Season's Greetings from the Embedded Windows Team!

As we wrap up 2006 and move onward to 2007, it feels good to think about the XP Embedded Team’s achievements in the last year and I get excited as we look into the plans for the next year. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Kalpana Murthy, the GPM (Group Program Manager) on the Embedded Windows Team. I started with the team about 6 months ago, and in that time have seen us achieve some significant milestones and am quite proud of the team and our accomplishments.

- We have built out the team from a handful of folks who have been valiantly supporting the product in the past years and now are staffed up to a larger number, and we will continue to build out the team in 2007.

- We released XPe Feature Pack 2007 demonstrating our commitment to the product and our customers. Cool new EEFs like USB Boot, FBWF were part of the Feature Pack in addition to bug fixes that we assessed to be important to customers.

- As part of the Feature Pack effort, we held Community Technology Previews (CTPs) as a means of staying in touch with customers along the development cycle, and got great feedback that helped us improve the software prior to RTM. We plan to continue to do these CTPs on our future releases and greatly appreciate the community’s continued participation. They will play a major role in helping us build a better products that meet customer needs.

- We are currently in the CTP cycle for ImageDiff1.0 – a tool that customers requested to help them migrate to XPeSP2 from SP1 and upgrade to Feature Pack 2007 without having to reimage their systems.

- We also are currently working to release additional client technologies on XPe that have been strong customer asks – IE7, RD6, WMP11, UMDF and .NET3.0. We will be componentizing the first four technologies. There will also be a CTP associated with these around the 1Q of CY 2007. The RTM date for these technologies is currently in planning, but we are tentatively targeting middle of 2007.

- Our community involvement is on an uptick and we will continue our activities via whitepapers, presentations at major conferences such as MEDC, blog articles, newsgroups and the newly added Forums.

As we look toward 2007, we definitely will be continuing our planning activities to understand our next major release plans. Please stay tuned, we intend to provide a clearer picture in the 1Q of CY 2007.

I also would like to take a moment, and consider the last year from a broader perspective. In general, it has been a pretty good year for several of us and we are quite fortunate to have had it that way. However, I do know that folks around the world experienced a range of natural events such a floods, snowstorms, windstorms and the like. I hope far more positive experiences are in the outlook for everyone as we look forward to the New Year.

The Embedded Windows Team would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a Happy Holiday Season and a Very Happy New Year !!

- Kalpana