled Azure Stack back in 2015 at its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), touting it as a new-and-improved version of its older Windows Azure Pack product. Azure Stack was designed to enable organizations and partners to host Azure-based services from within their own datacenters. Initially, Azure Stack was expected to become generally available by the end of 2016, but Microsoft decided last summer to significantly change the solution's delivery model, pushing the release date back to mid-2017.

In a blog post timed to coincide with the 2016 WPC, Microsoft announced that rather than let organizations and partners choose the hardware from which they run Azure Stack, it would instead require them to purchase the product as an "integrated system" from a select roster of hardware partners, including Lenovo, Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The decision was largely met with disapproval, though Microsoft executives have framed it as a way to ensure that customers use Azure Stack in the way that works best -- for instance, by not burdening them with the intricacies of rapid software updates. As Vijay Tewari, a principal group program manager for enterprise cloud solutions at Microsoft, explained in a Channel 9 video:

"We have to help customers realize that Azure Stack is a brand-new product. It is not a conglomeration of existing products as we have seen in the past. And along with it comes a responsibility that Microsoft has to keep the operation lifecycle of that product valid for customers. And what I mean by operational lifecycle is that the entire product needs to be updated at the pace at which we need to keep it updated for Azure services to land on top of Azure Stack. And Azure, as you know, it iterates very very rapidly. New services are emerging all of the time. Existing services are being updated at very very rapid paces. And we need to have that entire approach workable in customer datacenters. So, from our perspective, we need hardware that we know well of, where we know what version of the firmware needs to run on the disks, on the HBAs, on every single aspect of the system so we can keep it operational and robust for the services that land on top of it. That is not feasible on systems that we have never seen before."

Microsoft has issued two technical previews of Azure Stack so far, the latest being released on September 2016. [BACK TO 2017 PRODUCT LIST]

SharePoint Server and SharePoint Online Improvements
SharePoint Framework: Released
Other updates: Throughout first half of 2017

Microsoft officially launched SharePoint 2016, the current release of its enterprise collaboration platform, in May of last year. However, a key component of Microsoft's vision for the future of SharePoint is still to-come: the SharePoint Framework. Based on open source JavaScript, the SharePoint Framework is geared toward developers and "enables fully supported client-side development, easy integration with the Microsoft Graph, and support for open source tooling," according to Microsoft. The SharePoint Framework has been in preview since August 2016, though Microsoft issued a preliminary "release candidate" version earlier this month. Microsoft expects to roll out a few more release candidates to fix last-minute issues before making the product generally available, though it did not give a specific date for the final release.

Besides the SharePoint Framework, Microsoft's plans for SharePoint this year include improvements to "collaboration, mobility, intelligence and trust," according to Mark Kashman, a senior product manager on Microsoft's SharePoint team. Kashman provided some insight into Microsoft's SharePoint roadmap at a presentation last October, showing a slide that listed the following features as being on tap for the first half of 2017:

• Feedback-driven updates to doclibs, lists, pages, sites apps
• More Web Parts
• Publishing sites
• More Flow and PowerApps integration
• SharePoint add-in improvements
• Modern team site extensibility
• Performance-focused CDN integration with publishing sites

"What we are announcing coming in the early part of next year is the way to build more modern and broadcast-type Publishing Sites, not just Pages," Kashman said during his October talk. "And, of course, with business applications, we're working with the PowerApps team and the Flow team to build rich solutions that you can do as an end user without relying on deep development. We have things like the SharePoint Framework that we're working on so that if you have higher-end customizations to build into your solutions, you can. And we're starting with Web Parts and building from there to build out a richer set of custom pages, and of course beyond that looking into the portal space. Again, looking with the Graph and Office 365 Groups, those things are bringing together everything we do in SharePoint now." [BACK TO 2017 PRODUCT LIST]

Microsoft Teams
Released

Teams, Microsoft's contender in the enterprise chat arena dominated by millennial darling Slack, debuted last November as a preview release. At the New York launch event, Nadella touted Teams as "a chat-based workspace where people can come together in a digital forum to have casual conversations, work on content, create work plans -- integrated all within one unified experience."

Microsoft expects to make Teams generally available in the first quarter of this year to Business and Enterprise subscribers of Office 365. Microsoft is staking the success of Teams against the much more entrenched Slack on Teams' deep integration with the wider Office 365 productivity suite, which Microsoft has been steadily improving with investments in machine learning, intelligence, security and governance.

"Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneNote, Planner, Power BI and Delve are all built into Microsoft Teams so people have all the information and tools they need at their fingertips. Backed by the Microsoft Graph, intelligent services are surfaced throughout the workspace to help with information relevancy, discovery and sharing. Microsoft Teams is also built on Office 365 Groups -- our cross-application membership service that makes it easy for people to move naturally from one collaboration tool to another, preserve their sense of context and share with others," said Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for Microsoft Office, in a blog post timed with the product's unveiling.

Whether the Office 365 hook will be enough to usurp Slack in the hearts of enterprise users remains to be seen, though Slack did seem a little rattled by the Teams unveiling; the company took out a full-page ad in The New York Times on the same day as Microsoft's launch event to both welcome its new competitor and assert that "Slack is here to stay." [BACK TO 2017 PRODUCT LIST]

Visual Studio 2017
Released

The next major release of the Microsoft integrated development environment, dubbed Visual Studio 2017, reached the "release candidate" stage in November 2016, following five other "preview" releases under the code name Visual Studio "15." Typically for Microsoft, the availability of a release candidate means that the final version is imminent. So far, however, Microsoft has not given any official word of when Visual Studio 2017 will become generally available, though we'd peg it for sometime in the first half of 2017, given that it appears to be in the latter stages of development.

In development since the early part of last year, Visual Studio 2017 has been dubbed by Microsoft as "the latest and greatest version of Visual Studio." John Montgomery, director of program management for Visual Studio at Microsoft, summarized some of the platform's improvements in a blog post announcing the release candidate. They include:

• Enhancements to productivity: Visual Studio 2017 features new filtering capabilities in IntelliSense, improvements to navigation and debugging, live code analysis and editing, and the ability to access files without projects.
  
  
• Greater mobile development support: Developers can build iOS, Windows and Android apps using JavaScript, C# and C++. Visual Studio 2017 also comes with a mobile test recorder for application testing purposes.
  
  
• More streamlined development for the cloud: "Visual Studio 2017 RC improves DevOps workflows from Git-based version control to making it much simpler to create continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines," according to Montgomery.
  
  
• Speed and performance improvements: Visual Studio 2017 is faster to install and start up, has a smaller memory footprint, and loads solutions between two to four times faster than its predecessor.

Microsoft also introduced a brand-new product, Visual Studio for Mac, at the same time that it unveiled the Visual Studio 2017 release candidate. As its name suggests, Visual Studio for Mac is a native development platform for macOS that's based heavily on Microsoft's investments in Xamarin. Miguel de Icaza, a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer, touted the product as "a one-stop shop for .NET development on the Mac, including Android, iOS, and .NET Core technologies" in a blog post last November.

So far, Microsoft has released just one preview version of Visual Studio for Mac. Given that it's a brand-new product that's still in the early stages of testing, we don't expect Visual Studio for Mac to become generally available until the second half of 2017 or later. [BACK TO 2017 PRODUCT LIST]

SQL Server 2017 and SQL Server on Linux
Released

The current version of Microsoft's relational database management solution, SQL Server 2016, hit general availability just this past summer, but the company is already well on its way to rolling out the next release.

The first preview of SQL Server "v.Next" -- as of this writing, Microsoft hasn't announced a formal version name -- and the first public preview of the brand-new SQL Server on Linux were issued in November 2016. Both are expected to become production-ready at around the same time: mid-2017.

