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This article is a summary of the announcement by Microsoft that Windows NT 5.0 will be named Windows 2000 - effective immediately.

Along with the announcement of the new name, Microsoft officially announced that Windows NT would be the basis for all future operating system products, and also announced an additional version.

Here are the new names, how they translate to the former names, and a description of the new version:

• Windows 2000 Professional (formerly Windows NT Workstation 5.0) - will be the Microsoft mainstream desktop operating system for businesses of all sizes, will have enhanced features for mobile users, high security, and better performance with up to two-way SMP (Symetric Multi-Processors) where needed.

• Windows 2000 Server (formerly Windows NT Server 5.0) - Ideal for small to medium-sized business application deployments, Web servers, workgroups and branch offices, this version of Windows NT 2000 is expected to be the most popular version. Existing Windows NT Server 4.0 operating systems with up to four-way SMP will be able to upgrade to this version.

• Windows 2000 Advanced Server (formerly Windows NT Server 5.0 Enterprise Edition) will be a more powerful departmental and application server, and will also provide rich NOS (Network Operating System) and Internet services. Supporting systems with up to four-way SMP, this new product will be ideal for database-intensive work and integrates clustering and load-balancing support to provide high system and application availability. Existing Windows NT Server 4.0 Enterprise Edition Servers with up to eight-way SMP will be able to install this version, which is expected to be priced below today's Windows NT Server Enterprise Edition.

• Windows 2000 Datacenter Server (new) will be the most powerful and functional server operating system ever offered by Microsoft. It will support up to 16-way SMP and up to 64 GB of physical memory (depending on system architecture). Like Windows 2000 Advanced Server, it will provide both clustering and load-balancing services as standard features. It will be optimized for large data warehouses, econometric analysis, large-scale simulations in science and engineering, OLTP (On Line Transaction Processing), and server consolidation projects.

Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 98 are not affected by this change, and will retain their current names.

It was not announced how Microsoft's new 3-tiered computing model will fit with this new scheme, although it's not hard to guess. The new model, addressed at length at the recent Professional Developers Conference, is composed of the Presentation, or user-end tier, the Business Logic tier, at which all actual processing is done, and the Data tier, at which databases reside. It's safe to assume that Windows 2000 Professional will be the operating system at user level, that Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2000 Advanced Server will be the operating system at the Business Logic tier, and that Windows 2000 Datacenter Server will be the operating system for the Data tier.

For matters related to this article please contact the author.