Microsoft, in a decision that may adversely affect smaller customers, is imposing a TCP/IP connection policy that limits the use of Windows NT Workstation 4.0 as a Web server.
The restriction in the current beta version of NT Workstation 4.0 allows only 10 TCP/IP connections within a 10-minute period. No final decision has been made as to whether this limitation will remain in the general release of NT Workstation 4.0, due by September.
One vendor shipping a Web server for NT Workstation says Microsoft's policy will stifle deployment of Web servers, particularly at small sites that do not want to deploy a more expensive server OS.
"What they've done is they've basically changed the operating system so that third-party Web servers really won't work anymore" on NT Workstation, says Tim O'Reilly, president of O'Reilly & Associates, in Sebastopol, California, which sells the WebSite Web server package for NT Workstation, NT Server, and Windows 95.
However, a Microsoft official says NT Workstation is intended as a client and not for server-based services. It includes a Peer to Peer Web Services feature for small-scale HTTP document publishing.
"NT Workstation was originally designed to be a great workstation product, not a server," says Adam Taylor, Win95 and NT group product manager, in Redmond, Washington.