Microsoft has been putting SQL Server on Linux through its paces since March of last year, when it announced a private preview of the product. At the time, Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Cloud and Enterprise at Microsoft, promised that SQL Server on Linux "will provide customers with even more flexibility in their data solution. One with mission-critical performance, industry-leading TCO, best-in-class security, and hybrid cloud innovations -- like Stretch Database which lets customers access their data on-premises and in the cloud whenever they want at low cost -- all built in."

One of Microosft's stated goals with these upcoming SQL Server releases is to achieve as much application compatibility and feature parity between the Windows and Linux versions, though some variances are inescapable. As Microsoft engineers described in this detailed blog post, the development of SQL Server on Linux entailed the creation of a "platform abstraction layer" (or PAL) within SQL Server and leveraging the "Drawbridge" virtualization technology created by Microsoft Research.

"To make SQL Server support multiple platforms, the engineering task is essentially to remove or abstract away its dependencies on Windows," they wrote. "As you can imagine, after decades of development against a single operating system, there are plenty of OS-specific dependencies across the code base. In addition, the code base is huge. There are tens of millions of lines of code in SQL Server."

The current test version of SQL Server on Linux supports a fairly representative handful of platforms: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux Server, Ubuntu and Docker Engine. However, it does still have a long roster of unsupported features and services that are available in SQL Server on Windows, such as Always On Availability Groups, Active Directory authentication, SQL Server R services and more. Microsoft assures that most of these missing services will become enabled as it updates the preview release.

As for SQL Server on Windows, the forthcoming "v.Next" version "includes in-memory, advanced analytics, columnstore, and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) enhancements," Microsoft said in a blog post announcing the preview. [BACK TO 2017 PRODUCT LIST]

2016 Product Roadmap Archive
The following products were featured in our 2016 Microsoft Product Roadmap. Click on a product name to jump to that section.

• Windows 10 'Redstone'
• Windows 10 Mobile
• SharePoint Server 2016
• Windows Server 2016
• System Center 2016
• SQL Server 2016
• BizTalk Server 2016
• Dynamics GP and Dynamics NAV
• Dynamics AX
• Azure Stack
• Dynamics CRM

Windows 10 'Redstone'
Redstone 1, Released
Creators Update, spring of 2017

Since its commercial release last summer, Microsoft's latest desktop OS has been off to jackrabbit start -- the fastest-growing of any other version of Windows, by Microsoft's count. In early January, just five months after making Windows 10 generally available, the company reported that the OS had already hit the 200-million-device mark, significantly outpacing the growth trajectories of both Windows 8 and Windows 7. Microsoft still has a ways to go before it hits its goal of putting Windows 10 on 1 billion devices by fiscal 2018, but the company is counting on a pair of Windows 10 updates coming this year, both code-named "Redstone," to make the OS more attractive to stragglers.

Media reports about Redstone have been circulating since the spring of 2015. At that time, longtime Microsoft watcher and ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley (who is also a columnist for RCP sister magazine Redmond), said the timing of the Redstone releases will mirror the summer/fall release cadence of Windows 10 and its first major update, Threshold 2. (Windows 10 was released in July 2015, while Threshold 2 rolled out in November.) Foley's estimate roughly jibes with that of Microsoft MVP Aidan Finn, who pegged Redstone 1 for a June release and Redstone 2 for November.

While Microsoft has already been updating Windows 10 regularly as part of its "Windows as a Service" model, the Redstone updates are expected to "be a larger update than the others and will provide new functionality and support for new classes of devices that aren't already part of Windows 10," according to Foley. Microsoft might also use Redstone to deliver the features that it couldn't develop in time for the initial Windows 10 release, she added.

For its part, Microsoft has not made any public mention of Redstone. However, the first three Redstone test builds have already been reportedly released to Windows Insider participants: build 11082 in mid-December, build 11099 roughly a month later and build 11102 in late January. While these builds focused mostly on bug fixes and various OS refinements rather than new features, Microsoft's Gabe Aul, who stewards the Windows Insider program, said that Microsoft made over 1,200 changes related to "OS development" from the second build to the third. According to Aul, Microsoft's objective with these early Redstone builds is to improve OneCore, which he described as "the shared core of Windows across devices," in order to streamline the company's internal process of testing new Windows features on different form factors. Once the OneCore improvements are done, Microsoft will be able to include more tangible feature additions and OS changes in the Redstone builds, though Aul cautioned that "[i]t will still be a few builds before any really noticeable changes show up, depending on when teams begin lighting up new features in their areas."

This focus on OneCore may have resulted in Microsoft shelving, or at least delaying, some features it had previously planned for Redstone, Petri.com's Brad Sams reported in January. "Multiple sources inside the company have said that some of the features for Redstone have been trimmed back because of the time dedicated to fixing the internal systems but that does not mean they are being scrapped," he wrote.

Whatever those features are, or were, is still up in the air, as there are scant few details about what Redstone will actually entail for users. According to various anonymously sourced media reports, Redstone will give Microsoft's Cortana digital assistant the ability to "float around Windows 10" (for instance, as a search widget in a live Word document), bring extension support to Windows 10's new Edge browser, and restore the old placeholders feature to the OneDrive storage service.

What Microsoft has promised is more frequent (if buggier) future builds of Redstone, at least for Windows Insiders on the "fast" ring. "The criteria we use to release builds to Windows Insiders in the Fast ring will be much closer to our criteria for flighting to our internal rings," Aul said in January. "This will allow more builds to reach Windows Insider. This also means that the builds we release to the Fast ring may include more bugs and other issues that could be slightly more painful for some people to live with." [BACK TO 2016 PRODUCT LIST]

Windows 10 Mobile
Released

Microsoft has been baking Windows 10's smartphone counterpart for quite some time now. Brand-new Windows 10 Mobile devices hit retail shelves last November, but for existing Windows Phone 8.x users, the new OS is still a no-show. Initially expected in the summer of 2015 to coincide with the release of the Windows 10 desktop OS, Windows 10 Mobile's anticipated release was later pushed back to Q4 of 2015 and then to "early" 2016.

Now, the OS may not arrive until February for current users. Citing an unpublished Microsoft letter to its partners, VentureBeat in late January reported that "both the service update [for brand-new Windows 10 Mobile devices] and legacy handset upgrade will now occur in early to mid February." Of course, the timing of when individual users will actually receive the OS is dependent on their carriers, whose own testing and rollout processes can occasionally lead to months-long delays.

What's also still unclear is which existing devices will receive the Windows 10 Mobile upgrade, and which will be unable to support it due to hardware limitations. Microsoft's Windows 10 Mobile Web site provides only a partial list of devices that qualify to receive the upgrade (see this screenshot taken Jan. 23): "Lumia 430, Lumia 435, Lumia 532, Lumia 535, Lumia 540, Lumia 635 (1 GB RAM), Lumia 640, Lumia 640 XL, Lumia 735, Lumia 830, and Lumia 930." The company says it is "working hard to make Windows 10 available for other Lumia devices," though it has yet to specify what those other devices are.

Microsoft's latest Windows 10 Mobile test build (10586.63) was released to testers in early January. That build, like most of the mobile builds preceding it, comprised mostly bug fixes and OS refinements. Microsoft has described Windows 10 Mobile as being essentially "feature-complete" since the summer of 2015, so there has been little in the way of major concrete developments to report since then.

For future Windows 10 Mobile updates, however, Microsoft does seem to have a few new features on tap -- possibly signaling a mobile equivalent of the Redstone updates coming to the Windows 10 desktop OS. For instance, Microsoft may be preparing to extend Windows 10 Mobile's hardware support beyond 32-bit ARM chips to 64-bit ARM and x86 Intel chips. Microsoft blogger Paul Thurrott reported on this issue in mid-January, pointing to a since-deleted Microsoft job listing that called for a senior program manager whose responsibilities would include "[b]uilding the plan for for ARM64 aligned with the Redstone wave," as well as to a Microsoft Hardware Dev Center page that mentions "Windows 10 Mobile x86" in documentation related to testing audio devices. So far, however, Microsoft has not officially shared any details about this point.

