Microsoft hit a big milestone today, shipping the final Windows 8 binaries to OEM manufacturers. I for one am happy to see the deadline hit square on the head, it certainly smells like a well oiled machine. For those of us who don’t work in HP’s engineering division, we’ll have to wait a little while to get our hands on the finished product. TechNet and MSDN access will be available from the 15th of August, and corporate customers can download the release media through MVLS on the 16th of August, although if you don’t buy software assurance, you’ll need to wait until the 1st of September. Retail product will be on the shelves on the 26th of October, along with Surface RT tablets 
.
Whilst the team at Fastrack has already successfully integrated the Developer Preview, Consumer Preview, and Release Preview, into our Managed Desktop Suite (MDS), we’re looking forward to the 15th, so was can finalise our MDS images and deployment task sequences, ready to start deploying to customers as soon as possible. Plenty of our customers have indicated an interest in looking at Windows 8 early on, for specific implementations, if you have something in mind, please get in touch.
Not long now…..
