Microsoft is readying a beta preview of Windows Server "Centro", a version of Windows Server 2008 targeted at organizations with less than 250 users.

The invitation only beta will be open to between 300 and 400 customers, with no word on the selection criteria involved -- we'd guess you're a likely candidate if you currently have close to the 250 user mark, a solid IT staff and a good relationship with Microsoft Support staff -- a later Community Technology Preview will be released sometime this year and will see wider availability among the beta testing elite.

Small business is the backbone of the industry but, we can't help wonder; Do we really need all the specialization? Are Mid-sized IT departments screaming for a specialized version of Windows Server or could the Redmond kids focus their efforts in a more efficient way to make the whole product line better. How confusing can the Microsoft product chart get before businesses give up en mass?

Today Microsoft and Zend Technologies--the corporate face of ultra-popular web programming language PHP--announced a "technical collaboration to enhance the experience of running [PHP] on Windows Server 2003." The collaboration will entail technical improvements to Windows Server which will be released under the open source PHP license, Microsoft releasing a FastCGI component for IIS, Zend establishing a Windows testing lab "to maintain high performance of PHP on the Windows Server platform as PHP evolves," and active participation in the PHP community "ensuring open discussion to help developers planning to deploy PHP applications on the Windows Server platform."

This move is mutually beneficial to both companies. Microsoft wins by wooing PHP developers--traditionally an open source lot--to their platform and stemming migration to LAMP with promises of improved performance, and Zend wins by getting in good with Microsoft's own large and loyal circle of developers. "Since our preliminary work with Microsoft, we have already seen a better than 100 percent performance gain with some PHP applications on Windows Server 2003," says Andi Gutmans, Zend co-founder and CTO. He also claims that "a majority of PHP developers [are] developing on the Windows platform," though he does not make the distinction between developing on Windows and deploying on it.