Microsoft is bringing good ol’ Services for UNIX to an end. This is largely good news. Services for UNIX has never been a great integration product, by any stretch of the imagination, but it is useful in several ways (especially for NFS integration). Now it will no longer be a separate product at all. Microsoft is integrating SFU features — and supposedly adding some additional Linux/UNIX integration tools — into Windows itself. The first part of this integration will happen in Windows Server 2003 R2, which will be released soon.

Microsoft is also making Windows Server more Linux/UNIX-friendly by increasing the power of the command line and the scriptability of the OS. Part of this is being done simply to lower the barrier for organizations to migrate from UNIX or Linux. However, this is also being done to provide better integration capabilities in order to please the vast number of organizations that run multiple platforms.