The mobile version of Cortana may also see some new features. According to The Verge, Microsoft is working on enabling Cortana to retrieve contextually relevant information for a user based on what they are currently doing with their phone (similar to the Google Now feature for Android). Microsoft is also reportedly developing a feature powered by Cortana that would let users start an action on one device running one platform, pause, and then continue that same action on a different device running a different platform. [BACK TO 2016 PRODUCT LIST]

SharePoint Server 2016
Released

Microsoft has been noticeably forthcoming about its plans for the next version of SharePoint Server, perhaps in an effort to quash the concerns of recent years that it might leave the on-premises version of SharePoint by the wayside in favor of the cloud-based SharePoint Online. Since even before the 2015 Ignite conference last May, there has been a steady stream of information from Microsoft about new features and changes coming in SharePoint Server 2016, such as:

• A more streamlined update and patching process to reduce downtime at organizations.
  
  
• A new "hybrid search" capability that promises a single cloud-based index, an improvement over the current disjointed search experience for organizations using SharePoint Server 2013.
  
  
• A new MinRole capability for server farms. IT pros can specify the server's role and SharePoint Server 2016 will automatically configure the server within a server farm, making it easier to scale operations.
  
  
• Data-loss prevention capabilities and information rights management protections.

Throughout its messaging about SharePoint Server 2016, Microsoft has emphasized the product's support for running hybrid SharePoint architectures -- that is, situations in which the on-premises server product running in an organization's datacenter is able to integrate with Office 365 running out of a Microsoft cloud datacenter. One of Microsoft's stated goals with SharePoint Server 2016 has been bridging the feature gap between it and SharePoint Online. Microsoft has done this by integrating several Office 365 features -- such as Delve, Groups and Clutter -- into the on-premises server product.

"Everything we're doing in Office 365 inspires the [SharePoint Server] product going forward, and you'll see this cadence continuing," said Mark Kashman, a senior product manager on the SharePoint team at Microsoft, during a presentation at the SPBiz Conference in June.

Microsoft has updated its projected release timeframe for SharePoint 2016 twice now. Originally, it had been scheduled for the second half of 2015, but Microsoft pushed it to Q2 of 2016 early last year. Then, in a message to the SharePoint IT Pro group on Yammer dated Nov. 18, Microsoft Senior Technical Product Manager Bill Baer said the release had actually been moved ahead to Q1 of 2016. The earlier-than-expected release is not surprising, given that Microsoft already released a "mostly feature complete" release candidate of SharePoint Server 2016 in January. That's after two public previews that were tested by over 5,000 users, according to Microsoft. [BACK TO 2016 PRODUCT LIST]

Dynamics AX
Released

Microsoft's suite of enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools will hit several milestones this year, starting with Dynamics AX.

The next version of Dynamics AX -- previously code-named "AX 7," though Microsoft said in November that the final version will forgo the year designation -- will be the first of the Microsoft ERP products to become truly cloud-based, following the leads of Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online. It is expected to become generally available in Q1 as a cloud solution hosted on the Azure PaaS, with the on-premises version being released closer to mid-2016.

"We're launching initially with Azure cloud delivery, and we're focused on customer deployments in the cloud. We optimized every architectural choice around the idea of saying we want to have the best possible experience in the cloud," said Microsoft Technical Fellow Mike Ehrenberg in an interview with RCP late last year.

Besides the cloud-first approach, Dynamics AX will feature a more streamlined user interface that leverages HTML 5, a new training feature called Task Guides and improvements to Dynamics Lifecycle Services. [BACK TO 2016 PRODUCT LIST]

Azure Stack
Anticipated release: Mid-2017

Microsoft first took the wraps off its new Azure Stack offering at last year's Ignite conference, touting it as a solution that would enable users to easily run Azure cloud services in their own on-premises datacenters, thus supporting the increasingly hybrid nature of organizations' IT environments. Microsoft Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson, speaking at the 2015 Ignite keynote, described Azure Stack this way:

"This is literally us giving you all of Azure for you to run in your datacenters. What this brings you is you get that great IaaS and PaaS environment in your datacenters. You have incredible capability like a unified application model that gives you a one-click deployment experience for even the most complex, multi-tier applications and then you get that cloud-inspired infrastructure. We're giving you the same software controller that we built for our network, the name is the same, network controller. We're giving you our load balancing. We're giving you all the storage innovation."

Azure Stack represents an evolution of Microsoft's older Cloud OS solution, which also promised to give partners and organizations the ability to build Azure environments in their datacenters, but suffered from low uptake due to its complexity.

Azure Stack shares a common architecture, application model and DevOps tool set with Azure, according to Microsoft. This minimizes the work that developers need to do to make sure their apps work on both Azure and Azure Stack, as well as lets IT pros extend on-premises apps to the cloud without having to drastically change the tools they use for automation or management.

Microsoft has not given a specific date for Azure Stack's release, but because it is linked with the company's 2016 wave of server releases, it will likely become generally available by year's end. [BACK TO 2016 PRODUCT LIST]

Dynamics CRM
Spring wave: Released
Next-gen Dynamics CRM, fall of 2016

Microsoft's last major Dynamics CRM release was that of Dynamics CRM 2016 in late November. The company plans to follow that up this year with two major updates, one in the spring and one in the fall.

The "spring wave" of updates will arrive in Q2, Microsoft said in early March. However, this update -- and all the new features and improvements that come with it -- will apply only to Dynamics CRM Online. For on-premises Dynamics CRM customers, feature-parity will arrive with "the next on-premise release of Dynamics CRM in the fall of 2016," according to a spokesperson. So far, Microsoft hasn't said whether this on-premises update will entail a new year in the product name.

In its March announcement, Microsoft described a few of the changes coming with the spring (and later to the fall) update. The update will focus primarily on integrating two of Microsoft's CRM-related acquisitions from 2015 -- FieldOne, which provides cloud-based solutions for field-service personnel, and Adxstudio, whose "portals" technology lets organizations build customer-facing Web sites that connect to their Dynamics CRM account. On the service side (FieldOne), the update will bring new capabilities aimed at helping organizations schedule, assign and execute on-site service appointments. On the customer engagement side (Adxstudio), Microsoft said the spring update will "enable organizations to better connect with customers, partners and employees, and provide these groups with a streamlined way to access information, obtain assistance and perform tasks."

The spring update will also bring improvements to Dynamics CRM's social media-based marketing tool, called Social Engagement. Social Engagement uses machine learning to enable marketers to score their products' performance based on user "sentiment" across social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. With the spring update, Microsoft will add two new machine learning scenarios to the Social Engagement tool -- "adaptive learning" and "automated triage." [BACK TO 2016 PRODUCT LIST]

Windows Server 2016
Released

In early 2015, back when Windows Server 2016 was still known only by its codename of "vNext," Microsoft said that the server OS's architecture would be "deeply refactored" to support cloud scenarios, which certainly sounds like a major development albeit in an abstract sort of way. However, subsequent dispatches from Microsoft have been more explicit about the changes coming to Windows Server 2016 -- and they're big changes.

First, Windows Server 2016, which Microsoft is expected to release in Q3 of this year, will feature Windows Server Containers and Hyper-V Containers. The former debuted in the third Windows Server 2016 technical preview that was released in August, and the latter in the fourth technical preview released in November.

Second, Windows Server 2016 will include a "Nano Server" component, which Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Jeffrey Snover described as "the most important, most significant change that we've made since Windows NT." As Microsoft explains it, "Nano Server is a deeply refactored version of Windows Server with a small footprint and remotely managed installation, optimized for the cloud and a DevOps workflow. It is designed for fewer patch and update events, faster restarts, better resource utilization and tighter security." According to Microsoft, Nano Server is 20 times smaller than Server Core and, compared to Windows Server, has a virtual hard disk size that's 93 percent smaller, is affected by 92 percent fewer critical bulletins, and requires 80 percent fewer system reboots.

