Whats Between the Sheets

What’s Between the Sheets

I guess I should have said “what’s between the covers,” but sheets are pages, right? Lame attempt at humor there, but I guess you want to know what I’m going to be covering in this book. Well, I could start talking about the “three pillars of Windows Server 2008,” which are (Warning! The Marketing Police insist on Init Caps here!) More Control, Increased Protection, and Greater Flexibility. But if I started talking like that you’d probably clap your hands tightly over your ears and start shouting, “Augh! Marketing fluff! Shut it off! Shut it off!!” and run away screaming madly to the server room.

I know that’s not being fair to those who work in marketing (poor souls), but we all need to pick on somebody sometimes, don’t we? And since you are an IT pro (the target audience of this book), what you want is technical “meat,” not marketing “fluff”-and that’s exactly what we (myself together with the product team at Microsoft) have tried to bring you. So instead of talking about “pillars,” we’re going to focus on “features” and “enhancements” (changes to features found on previous Windows Server platforms) so that you can derive the utmost benefit from reading this book.

Windows Server 2008 has a lot of new features and a ton of enhancements to existing ones. Unfortunately, in a book this size (there’s no point writing a 1500-page book about pre-release software) this means some features have to get more prominence than others. So some features and enhancements have their own separate chapters, while others get unceremoniously lumped together for coverage. Don’t read more into this than is intended, however, as some features simply interest me more than others and some are closer to being finished at the time of writing this than others. Features closer to being finished generally have more internal documentation (the raw source material for much of this book) available and that documentation is usually in near-finished condition.

Anyway, for personal reasons or otherwise, the following new features and enhancements have been chosen by me (and me alone) to be showcased within their own separate chapters:

• The Windows server core installation option of Windows Server 2008

• New and improved server management tools

• Identity and Access (IDA) enhancements to Active Directory

• Clustering enhancements

• Terminal Services enhancements

• Network Access Protection (NAP)

• Internet Information Services 7.0

• Deployment tools

These features all got their own chapters, while most everything else has been lumped together into Chapter 12, “Other Features and Enhancements”-not because they’re any less important, but simply for reasons of my personal interest in things, limited time and resources, and convenience.

I’ll also talk briefly in Chapter 2, “Usage Scenarios” about why you will (the Marketing Police insisted on my using italics there) want to deploy Windows Server 2008 in your enterprise. Thus, Chapter 2 will briefly talk about various scenarios where the new features and enhancements found in Windows Server 2008 can bring your enterprise tangible benefits. So there’s a bit of marketing content in that chapter, but it’s important for reasons of planning and design. Otherwise, the rest of the book is pure geek stuff.