First, we found that NT 5.0 itself is now quite stable. We experienced no operating system crashes and seldom had to reboot, even when we changed system parameters. We also liked the management console and its snap-ins, although we hope Microsoft reduces the memory footprint in the final release.

NT 5.0 is chock-full of features and, all in all, we liked what it had to offer, including Active Directory, and enhanced security and management features. Nevertheless, we recommend you tread very carefully if you're considering early deployment of it as a server operating system. Though some features appear to be rock-solid, others need work, and we seriously doubt all the kinks will be worked out by the time it ships sometime next year. If possible, let Microsoft get a couple of service packs and possibly even a minor revision under its belt--but don't wait much longer than that. Once NT 5.0 gets on its feet, we predict it will be a formidable system for midtier enterprise application deployment.

NT 5.0 has so many new features we had to pick and choose which ones to test. Though we made a point of examining many of the security, management and file system changes and enhancements, we spent most of our time working with Active Directory, since it is perhaps the most widely touted feature of NT 5.0.

As we learned in February, Active Directory and many of the tools and utilities around it are seriously flawed. Although Microsoft assures us that it is busily removing all WINS (Windows Internet Name Service) dependencies, the Beta 2 version exhibits dependencies on WINS that lead us to question whether Active Directory is suitable for enterprise deployment. Furthermore, Active Directory's reliance on dynamic DNS often did not bode well for the directory system's stability.

Many of you will be helping users make the transition from either NetWare or Exchange directories to Active Directory, so we tested NT 5.0's migration features extensively. Here, too, we found that Microsoft has lots of work ahead of it. For example, although we successfully set up trees in both San Mateo and Madison over our WAN, essentially creating a two-tree "forest," it required significantly more effort than it should have. We question Microsoft's decision to maintain compatibility with NT 4.0, as this essentially perpetuates the domain structure under the covers of NT 5.0, a drawback we identified during our tests of Beta 1.

The Nuts & Bolts of the OS NT 4.0 was notorious for its need to be rebooted for all system changes--say, adding or removing a protocol such as IPX, or changing certain TCP/IP settings. NT 5.0 has vastly reduced these occurrences. In fact, we were able to add protocols and change the frame type for IPX without a single reboot. However, we were forced to restart the system a number of times to get certain functions to work, including file replication in DFS. Microsoft's goal is to pare the number of reboot scenarios to no more than five by the time NT 5.0 ships (see "NT 5.0 Goes Easy on the Reboots," page 50). Overall, we applaud Microsoft's progress and efforts in this area.

NT 5.0 Beta 2 was a resource hog, gobbling up just about all the resources (RAM, disk space) we could throw at it. A fresh Server install claimed about 700 MB of disk space (including 250 MB for the swap file). It was easy to push memory consumption on our test servers well beyond the 130-MB mark--and we hadn't even opened any end-user applications yet. We found that NT 5.0 Workstation ate about 400 MB of disk space and 32 MB of memory on a relatively idle machine. Granted, many parts of NT 5.0 have not been optimized, and there is undoubtedly a big chunk of debug code in the OS, but we fear the beta versions have raised the bar on minimum memory requirements.