Nano Server saw daylight in May 2015 as part of the second technical preview of Windows Server 2016. At that time, Microsoft said Nano Server was designed for three roles: as the host OS for cloud computing scenarios using Hyper-V, as a platform for deploying cloud-native apps, and as a host for scale-out file server operations. In November, Microsoft expanded those server roles to also include DNS Server and Web Server (IIS) roles. Nano Server doesn't replace Server Core, however; Windows Server 2016 will allow for both options. Organizations can also decide to do a full server installation. "Applications and services will need to be evaluated on a case by case basis to determine the best operating system footprint," Microsoft said.

Third, Microsoft has decided to switch to a per-core licensing approach with Windows Server 2016, a departure from its previous per-processor approach. The repercussions of that change were outlined in a detailed FAQ from Microsoft, which said that the switch aims to "evolve our server licensing to support hybrid cloud." Windows Server 2016 will be licensed in two flavors: Standard Edition (for "low to no virtualization scenarios") and Datacenter Edition (for "unlimited virtualization").

Microsoft describes the license packages this way: "Core licenses will be sold in packs of two licenses. Each processor will need to be licensed with minimum of 8 cores which is 4 two-core packs. Each physical server, including 1 processor servers, will need to be licensed with minimum of 16 cores which is 8 two-core packs. Additional cores can then be licensed in increments of two cores (one two core pack) for gradual increases in core density growth." [BACK TO 2016 PRODUCT LIST]

System Center 2016
Released

Like the upcoming Windows Server 2016, the next-generation version of Microsoft's datacenter management suite is expected to arrive in Q3 with a new core-based licensing model. According to a Microsoft licensing datasheet, the decision to mimic Windows Server 2016's core-based model is an effort to "provide a consistent licensing metric for managed VMs." For System Center 2016, the licensing will work this way:

The System Center 2016 licensing model for Standard and Datacenter will be the same as 2012 R2 with server and client management licenses. As with System Center 2012 R2, the 2016 editions will be differentiated by virtualization rights only. Licenses are required only for the endpoints being managed. No additional licenses are needed for the management server or SQL Server runtime.

Besides the licensing change, Microsoft has also decided to go ahead and release the System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) component in December 2015, ahead of the larger System Center 2016 suite, to address the needs of organizations managing Windows 10 clients. Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of Enterprise Client and Mobility at Microsoft, called that release of SCCM "the most significant and important release of ConfigMgr ever," and pointed to the fact that this Windows 10-optimized version of SCCM is also SaaS-enabled, meaning that organizations will receive regular monthly updates to the product.

The rest of the System Center 2016 suite, which is currently on its fourth technical preview, will arrive later this year. Microsoft is touting System Center 2016's integration with Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS) as a key improvement. "Through the integration with OMS, your System Center investments can manage traditional infrastructure, workloads, and modern applications with ease -- regardless of whether you're working with Azure or AWS, or running Windows Server, Linux, VMWare, or OpenStack," according to Microsoft. [BACK TO 2016 PRODUCT LIST]

SQL Server 2016
Released

So far, Microsoft hasn't given any hints about when it will release its next-generation relational database management solution, which is currently in its third community technology preview (CTP). However, it's a fair bet that the final version of SQL Server 2016 could appear before the end of summer, given that the last three major SQL Server versions -- SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2012 and SQL Server 2014 -- have all followed the pattern of being released to manufacturing (RTM) in March or April and becoming generally available a month or so later.

Changes and improvements coming in SQL Server 2016 include:

• A new feature called Always Encrypted, which protects both at-rest and in-motion data by keeping the encryption keys within the application.
  
  
• Integration with the R programming language via the new SQL Server R Services, improving analytics capabilities.
  
  
• The new Stretch Database feature, which lets users access more historical data by enabling operational tables to extend between on-premises and the Azure cloud.
  
  
• Native support for the JSON language.
  
  
• Built-in PolyBase, letting users query relational and non-relational data with T-SQL.

As it has done for many of its flagship products, Microsoft is promising continuous and regular updates to SQL Server 2016 to keep pace with cloud environments. "Our cloud-first product development model means that new features get hardened at scale in the cloud, delivering proven on-premises experience. In addition, we offer a consistent experience across on-premises and cloud with common development and management tools and common T-SQL," said Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Data Group, in a blog post last October announcing CTP 3. [BACK TO 2016 PRODUCT LIST]

BizTalk Server 2016
Released

Microsoft expects to roll out the tenth and newest version of its BizTalk integration platform in Q4, after the general availability of SQL Server 2016 and Windows Server 2016, according to a whitepaper the company released in late 2015. BizTalk Server 2016 will be closely tied to the development of Microsoft's other integration products, namely Host Integration Server and Logic Apps on Azure Stack, which are both in varying stages of development. Given these dependencies, there are several dates and moving parts to track when it comes to BizTalk Server 2016:

• Before its Q4 general availability, BizTalk Server 2016 will be released as a CTP in Q2 and as a beta preview in Q3.
  
  
• Host Integration Server's release milestones will follow the same ones as BizTalk Server.
  
  
• BizTalk Server also has an iPaaS (Microsoft's acronym for integration Platform as a Service) counterpart called Azure BizTalk Services that will become available in April.
  
  
• Logic Apps on Azure Stack will be released as a preview in Q3, with RTM expected in Q4.

Microsoft listed the following new features coming to BizTalk Server 2016:

• Alignment with the latest releases of SQL Server, Windows Server, Office and Visual Studio.
  
  
• Support for SQL Server 2016's AlwaysOn feature.
  
  
• Better integration with API connectors.
  
  
• Support for high-availability workloads in Azure IaaS.

Microsoft said it is also planning "numerous enhancements including supporting dynamic ports with ordered delivery, performance and usability improvements to the admin console, support for SAS authentication with our WCF-NetTcpRelay and more." [BACK TO 2016 PRODUCT LIST]

Dynamics GP and Dynamics NAV
Anticipated release: Dynamics GP 2016, May 1
Dynamics NAV 2017: Released

Besides the aforementioned Dynamics AX, two more products in Microsoft's ERP lineup are expected to see daylight in 2016.

Dynamics GP 2016 will debut in the first half of the year, with an "R2" version rolling out in the second half. That's according to this Microsoft slide posted by Microsoft developer Tim Wappat in a September 2015 blog post (see below).

The slide suggests upcoming improvements to Dynamics GP's business intelligence (BI) capabilities, workflows, Web client and "All in One" document viewer, as well as extended device and browser support.

Dynamics NAV could also get a refresh this year, even though Dynamics NAV 2016 was released just a few months ago in October 2015. According to this slide presented by Microsoft during a session at the 2015 Worldwide Partner Conference that was shared by several attendees, Microsoft plans to release "NAV Next +1" and "NAV Next +2" in 2016 and 2017, respectively. However, the company has yet to give any concrete details about either of these Dynamics NAV releases. [BACK TO 2016 PRODUCT LIST]

2015 Product Roadmap Archive
The following products were featured in our 2015 Microsoft Product Roadmap. Click on a product name to jump to that section.

• Windows 10
• Windows 10 Mobile
• Office for Windows 10
• Office 2016
• SharePoint 2016 and Exchange 2016
• Skype for Business
• Dynamics CRM
• Power BI
• Visual Studio 2015
• Windows Server 2016
• System Center 2016

Windows 10
Released

Bits of information about Windows 10 have been circulating since late 2013, although those early reports were met with "no comment" comments from official Microsoft channels. Since releasing the first Windows 10 technical preview build in October, however, Microsoft has been exceedingly open about the upcoming operating system. It was apparent early on that Windows 10 would serve as a course correction, of sorts, from Windows 8, which alienated many traditional keyboard-and-mouse users with its touch-focused interface and lack of a Start menu. Much of the earlier Windows 10 messaging also centered around the enterprise, with Microsoft touting new features such as multifactor authentication, file-level encryption and a dynamic provisioning capability designed to enable system upgrades without the need for re-imaging.

