At the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles this week, the Microsoft Windows Server team apparently provided a peek at the company's product road map - with at least two slides supposedly shown at the conference hinting at the planned product-release cycle of the company.

The slides, which were noted by blogger Stephen Chapman this week, suggest that 2012 is the tentative timeframe that Microsoft has set for a "major release" update, code-named Windows 8, for the Windows Server.

The latest slides are a notable substantiation of earlier rumors - in August too, similar slides were reported, that time in Italian, giving a cue about the timeline of Microsoft's future releases.

Furthermore, the reported 2012 time frame more or less coincides with Windows Server's plans of working on a minor release almost every two years, and a major release after nearly every four years.

Corroborating the strategy whereby Microsoft schedules its desktop and server releases fairly closely, the company released a minor update - Windows Server 2008 R2 - earlier this year; followed by the desktop teams' major release - Windows 7.

However, refusing to divulge any details about the company's product road map, Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky rebuffed the 'rumors' saying that there hasn't been any official mention of the word 'Windows' next to the numeral '8.'