What's so remarkable about the reliability and availability of InDIMENSIONS's Web sites is that nobody remarks about those subjects anymore.

The music-industry clients of InDIMENSIONS, a Toronto-based business development company, "are focused on their brand's image both online and offline," says Colin Bowern, executive vice president for technology. "When you have an artist's management call you up and ask you why their site is down, it's pretty embarrassing."

After enduring intermittent Web server outages and generally unstable performance with a succession of Linux-based hosting providers in recent years, InDIMENSIONS last fall switched to a hosting partner with a platform built on the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 operating system and other Microsoft technologies. Since then, "Web-site uptime has been a complete non-issue for our clients," Bowern says.

That's sweet music not only to InDIMENSIONS, but also to Mario Garzia and his colleagues on the Microsoft Windows Reliability Team. The team is responsible for ensuring high reliability across the Windows operating system as well as assisting various Microsoft product development teams in making their technologies more reliable.

For IT professionals, computing systems are considered reliable when they are predictable, require minimal maintenance and are continuously available -- essentially, run with minimal interruptions so users can access the resources they need in a timely manner. The team's work on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 has helped the operating system earn praise from companies like InDIMENSIONS for its high reliability, stable performance and virtually uninterrupted availability.