Four of Microsoft's major platforms are queued up to be released near the end of 2009 or early 2010.

and Exchange 2010 are all slated to ship by year-end, as is the company's new identity federation platform,  

On the heels of all that is another granddaddy Microsoft platform -- Office 2010, which is slated to ship early in 2010 and includes the wildly popular under the Office product family banner.

Behind that heavy-hitter lineup of software, each one individually capable of providing IT with an upgrade cycle that extends well past 12 months, is a new version of SQL Server and an appliance version of the database for massively parallel processing that will come in the first half of 2010

Users trying to make sense of it all can add to the mix a handful of code-named projects that includes new Application Server technology for Internet Information Server (Dublin); a client console for Forefront security software (Stirling); a distributed cache system for clustering technology (Velocity); and a componentized version of Windows Embedded for devices (Quebec). All that software will be available in late 2009 and throughout 2010.