In a press event in mid-January, Microsoft talked up Windows 10 for the wider consumer audience. Announcements at the event included:

• Windows 10 will be a free upgrade for consumer users running Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1. (Excluded from this are users of Windows RT and Enterprise editions of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.)
• The Cortana voice-activated personal assistant, previously only available to Windows Phone 8.1 users, will be a built-in feature in Windows 10 PCs and tablets. (A new Windows 10 build with the Cortana feature was rolled out a few days after the event.)
• Windows 10 will have two browsers: Internet Explorer 11 and a browser code-named "Spartan" that features a new rendering engine.
• Windows 10 will support Microsoft's new HoloLens technology, which works with a goggle-like headset that lets users view, manipulate and interact with holographic images as if they were three-dimensional objects.

Also noteworthy was Microsoft's description of Windows 10 as "Windows as a Service." Terry Myerson, executive vice president of Operating Systems at Microsoft, explained that concept in a blog post:

This is more than a one-time upgrade: once a Windows device is upgraded to Windows 10, we will continue to keep it current for the supported lifetime of the device -- at no cost. ... We'll deliver new features when they're ready, not waiting for the next major release. We think of Windows as a Service -- in fact, one could reasonably think of Windows in the next couple of years as one of the largest Internet services on the planet.

And just like any Internet service, the idea of asking "What version are you on?" will cease to make sense -- which is great news for our Windows developers.

Microsoft has repeatedly touted Windows 10 as a "universal" platform that is designed to translate seamlessly across different devices. However, that does not mean that there won't be different SKUs of the operating system that are optimized for a range of screen sizes and device types. In late January, ZDNet columnist Mary Jo Foley reported on the possible different Windows 10 SKUs based on information from her sources. There is the "desktop" version, designed for tablets and PCs, and another "mobile" SKU for smartphones and smaller tablets. The desktop SKU has been in the technical preview stage since last fall, while the mobile SKU is expected to be released as a preview in mid-February, Foley said. (*)

Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president of the Operating Systems Group at Microsoft, also said that owners of smaller devices will lack a few Windows 10 features. For instance, new devices smaller than 7 inches will not have the "Continuum" feature, which would let users switch between PC and tablet interfaces, and devices smaller than 8 inches will not have the desktop mode.

The final version of Windows 10 is expected to become generally available in the later part of 2015. [BACK TO 2015 PRODUCT LIST]

Windows 10 Mobile
Anticipated release: December 2015

The first technical preview of Windows 10 for smartphones (the "mobile" SKU described by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley) is not expected to be released until mid-February. However, Microsoft began setting the stage for interested smartphone users to receive the preview in January, when it released a "Windows Insider" app for Windows Phone 8.1 devices. According to Microsoft's description, the app "provides registered Insiders the ability to receive pre-release OS updates on their phone, directly from Microsoft." It will work like the Windows Insider program that Microsoft kicked off last October for the Windows 10 technical preview.

In a blog post in January, Chris Weber, corporate vice president of sales for the Mobile Devices group at Microsoft, gave a brief description of how Windows 10 will work specifically on Lumia phones:

[W]ith the suite of in-box apps on Lumia, you have the ease of using Mail and Calendar on your phone as you would on your PC. You can easily work on PowerPoint presentations, edit Word documents and appreciate other rich functionality in Office, while you are on the go.

The same seamless integration can also be seen with Maps. Let's say you searched for a place -- maybe a new restaurant that your friends have been talking about -- on your PC. The next time you are out and about, your search will also show up on your phone when you open Maps. With it, you can also access info such as driving directions to that restaurant, reviews and even the ability to reserve a table, all from the same app.

In November, a Tweet on the official Lumia Twitter feed suggested that "all Windows Phone 8 devices" and higher would be upgradeable to Windows 10. In the January blog, however, Weber waffled a bit on this point, saying that Microsoft's goal is "for the majority of the Lumia phones running Windows Phone 8 and 8.1 to join the Windows ecosystem." He cautioned that "[l]ike any upgrade to a new platform, not every phone will upgrade or support all possible Windows 10 features, and certain features and experiences will require more advanced future hardware."

Windows 10 for smartphones is expected to launch later this year, at the same time as Windows 10 for PCs, and come pre-installed on new phones. However, for those upgrading to the operating system, the exact ship date may vary or even be delayed, depending on a user's carrier. [BACK TO 2015 PRODUCT LIST]

Office for Windows 10
Released

Industry watchers have been anticipating the launch of touch-based Office apps for Windows, code-named "Gemini," for well over a year now, but have had to wait while they were first released for Apple iOS and, more recently, Google Android devices.

In late January, Microsoft finally announced a release timeframe for the apps on Windows. "The Office universal apps will be available with the Windows 10 Technical Preview in the coming weeks," said Julia White, general manager of the Office Product Management team, in a blog post dated Jan. 22. (*) General availability is slated for "later this year," possibly to coincide with the release of Windows 10.

The Office apps -- Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote -- will be an out-of-the-box feature for all new Windows Phones and "small" Windows 10-based tablets, according to Microsoft. For other devices, the apps will be available to download from the Windows Store, though Microsoft has not said whether they will also be free for those devices.

White's blog post describes a few of the features coming to the touch-optimized Office apps:

• The Word app will have a new feature called "Insights for Office," which will let users viewing documents in Read mode access extra "online resources like images, web references and definitions."
• Users of the Excel app will be able to select and format multiple cells at once.
• The new "Ink Tools" feature in PowerPoint will let users annotate their slides in real time.
• Users will be able to sort, flag, archive and read e-mails in the Outlook app using specific touch gestures.

In keeping with Microsoft's vision of universal apps for Windows, the Office apps will share the same code regardless of the size of the device that is running them. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Office 2016
Released

Official confirmation that the next version of Microsoft's desktop Office suite would be released in the second half of this year came in late January, though Microsoft had reportedly been testing the product internally for several months by then. In September 2014, screenshots believed to be from that internal test version were leaked to The Verge. Based on the images, Office 2016 will include the "Tell Me" assistant from Microsoft's Office Online product. Tell Me is a helper-type feature that appears as a dialog box, similar to the now-defunct "Clippy" but without the anthropomorphism. The screenshots also showed a new black theme and a mostly unchanged ribbon.

According to The Verge, "Other new features include automatic image rotation, allowing Microsoft to use camera metadata to correctly position images in Office documents. ... Microsoft is also improving its Outlook email client with sync options to just download 1 day, 3 days, 7 days, or 14 days of email." ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley offered a few more details about new features coming to Office 2016, including the ability to pan and zoom on Excel charts, "information rights management protection" in Visio, and the ability to share most-recent files (both local and cloud-hosted) in OneDrive.

So far, the changes and additions seem mostly minor, though Microsoft said that the new Office version will have "compelling new experiences" when it becomes available. Incidentally, the company has not mentioned how, or if, it will incorporate its new "Sway" app into Office 2016. Currently in preview, Sway is designed to let Office users create graphical and interactive presentations for the Web.

Also expected to be released this year is the next version of Office for Mac. The Outlook client has been available for Mac users since October 2014, but only Office 365 subscribers have been able to access it. According to Microsoft, a public beta of the next Office for Mac will be released in the first half of 2015, with the finished product expected in the second half.

