We just received our certification for Windows Server 2008.  Or we are about to — it probably isn’t “official” yet.  Anyway, congratulations to the Digipede team and thanks to everyone at Microsoft and Veritest who helped us through the process.

Getting the logo was arduous.  This has less to do with the technical logo requirements and more to do with the complexities of the process itself.  Some of the complexity is inherent in such a process, but much was due to the program itself being a sort of “work in process”.  But hey, that’s why we early certifiers got the testing fees waived.  I think those who begin the process now will find the test requirements and tools are better written and more robust.

As I said, passing the technical requirements was not arduous for us (we were already very close), but passing the tests did require some minor improvements to the Digipede Network that were motivated by the test:

• Support for User Account Control (UAC).
• More useful logging on the Digipede Server and during installations.
• Improved user messaging and event logging during error conditions between server components and the database.
• Improvements to the Installation Guide including new sections on Custom Actions, installation artifacts, and more.

Some of these changes have already made their way into the shipping product, though others won’t be available until the Digipede Network 2.1 (which, while a minor upgrade, contains many features beyond the improvements mentioned above — I think the feature set will be announced soon).

So now we’re ready for the big launch of Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008 in Los Angeles on February 27th.  If you are going to be there, come see us at the Partner Pavilion.  I’m pushing for some kind of Digipede swag — but I’m not in marketing ;).

[tags]Server 2008, VS2008, SQL, Certified, Digipede[/tags]