Microsoft has finally confirmed a 30 November launch date for Windows Vista for volume customers, as a new National Computing Centre (NCC) survey suggested the desktop operating system will be deployed at a third of UK firms by the end of 2008.

Microsoft will use its New Day for Business event in New York to launch Vista and Office 2007, and update progress on Exchange 2007.

According to the 200 firms surveyed for the NCC Benchmark of IT Spending 2006 , more than a third expected to have some Vista systems in place within two years, resulting in it being on 12 percent of corporate desktops by 2008. This is despite advice from analyst Gartner to hold off enterprise deployments of the new OS until 2008.

David Bradshaw of analyst Ovum agreed that mainstream adoption would be well under way by 2008. “Most firms will have year-long trials and wait to see when the first service pack is scheduled for,” he added.

Those advising caution over upgrades were given further ammunition last week, however, after Microsoft revealed that Vista and Longhorn will only support the upcoming SQL Server 2005 SP2, due out as a Community Technology Preview “sometime soon”. Current versions of the database, including SQL Server 2005 SP1, will not be compatible.

While Vista clients will still be able to use standard drivers to access databases running on a server, developers wanting to run SQL Server locally on a Vista workstation will have to wait for the new version.