This will be the first Office for Mac release in over four years (Office for Mac 2011 became available in December 2010). Microsoft attributed the lengthy delay to its focus on cloud-first updates since the launch of Office 365. "Historically we have released a new version of Office for Mac approximately six to eight months after Office for Windows. However, following the release of Office 365 we made the conscious decision to prioritize mobile first and cloud first scenarios for an increasing number of people who are getting things done on-the-go more frequently," the company explained. [BACK TO 2015 PRODUCT LIST]

SharePoint 2016 and Exchange 2016
Exchange 2016: Released
Anticipated release, SharePoint 2016: Q1 2016

Microsoft's ever-increasing focus on Office 365 -- and, by extension, cloud-first feature releases and updates -- has meant that refreshes of the on-premises SharePoint Server and Exchange Server have been pushed to the back burner. The most recent versions of both products (SharePoint 2013 and Exchange 2013) were released in tandem in late 2012. Microsoft has stated that it remains committed to releasing new versions of those on-premises products every two to three years, but that their cloud-based counterparts in Office 365 would be more feature-rich and updated more frequently.

Microsoft revisited that point again last spring when it announced that the next versions of Exchange and SharePoint would not arrive until 2015, near the end of that two-to-three-year refresh schedule. Jeff Teper, corporate vice president of Office Service and Servers at Microsoft, gave the news with the caveat that "[o]ur server releases will include some, but not all" of the features Microsoft is rolling out to Office 365, such as the Delve deep-search feature (previously code-named "Oslo") or the Groups social networking tool.

Speaking at last April's SP24 conference, which was streamed online, Senior Microsoft Product Marketing Manager Bill Baer said that the next SharePoint Server would be released in "late 2015." Presumably, Exchange Server will also ship in that same timeframe. Baer also dispelled rumors that the next on-premises release of SharePoint would be the last. "We understand that our audience can't necessarily make...a wholesale move to the cloud. So we're going to continue to ship SharePoint Server on-premises as long as there is a demand for SharePoint Server on-premises," Baer said in his keynote.

Besides those announcements, Microsoft hasn't officially shared much about the upcoming on-premises server releases -- not even their names (*). It's possible, though, that they will have the "2016" version name to mirror Office 2016. The company is expected to reveal more about the next Exchange and SharePoint releases at the inaugural Microsoft Ignite conference in early May. Ignite effectively combines the old TechEd America conference and other specialized Microsoft events, including SharePoint Conference, Exchange Conference and the Microsoft Management Summit. [BACK TO 2015 PRODUCT LIST]

Skype for Business
Released

The next major release of Lync Server -- and its corresponding Office 365 component Lync Online -- will appear sometime in the first half of this year under the new name "Skype for Business," Microsoft announced last fall.

Since acquiring Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011, Microsoft has been focused on integrating and aligning the consumer-focused VoIP tool's functionality with that of the more enterprise-focused Lync. The first step was introducing Lync-to-Skype connectivity in 2013; that feature enabled users of both products to exchange voice calls and instant messages with each other.

In December 2014, Microsoft took it a step further by delivering the long-awaited video-calling feature to Lync and Skype. As of this writing, though, that video-calling feature is limited to Skype users on Windows or Mac PCs. Microsoft said back in December that it would expand video-calling support for Skype to Apple iOS and Google Android devices "in the coming months," possibly as part of the Skype for Business release. Also coming in Skype for Business will be support for SkypeIDs, improvements to the contact search capabilities in the worldwide Skype directory, one-touch call transferring and more.

Upgrading from the current Lync Server 2013 to Skype for Business will require only a datacenter update and no new hardware, according to Microsoft. For Lync Online users, the change will come as part of a Microsoft update. [BACK TO 2015 PRODUCT LIST]

Dynamics CRM
Spring update: Released
Dynamics CRM 2016: Released

Microsoft plans to refresh its Dynamics CRM solution in the second quarter of 2015 with what it calls a "spring wave" of updates.

For some time now, Microsoft's various Dynamics CRM and ERP solutions have been on a six-month product refresh cycle. The last major update to Dynamics CRM came in December 2014, with the release of Dynamics CRM 2015. That would suggest that the next big update could fall sometime in June this year, although Microsoft has not given a more specific timeframe beyond Q2.

The Dynamics CRM 2015 release was notable for the addition of integration with Cortana, Microsoft's voice-activated digital personal assistant technology. That release was followed in January by a major update to Parature, a component of Dynamics CRM aimed at marketing- and sales-oriented users.

So far, Microsoft has not revealed much about what is coming with the spring update wave. However, a roadmap posted online in September 2014 by a Microsoft partner suggests that the entire Dynamics CRM stack -- including on-premises Dynamics CRM, the cloud-based Dynamics CRM Online, the Dynamics Marketing tool, the Social Listening tool and Parature -- will be getting updates at that time. According to that post (which has since been removed, although ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley retained a screenshot of the roadmap), the code names for the different updates are "Carina" for Dynamics CRM and Dynamics CRM Online, "Corvus" for Social Listening, "Spica" for Dynamics Marketing and "Taurus" for Parature. [BACK TO 2015 PRODUCT LIST]

Power BI
Released

Microsoft first commercially released its Power BI for Office 365 service a year ago. In December 2014, the company indicated that it was rolling out a number of new features to the service. In late January of this year, the company added that it was changing the product's pricing structure, offering a new, no-cost standalone version (to be called simply Power BI) and significantly cutting the price of the enterprise-grade version (to be called Power BI Pro).

Currently, the new Power BI is available as a free preview to users based in the United States, with expansion to other markets planned "in the future," Microsoft said. New features in the preview include:

• the new Power BI Designer tool, which lets users create and share data visualizations without the need for Excel 2013
• customizable dashboards, where users can view data from both on-premises and the cloud
• built-in connectors to popular third-party SaaS applications, such as Salesforce.com, GitHub and Zendesk, with more connectors to come
• a new connector to SQL Server Analysis Services, enabling users to view on-premises data in the cloud

Microsoft is also planning to release Power BI mobile apps for Apple iPhone and Google Android, as well as universal apps for Windows devices, "later this year." The app is already available in preview for Apple iPad.

Whenever it becomes generally available -- a Microsoft spokesperson said via e-mail in January that it "will exit preview later this year" -- the free version of Power BI will not require users to have an Office 365 subscription or a Microsoft account to access. It will limit data capacity to 1GB per user, implement daily data refreshes and support 10,000 rows of streaming data per hour. The more feature-rich Power BI Pro will cost $9.99 per user per month (a 75 percent price cut that is effective on Feb. 1), have a 10GB-per-user data capacity limit, have hourly scheduled data refreshes and support 1 million rows of streaming data per hour. This Microsoft page lists more details about the two versions. [BACK TO 2015 PRODUCT LIST]

Visual Studio 2015
Released

Microsoft released the first community technology preview (CTP) of its next Visual Studio product, Visual Studio 2015, in June 2014. The company has been following a break-neck pace in its updates since then, releasing subsequent CTPs at a near-monthly basis. CTP 5, the most recent release as of this writing, just became available in late January, two months after the release of a preview version in November.

S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft, said upon the release of CTP 1 that the finished Visual Studio 2015 product (at that time, code-named Visual Studio "14") would "most likely be available sometime in 2015." So far, Microsoft has not given a more specific timeframe, but Microsoft solution provider Insight estimates the release to be sometime in Q2 or Q3 of 2015.

Notable new features coming in Visual Studio 2015 are:

• the open source .NET Compiler Platform
• ASP.NET vNext, an update of the ASP.NET platform that is designed for cloud development
• support for C++11 and C++14 languages

In addition, the recently released CTP 5 delivered improvements to the product's diagnostic capabilities, improvements to ASP.NET 5 and the XAML language service, and a new timeline tool that provides users with a "scenario-centric view" of what resources their applications use.

New features and bug fixes available in the preview and CTP 5 are detailed in this Microsoft page. [BACK TO 2015 PRODUCT LIST]

Windows Server 2016
Anticipated release: Q3 2016, with previews throughout 2015

So far, there hasn't been much talk from Microsoft about the next version of its Windows Server product, although the company did release a technical preview in October and plans to issue another one this spring. As for the finished product, however, there will be a bit of a wait: Microsoft does not expect to ship the final version of Windows Server vNext until next year, according to a blog post in late January.

