Download the original Active Directory Branch Office Deployment Guide

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During the great Windows Server 2003 content purge on TechNet in the summer of 2016 a lot of valuable documentation was lost. Part of it was recovered in the infamously huge PDF download with 2003 support content, and other content was ported to the new documentation site on /, but the rest was just gone. However, us AD people are still missing a historic and still relevant piece of documentation: the AD Branch Office Deployment Guide, originally written for Windows 2000 and later updated for Windows Server 2003. This document outlines the design of an AD with one or more central locations, and lots of outlying branch offices. The DNS configuration described in this removed document was (and is) very relevant.

Guess what? I saved the original download and have it right here on my laptop. Because we (PFE and Support Engineers) still get questions about it, I decided to put it back up again as an informal blog resource. The original download was a .EXE, which was the modern thing to do at the time. It contains two other .EXE files, again doing nothing else but extracting stuff. However, a .EXE is not allowed on WordPress, so I had to repackage it as a .ZIP. Enjoy:

  • Download the AD Branch Office Deployment Guide for Windows Server 2003 (MD5: 2B33F92B00D8094D27B4A3542BBBFB5C): adbodg03.