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Finally, here it comes - Windows Embedded Standard 2009 Academic SKU!

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Back in the fall of 2007 (see the comments from ShermB and me on this blog), or even earlier back in 2005 (see this blog from Andy), we were talking about making a Windows XP Embedded hobbyist SKU for our hobbyist community. It still hasn’t happened yet given all the complications surrounding this product. (You can find the general Windows Embedded hobbyist program “SPARK Your Imagination” though which is currently based on CE). The good news was, we had a spin-off from the investigation in that fall – I compiled the feedback from several university faculties and students on their experience of using our evaluation SKU; we understood overall it was painful for them because it timebombs in 120 days which is usually before their projects due; so we proposed making an Academic SKU for academia only instead which we can leverage the existing MSDN Academic Alliance (aka, MSDNAA) program as the distributing channel.

Several designing options, with factors such as engineering cost, marketing cost etc., were evaluated. At the end the team came to an agreement on what to implement: extend the current expiration date from 120 days to one year for academic users only.  That should meet the needs of most academic users. I was very happy to see the buy-off from the whole team, both the engineering side and the marketing side. Andy was happy too!  Due to time and resource constraint, the team was not able to include the Academic SKU development in the Windows Embedded Standard 2009 work. However, it was put on the team project “train” and scheduled to be developed right after Standard was out of the door. I was off the hook in general but I knew the PM/Dev/Test owners have been working really hard even during the snow storm or holiday breaks back in Dec.

Today, I am very pleased to share the news -  the Academic SKU of Windows Embedded Standard 2009 is RTM’ed!

With the exception of the changes required to adjust the timebomb, this version is binary identical to the rest of the Windows Embedded Standard 2009 Evaluation version, the database has all the same components and the tools are the same too. They will soon be available on MSDNAA for download.

How exciting! Champagne please …

- Weijuan

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 15, 2009
    The Windows Embedded team just announced the availability of the Windows Embedded Standard 2009 Academic

  • Anonymous
    January 15, 2009
    Here is some good news coming from the Windows Embedded team, announced yesterday on their blog : faculties

  • Anonymous
    January 15, 2009
    Here is some good news coming from the Windows Embedded team, announced yesterday on their blog : faculties

  • Anonymous
    January 19, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 22, 2009
    excuse me but the http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/en-us/products/spark/default.mspx link in this article is not working.

  • Anonymous
    January 22, 2009
    Andre, We were just informed early today that the site http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded is down. They are working on it and should be back online soon. Please do come back later and check it out. Thank you for the interest. And sorry for the inconvenience. Weijuan

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2009
    That is a good outcome, an academic XPE. Early on with MSDNAA, the version that was available was the complete OEM version. Iam am a used-to-be embedded academic, now working with XPE for cars, trains etc. A couple of points to remember:

  • The OEM updates/refreshes are not the public updates  So where do the academics get the updates from
  • If it is the binary equivalent then it can do licensed images.  But not being OEMs academics can't get licenses... It would be good if there was a license key that worked in for this even though it still time bombed .. Just to get the experience.

  • Anonymous
    January 26, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 17, 2009
    If you are a student or a university teacher interested in Embedded then you might know about MSDN Academic

  • Anonymous
    February 18, 2009
    Deux bonnes nouvelles de plus dans la sphère de Windows Embedded Standard 2009! Premièrement, il existe