Answers to Event Questions - R2 Features

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Busy Busy BusyGreetings!

This is the first of many long-overdue, promised blog posts containing answers to questions I’ve received at our TechNet Events.

The first one deals with a general question about Windows Server 2003 R2 …

"What are the features of R2 that are different in Standard vs. Enterprise editions of R2?"

Here's a great feature comparison page that compares all editions of Windows Server.  (Between you and me, I wish they would make these feature comparison pages easier to find for our products.  This one is in an awesome, easy-to-use format.  All of our products need a page like this, and it should be one of the first links you see on the product's home page.  Just my opinion.)

The differences I see on this page - things in 32bit Enterprise R2 that are not in 32bit Standard R2:

  • ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services)
  • ADFS Proxy
  • Microsoft Identity Integration Server 2003 (MIIS) support
  • Volume Shadow Copy Service: transportable hardware snapshots (only partial support in Standard)
  • 8-way symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support
  • 4GB RAM support (Enterprise supports up to 64GB)  …and the story is different for the 64 bit versions of Standard and Enterprise
  • Hot Add Memory
  • Terminal Server Session Directory
  • Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA)

Otherwise, the cool features we covered in our event around Branch Office Management, Identity Management, and Storage Management are available in both Standard and Enterprise editions.

And here’s another question – this time about Print Management…

“Can I set the default printer on workstations after I deploy them using the new R2 Print Management Printer Deployment feature?”

 

No.. this can’t be done using these new R2 Print Manager.  However, a great suggestion is to use scripting and group policy to make this happen.  This comes from Matt Hester’s blog:

One way is to create a script with the following commands to set the printer, there is some good information here: https://www.servernewsgroups.net/group/microsoft.public.windows.server.active_directory/topic2766.aspx   The other way to accomplish is to modify the registry of the system you are working with. Take a look here for the registry locations: https://www.jsifaq.com/SUBB/tip0600/rh0672.htm The great thing about knowing the registry entry is that you can create a custom policy .ADM file to actually accomplish this via group policy. Take a look here on how to create custom .adm files: https://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/technologies/management/gp/admtgp.mspx

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