The move to delay Windows Server's next release until 2016 comes as a surprise. Microsoft typically releases its client and server operating systems close together, and with Windows 10 set to launch later this year, many industry watchers expected to see Windows Server vNext around that same timeframe. The blog post in January did not give any insight into Microsoft's reasoning for the delay, but ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley speculated that it has to do with Windows Server 2003 approaching the end of its support lifecycle in July 2015.

"Maybe the Softies don't want to confuse the upgrade message and want to be able to tell those still running Windows Server 2003 -- for which all free Microsoft support, including security patches) ends this July -- that the platform to which they should move is Windows Server 2012 R2," Foley wrote. She added that "[t]here's also the possibility that business users and IT pros have told the company that pushing out another major new Server release just two years after Windows Server 2012 R2 debuted might be too soon." Windows Server 2012 R2 hit general availability in late 2013.

At any rate, Microsoft said that it plans to "release further previews through the remainder of 2015." The TechNet library article for October's technical preview gives an outline of the changes coming to Windows Server. They include:

• improvements to PowerShell 5.0 "that extend its use, improve its usability, and allow you to control and manage Windows-based environments more easily and comprehensively"
• new networking features such as Network Controller and Generic Routing Encapsulation
• new capabilities in Active Directory Federation Services related to authenticating users in Lightweight Directory Access Protocol directories
• improvements to Remote Desktop Services, including support for OpenCL and OpenGL applications
• a new Storage Replica feature "that enables synchronous replication between servers for disaster recovery"
• the ability to upgrade Hyper-V or Scale-out File Server failover clusters with zero downtime
• improvements to the Web Application Proxy related to application publishing and pre-authentication

Another notable addition in the next Windows Server release will be integration with Docker, the open source application development platform.

"This release of Windows Server will include new container isolation technology, and support running both .NET and other application types (Node.js, Java, C++, etc) within these containers. Developers and organizations will be able to use Docker to create distributed, container-based applications for Windows Server that leverage the Docker ecosystem of users, applications and tools. It will also enable a new class of distributed applications built with Docker that use Linux and Windows Server images together," wrote Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Cloud and Enterprise Group at Microsoft, in a blog post announcing the integration. "We will support the Docker client natively on Windows. Developers and administrators running Windows will be able to use the same standard Docker client and interface to deploy and manage Docker based solutions with both Linux and Windows Server environments."

In addition, Windows Server container images will be available from Docker Hub, an application repository and collaboration portal. "This will enable developers and administrators to easily share and automate application workflows using both Windows Server and Linux Docker images," Guthrie said. [BACK TO 2015 PRODUCT LIST]

System Center 2016
Anticipated release, System Center: Q3 2016
Anticipated release, SCCM: Released

Initially expected to launch alongside Windows 10 and Windows Server in the later part of this year, the next iteration of the System Center product suite will instead be released sometime in 2016, Microsoft announced in late January.

System Center vNext first hit the technical preview stage last fall, although System Center Configuration Manager was missing from the lineup, its own preview having been delayed for sometime early this year. Writing for Redmond magazine, Microsoft MVP Greg Shields observed that the System Center vNext technical preview was particularly notable for what else it doesn't have: "That early focus on what's not in vNext should be concerning for those who've drank the System Center Kool-Aid. Considering the scope of what won't be around in this next release, smart IT shops might start preparing now for a reasonable amount of management platform retooling," he wrote.

Microsoft's release note lists the following "features removed" from the product:

• App Controller
• Service Manager Cloud Services Process Pack (CSPP)
• management pack authoring with Visio in System Center Operations Manager
• support for all versions of Citrix XenServer and versions 4.1 and 5.1 of VMware vCenter in System Center Virtual Machine Manager
• support for Server App-V
• support for governance, risk and compliance (GRC) process management in System Center Service Manager

Microsoft points to Windows Azure Pack as an alternative to both App Controller and Service Manager CSPP.

While System Center Configuration Manager was not part of the technical preview release, Microsoft said in its January blog that it will ship ahead of the rest of the suite, "in a timeframe that aligns with Windows." The company also promised that System Center Configuration Manager will be optimized for Windows 10. "Windows 10 will be delivered in a way that allows for more choice and flexibility for businesses. Businesses will be able to opt-in to the fast-moving consumer pace, or lock-down mission critical environments that require only security updates and fixes. In alignment with these changes for Windows 10, the next version of Configuration Manager will be more easily updatable to support each of these Windows 10 updates," Microsoft said last fall.

Microsoft said it will share more details about its "vNext" products at the Ignite conference in May. [BACK TO 2015 PRODUCT LIST]

2014 Product Roadmap Archive
The following products were featured in our 2014 Microsoft Product Roadmap. Click on a product name to jump to that section.

• Windows 8.1 Update
• Office 2013 SP1
• Exchange Server 2013 SP1
• SharePoint Server 2013 SP1
• Lync Server
• Dynamics CRM 'Leo'
• Dynamics GP 2013 R2
• Dynamics GP 2015
• Dynamics AX 2012 R3
• SQL Server 2014
• SQL Server 2012 SP2
• Windows Server 2012 R2 Update
• Windows Phone 8.1
• Visual Studio 2013 Update 2
• Power BI for Office 365
• Azure RemoteApp ('Mohoro')
• Windows 10

Windows 8.1 Update
Released

Microsoft is working on the first update to Windows 8.1, with rollout expected sometime in the spring, according to a report last year by ZDNet blogger and Redmond magazine columnist Mary Jo Foley.

Update 1's aim is to further unify Microsoft's desktop/tablet and smartphone platforms from a developer and programming perspective, Foley reported more recently in January. The "Update 1" name may be one indication of that already: As Supersite for Windows' Paul Thurrott noted, that's the naming convention Microsoft uses for Windows Phone updates.

Citing unnamed sources, Foley said that Update 1 will be timed to coincide with the release of Windows Phone 8.1, which media reports suggest will be in April. A January blog post by a Microsoft leaker who goes by the name "WZor" claims to narrow the timeframe to March for the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) milestone and April 1 for general availability. Presumably, the April 1 release is designed to coincide with Microsoft's Build conference, which kicks off on April 2.

Several media outlets have noted that the allegedly leaked Update 1 screenshots that accompanied WZor's post do not show any major UI changes or, more importantly, any sign of a Start menu.

Update 1 will be a free download for current Windows 8.1 users, WZor said.

According to Thurrott, Update 1 "might be seen as a combination feature pack and service pack, since it will both add new features and rollup previously delivered updates of various kinds." [BACK TO 2014 PRODUCT LIST]

Office 2013 SP1
Released

Microsoft said in November that it is planning to deliver the first service pack for Office 2013 sometime in early 2014.

Besides that, Microsoft hasn't said much about Office 2013 SP1 yet, but indicated that it will improve compatibility with Windows 8.1, as well as add "performance enhancements [and] feature updates."

Foley speculates that Microsoft may roll out touch-based Office apps this year as part of the rumored Office "Gemini" update wave. The first Gemini updates -- which were reportedly aimed at Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote -- were originally expected to have a fall 2013 release, though that didn't pan out. Now, Gemini is expected to arrive in the summer of 2014, though Foley says it may arrive even sooner.

"I'm thinking they [touch-centric Office apps] debut alongside Office 2013 Service Pack 1 or shortly thereafter," she wrote in a January Redmond magazine column.

Also on the horizon, according to Foley, are Office apps for Apple iPad and Google Android tablets. Microsoft has not given a specific timeline for when it will launch these tablet apps; in an October interview, outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer would only confirm that Microsoft is working on a touch-centric Office experience for tablets, but would not say when it would become available.

