News

No New Version of Application Center Coming

• By Scott Bekker
• March 18, 2003

"As a discrete product, the last version is Application Center 2000," says David Hamilton, a senior executive in Microsoft's enterprise management product division. "Web-based applications are becoming so much more mainstream, and are becoming fundamentally similar to other applications. We think treating them differently is a mistake."

Technologies of Application Center 2000 that were not focused on the COM+ architecture will be carried forward, and sales of and support for Application Center 2000 will continue, Hamilton says. "It is a critical product to our customers, and we're very committed to [supporting] it," he says.

The product was introduced in May 2001. Mainstream support will continue until July 2006, and customers can purchase extended support through June 30, 2008.

Three of the main thrusts of Application Center will continue in other initiatives and products. Configuration of Web-based applications will be treated like configuration of other applications and handled through the XML-based System Definition Model of Microsoft's new Dynamic Systems Initiative.

Monitoring of Web-based applications will be handled in the new Microsoft System Center, which at first will be a suite combining Systems Management Server 2003 and Microsoft Operations Manager 2004 and later will be a single integrated product. Responsibility for scaling out Web-based applications through load balancing and other means will return to the Windows operating system team.

This article was updated on March 26, 2003.