Good article and with versions coming every 3 years, they're close enough that I'm not sure you gain anything from having forklift upgrades of all servers. Kilmanjaro, the next version or partial version is slated for the first half of 2010, which is really only 18 months!

I'm sure some of those features will trickle to Standard, but for now, be sure you read carefully that's not in there. Quite a few cool features are in Enterprise only. However 2008 does seem like a good product and if you use some things, like Full-text, need images (A great white paper from Paul Randal here: ) and want to try PBM, it's worth considering.

I also wouldn't upgrade to 2005 right now. I'd go directly to 2008, and push vendors to certify it ASAP. With the versions coming quicker, I wouldn't be surprised to see the support policy drop to 6 years for mainstream versions.