Over the past few weeks there has been a ton written about Windows Server 2008 and the brave new world of NAP. It seems like every NAC player who had a half-baked NAC implementation is now counting on NAP's on device agent, policy server and enforcement to make their solution whole. Basically many of these solutions, especially the host based variety are just going to provide more tests for NAP and lets Microsoft do the rest. I think the market may want more than that, but that is a blog for another day.

The single biggest factor in my mind holding up adoption of NAP is who is using Vista and Server 2008. The short answer is not many people yet. Yes in the higher education market, where several NAC vendors live or die, there is a lot of Vista because students with new laptops are coming into school with their shiny new computers. But these same universities generally are not the first ones to upgrade to the latest version of Microsoft Server software. On the commercial side of the house, Vista is just not a factor yet. In fact many customers we speak to are no where close to be ready to support Vista. So if Vista is a pre-req for NAP, we won't see NAP as a major factor until 2009 and probably later in the year at that.

However, Tim Greene points out in his NAC newsletter today, that the long anticipated XP SP3 is now due out soon. This will include a NAP client for XP. This will bring NAP to the masses. Also as Tim points out, once the NAP agent is out there, you don't necessarily need to use Windows Server 2008 to implement a multi-vendor NAC solution. You could use a TCG/TNC compliant policy server instead. This all sounds great, but here is my one caveat. When is soon? We have heard this from Microsoft before. Remember when Longhorn was supposed to be out in 2006? 2007?  Vista itself was very, very late. This type of freezing the market with the promise of an imminent release is SOP it seems.

So if you really want to get me excited about XP SP3 and NAP, give me some hard dates on when it is real!