Microsoft To Smooth Long, Hard Road To SP2Microsoft To Smooth Long, Hard Road To SP2

The painstaking process of testing Windows XP Service Pack 2 to ensure that business applications don't break when it's installed is slowing down companies that want to deploy Microsoft's big patch. By Microsoft's estimate, it can take businesses with 1,000-plus PCs from six months to a year to complete the job.

What's needed are tools to automate the process, and now, nearly three months after releasing SP2, Microsoft is about to deliver them. The company is working on a version of its Application Compatibility Toolkit, used by Windows administrators for other compatibility testing, that's tuned specifically for SP2. A test version of the toolkit should be available within a few weeks.

Some customers are anxious to get it. "Clearly, we would use it," says Martin Howard, senior VP and CIO of Patient Care Inc., a home health-care provider with 1,000 PCs, most of which run Windows XP. "Testing should give us a level of security that would enable us to go forward."

Like some other Windows XP accounts, Patient Care has been holding back on an SP2 rollout while its IT professionals assess the operating system. Some Patient Care IT staffers have downloaded SP2 onto home computers, and the next step will be a formal testing program to see how it works with the company's applications. Those range from Salesforce.com Inc.'s hosted software to custom code built using Sybase Inc.'s PowerBuilder tools and database.

If all goes well, Patient Care will begin its SP2 upgrade in January or February. "We've found no issues to date of any consequence," Howard says.

That's the kind of feedback Microsoft's Windows XP team likes, but it's not what it always gets. "I still hear a lot of fear from customers about application compatibility," admits Barry Goffe, Microsoft group product manager. Despite such jitters, customers generally are encountering only minor issues with SP2, Goffe says.

SP2, which promises to improve PC security, isn't sitting idle. More than 100 million copies have been downloaded or distributed by CD in the 10 weeks since its release, Microsoft said last week. The majority of those seem to be going to consumers and small businesses. Adoption in larger companies is harder to gauge because of the way SP2 gets distributed: One SP2 download from Microsoft's Web site might be distributed to 10,000 PCs within a com- pany. A recent survey of developers by Evans Data found that 46% hadn't even begun to install SP2.

Microsoft's Windows Application Compatibility Toolkit 4.0 should help spur the process. Until now, Windows administrators have had to make do with SP2 migration guidelines detailed in a Microsoft-issued white paper. The toolkit will automate what had been manual processes. For instance, a compatibility analyzer will make it possible to monitor application usage to determine testing priorities. The tools also can check for conflicts between Internet Explorer and applications that work over the Web.

For businesses that need help, Microsoft's consulting organization has developed an SP2 deployment service that uses standard approaches to test and install the operating system. Hundreds of companies have tapped the service, Goffe estimates.

SP2 can be customized in more ways than Windows XP without the service pack. More than 600 new group-policy objects are part of SP2's Active Directory, raising to about 1,400 the number of security configuration options.

SP2's many changes to Windows XP promise greater security, but no one, including Microsoft, said the upgrade would be easy. "It's a slower upgrade than usual," says Joe Wilcox, a Jupiter Research senior analyst. "In many respects, this is really another operating-system version."