Confessions of an IT Geek

What's new in Windows Server 2008 Active Directory

Recently I had the opportunity to present to the North Texas PC Users Group on the topic of what is new in Windows Server 2008 Active Directory. I am posting the presentation here. Note that there a few slides that have changed primarily due to the fact that I am not posting the videos due to the size and I also removed some of the diagrams that I pulled from my book due to the copyrights issues. Enjoy.

Active Directory for Dummies 2nd Edition

I am very proud to say that my second book was published this week. Active Directory for Dummies 2nd Edition is a completely updated version of the book from 2000 that now covers Active Directory in Windows Server 2008.  The book should be shortly available from the online vendors and then in the bookstores around the 2nd week of August. My hope is (other the book making a lot of sales) is that this book will prove to be a useful source of information for anyone that wants to learn about Active Directory either from scratch or is needing an update on what is new in AD 2008.

As I stated in the book, my intention is to continue to maintain this blog as a continuing aggregate source of information on Active Directory (as well as other topics). If you have purchased the book and wish to make comments and suggestions for future updates (I already have a list I have created<g>) please comment to this post and let me know.

New Version of ADMT is out

Microsoft has released the latest version of the Active Directory Migration Tool (v3.1). ADMT is a decent tool for doing both migration and AD restructures when your environment isn't too complicated. Here is a link to a document that discusses how to use this tool in these scenarios. Also if you are interested in migration of passwords between forests there is a Password Export Server that is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. This tool work in conjunction with ADMT.

While free tools are great, they do have their limitations. For more complicated migrations, my personal preference for AD (and Exchange) migration tools is the Quest migration tools.

New Active Directory KB articles

Here is a link to the AD team blog that lists the most recent MS knowledge base articles related to AD. Some good stuff in here including the remote server admin tools for AD and Hyper-v for Vista SP1.

Group Policy Best Practices Analyzer

Over the last couple of years Microsoft has begun creating Best Practices Analyzers. The first one I  believe was released as a non-supported tool for Exchange Server 2003 as what seemed to be at the time almost a whim. Fortunately people saw very quickly how important a tool like this (especially a free tool) could be. So much so that now the Exchange BPA is a part of the product.

Microsoft has just released a Group Policy BPA tool to analyze your GPO environment and individual GP to make sure that you have stable environment that will reliabily enforce policies on your users and computers connected to Active Directory. There are four versions on the tool depending on what platform you wish to run the tool on.