When all was said and done, we found the answer to our question to be an unequivocal "It depends." Windows 2000 is really five products: Professional, Server, Advanced Server, the yet-to-be-released Datacenter Server, and Active Directory, which is a component of the Server editions and can be implemented or not at the user's discretion. Each product has strengths and weaknesses, and each may or may not be a good fit for your enterprise organization.

Microsoft Windows 2000's breadth of technologies will make it difficult for organizations to quickly evaluate the operating system's features and plan for their use. We tested several of these new and improved technologies, and included them here and in our companion article "Win2000: New and Improved Internet?" (see page 54). We can't touch on all the features in this article, but we do plan a number of follow-on stories that will more fully explore additional features.

Here, we've concentrated on the Windows 2000 products we believe will have the most immediate impact on your organization: Windows 2000 Professional, Windows 2000 Server/Advanced Server and Active Directory.

All or Nothing
For shops looking to run a desktop/notebook operating system that's more reliable and easier to manage than their current mix of Windows 9x and Windows NT, Windows 2000 Professional is the way to go. There's no question about it--you'll want to upgrade to Windows 2000 Professional as quickly as you can, even if you don't plan to implement Active Directory.

We encourage Microsoft shops to be as cautious as with any new product, but to plan on upgrading to Windows 2000 Professional, Server and Active Directory sooner rather than later. The payoff will be a computing infrastructure that's actually manageable. But you'll have to go the whole way. Remember, Windows 9x and NT machines can authenticate in an Active Directory environment but not in much else, so you'll need to install Windows 2000 from the server to the desktop to reap your rewards.

For organizations with long-standing multivendor IT infrastructures, a full-blown implementation of Windows 2000, including Professional, Server and Active Directory, will be as much a political undertaking as it is a technical one--and about as pleasant as a trip to the dentist.

For example, Active Directory relies heavily on a well-functioning DNS environment that includes support for SRV RR (Service Resource Record) lookups and dynamic updates. If Active Directory isn't working right, look for DNS problems first. Even if your Unix folks agree to set up this environment, fingers will be pointing in every direction the first time something goes wrong, and the struggle for control will be on.

Large enterprises that rely on Windows NT for critical functions should plan to implement Advanced Server because of its built-in high-availability features, including TCP/IP network load-balancing and clustering services. We'll look more closely at these features in a future article, so stay tuned.

NetWare Shops: Hang Back
Our advice for mixed shops that include Novell NetWare and its NDS is to stay the course. Active Directory is young; it needs to mature and prove its mettle. It's also a single-platform environment.

NDS has been there and done that, and it supports multiple platforms. NDS with Novell's ZENworks already provides many of the manageability enhancements that Microsoft is just now including in Active Directory, and you can easily continue to manage Windows NT, Windows 9x and even Windows 2000 desktops with ZENworks. In fact, you'll be ahead of the game because Active Directory doesn't provide management tools for Windows 9x or NT.

Windows 2000 Reliability
Before we get to the details of Windows 2000's elements, let's say a word about reliability, since it plays a critical part in determining the operating system's prospects. We didn't have any reliability problems with Windows 2000 Professional or Server during our tests. We never had one blue screen, even though we pounded hard.

We think this bodes well for Microsoft's reliability claims. However, the reliability story won't be fully told until Windows 2000 gets a real-world shakeout over the next few months.