However, the signs point to Microsoft requiring an Office 365 subscription to use Office apps on Android and iPad tablets, "just as it does with the Office Mobile apps for iPhones and Android phones," according to Foley. [BACK TO 2014 PRODUCT LIST]

Exchange Server 2013 SP1
Released

The first service pack of Exchange Server 2013 will early 2014 alongside the SP1 releases of Office 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013. SP1 will essentially be the fourth cumulative update (CU4) for Exchange 2013, according to Microsoft. CU3 for Exchange 2013 was rolled out in December.

Microsoft outlined a few of the changes coming in Exchange 2013 SP1 late last year. One of the most notable is support for running on Windows Server 2012 R2.

SP1 will also include support for Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) for Outlook Web App (OWA), Outlook and Exchange ActiveSync. Microsoft notes that this S/MIME support will be limited to Internet Explorer 9 or higher, at least at the outset. Microsoft is "looking at the best way to bring this support to other platforms in the future -- but nothing we can share now," the company said.

Beyond SP1's release, Microsoft said it is already working on the next version of Exchange, and that the timing of future Exchange versions will likely follow the usual two- to-three-year release cadence.

Despite Microsoft's ongoing focus on its cloud-based Office 365 suite, the company "has no plans to stop delivering on-premises releases of Exchange," according to Exchange Corporate Vice President Perry Clarke in November. However, new features will likely become available on Office 365 first, Clarke indicated.

"Our development strategy continues to focus on Office 365 as the initial platform where we roll out new features. This approach allows us to introduce and test new features at scale before including relevant functionality into on-premises updates," Clarke said. "The benefits of the strategy can be seen in Exchange 2013, where features such as Managed Availability are directly based on work done to automate and improve our datacenter operations. If you want clues about what's coming in the next version of Exchange Server, keep an eye on what's happening in Office 365." [BACK TO 2014 PRODUCT LIST]

SharePoint Server 2013 SP1
Released

Like Exchange 2013, SharePoint 2013 was unsupported for running on Windows Server 2012 R2. That support will become available when SharePoint 2013 SP1 arrives in early 2014.

SP1 will be a "major update to SharePoint, establishing a new baseline for support, and provides customers the latest in improvements to performance, stability, and security," according to Bill Baer, a senior product manager for SharePoint, in November. Baer also offered assurances that Microsoft will continue to roll out on-premises versions of SharePoint in the future, according to its two- to-three-year release cadence.

Microsoft of late has been very open about its intention to deepen the integration between SharePoint and Yammer, the enterprise social networking company it acquired in 2012 for over $1 billion. Presumably, that integration will become even more apparent with SharePoint 2013 SP1.

Microsoft will likely reveal more about what's coming in SharePoint 2013 SP1 during its annual SharePoint conference, which takes place in early March this year. [BACK TO 2014 PRODUCT LIST]

Lync Server
Anticipated release: First half of 2015

The next version of Lync Server -- presumably Lync Server 2014, though Microsoft has not confirmed that name yet -- is slated for release in the second quarter of the year, Microsoft said in February 2013.

Integration with Skype has been a prominent facet of Microsoft's plans for Lync since it acquired the VoIP giant in 2011. Last year, Microsoft launched the Lync-to-Skype connectivity feature, enabling instant messaging and audio calls between users of the two products. However, this feature does not yet support video connections; according to Rob Helm, managing vice president at Directions on Microsoft, a Kirkland, Wash.-based independent consultancy, this support for video calls may arrive "by mid-2014."

Helm also speculates that Microsoft may be planning a "merged" Lync-Skype client "that would enable Microsoft and its customers to support both Lync and Skype services with a single client, at least for basic communications services like those covered by the free Lync Basic and Skype clients today."

According to Microsoft, 2014 will bring several features and changes to Lync, including quarterly updates to Lync Online, support for structured meetings and native interoperability with third-party video teleconferencing systems.

The company also said in early 2013 that it is planning to deliver enterprise voice capabilities to Lync Online sometime this year, perhaps in the summer. Microsoft has since axed Lync Online's "hybrid voice" feature as a way of getting enterprise voice, citing lack of interest. However, the company indicated that it has partnered with AT&T, BT and Verizon as service providers for delivering enterprise voice capabilities for organizations. [BACK TO 2014 PRODUCT LIST]

Windows Server 2012 R2 Update
Released

To coincide with the availability of Windows 8.1 Update 1, Microsoft in February said it will release a corresponding update to Windows Server 2012 R2 sometime this spring.

Microsoft characterized this forthcoming update as "minor," aimed at delivering bug fixes and UI changes. The update will also include previous update rollups and security patches. Microsoft said its aim is to enable users to access the update without requiring re-certification. [BACK TO 2014 PRODUCT LIST]

Dynamics CRM 'Leo'
Released

Microsoft's Dynamics CRM product line hit a couple of milestones last year, including the launches of the on-premises Dynamics CRM 2013 and the Microsoft-hosted Dynamics CRM Online Fall '13, as well as the release of Dynamics CRM apps for tablets and smartphones.

Dynamics CRM 2013 features a more improved graphical user interface than its predecessor, as well as enhanced social networking and collaboration capabilities through integration with Microsoft's Skype, Lync and Yammer technologies.

Microsoft so far has said little about its plans for the next major version of Dynamics CRM. However, the company indicated earlier this year that it intends to add cloud-based customer service features into Dynamics CRM using technology acquired from Parature, which Microsoft purchased in January.

In a Dynamics CRM 2013 product preview guide (.PDF) released in September, Microsoft said it is already working on two new Dynamics CRM versions code-named "Leo" and "Vega." Directions on Microsoft's Helm speculates that Leo will be the next major release and that it will arrive in mid-2014.

"Leo will probably deliver out-of-the-box integration with the Parature service, but there could be other customer service improvements, as well," according to Helm. [BACK TO 2014 PRODUCT LIST]

Dynamics GP 2013 R2
Released

Microsoft said in February that it plans to release the R2 version of its Dynamics GP 2013 enterprise resource planning product (ERP) sometime in the first half of 2014.

Dynamics GP 2013 was last updated in September with SP2. The forthcoming R2 release will bring improvements to functionality, as well as to the product's workflow and identity management capabilities. It will also introduce the product's "first companion apps," according to Microsoft. [BACK TO 2014 PRODUCT LIST]

Dynamics GP 2015
Released

Microsoft is planning to release two key versions of its Dynamics GP product this year. The first will be the aforementioned Dynamics GP 2013 R2 release, expected sometime in the first half of 2014. The second will be Dynamics GP 2015, which will arrive in the second half of the year.

Microsoft said in February that Dynamics GP 2015 will bring "more functionality, more workflow, more apps and a Service Based Architecture that will be the foundation for the further development of Dynamics GP over the next five years."

The company also said it is moving to a six-month update cycle for Dynamics GP in order to "enhance our new business proposition and bring incremental value to [Business Ready Enhancement Plan] customers on a much more regular basis." [BACK TO 2014 PRODUCT LIST]

Dynamics AX 2012 R3
Released

The R3 version of Microsoft's Dynamics AX 2012 ERP product will arrive in April, roughly 16 months after the launch of R2.

Besides an on-premises solution, Microsoft indicated at last November's Convergence EMEA conference that Dynamics NAV 2012 R3 will also be available as a Windows Azure-hosted solution sold through partners. The hosting capability is enabled by Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, which became generally available last spring. Two other Dynamics ERP solutions are available as Windows Azure-hosted services from partners: Dynamics NAV 2013 R2 and Dynamics GP 2013.

Dynamics AX 2012 R3 will feature, among other things, new tools to help organizations interact with customers via mobile devices and social networks, new management capabilities for transportation and warehouse functions, and support for single-instance deployments.

The release will also coincide with an update to Dynamics for Retail, previously Dynamics AX for Retail, Microsoft announced in January. [BACK TO 2014 PRODUCT LIST]

SQL Server 2014
Released