Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer, will officially launch Windows Server 2008 server at an event in Los Angeles today, capping months of beta testing by customers around the world. The launch is vitally important to Microsoft, which hopes sales of the updated server software will spur wider adoption of Windows Vista by corporate customers that have so far resisted the urge to upgrade from Windows XP.

"We think with Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008, the integrated benefits that customers see will really encourage them to start looking at deployments of Vista on the desktop as well," said Jagan Narendran, the director of Microsoft Asia-Pacific's Infrastructure Server Business.

Microsoft is counting on new features in Windows Server 2008 to attract interest from corporate IT managers. These features generally fall into one of four areas Microsoft focused on when developing Windows Server 2008: security, virtualisation, Web productivity and business intelligence.