Friday, October 7, 2016
Windows 8 how it can make a sysadmins life easier
Windows 8 how it can make a sysadmins life easier
There are plenty of nay-sayers who dismiss the idea of Windows 8 in the enterprise but there are many advantages to its adoption
There are plenty of commentators out there who tell you that business users have no real reason to move up to Windows 8.
The big issue is the nature of identity. If you’re one of trendsetters with your new Surface RTs & Pros and you went to use your windows tablet at work then you may well have found that joining the tablet to a domain, cuts off access to the Live world and the App Store.
This isn’t as catastrophic as it may initially appear: you can re-enable Live sync services by going to PC Settings > Users while logged in to the domain. It’s easy enough to do, there are screens which talk you through which parts will be synced and indeed, which identity will show to the outside world.
All of this could be a nightmare for the Systems Admin guys but, fortunately, the features for admins in Server 2012 are well up to the job of controlling the potential information leaks that could arise when a big-time Windows Live aficionado with a massive following suddenly links his Documents and Pictures folders up to (say) a hospital’s image bank server.
The key to understanding this control in Server 2012 is the massive expansion in Group Policies. This is not about having just five or 10 little keys hidden away in a subfolder; users can be blocked from cross-linking external IDs to internal domain accounts altogether.
Individual Azure-aware apps can be authenticated to connect on a case-by-case basis, of course, including the updated Windows Essentials 2012 add-on pack (as an aside, if you are messing about with the standard in-box apps for cloud sync, then stop and get the essentials pack without further delay - it’s a must-have download).
The relevant component is Remote Desktop Services. This has expanded so much under Server 2012 that it’s barely recognisable. It used to be the case that many people using a single server as a shared desktop would be at the mercy of tight spots in the whole compatibility and performance continuum - your favourite app had to be well behaved at a memory-map level, and abstemious with network traffic so that your user session updates didn’t get hit too hard. Whole websites grew up on tweaking and tuning this kind of deployment.
But is there something to be said for bringing Windows 8 into the enterprise?This is hardly surprising; companies are loath to look to change the operating system at the heart of their company network. But is there something to be said for bringing Windows 8 into the enterprise? What actual features really jump out as must-haves?
This isn’t as catastrophic as it may initially appear: you can re-enable Live sync services by going to PC Settings > Users while logged in to the domain. It’s easy enough to do, there are screens which talk you through which parts will be synced and indeed, which identity will show to the outside world.
All of this could be a nightmare for the Systems Admin guys but, fortunately, the features for admins in Server 2012 are well up to the job of controlling the potential information leaks that could arise when a big-time Windows Live aficionado with a massive following suddenly links his Documents and Pictures folders up to (say) a hospital’s image bank server.
The key to understanding this control in Server 2012 is the massive expansion in Group Policies. This is not about having just five or 10 little keys hidden away in a subfolder; users can be blocked from cross-linking external IDs to internal domain accounts altogether.
Individual Azure-aware apps can be authenticated to connect on a case-by-case basis, of course, including the updated Windows Essentials 2012 add-on pack (as an aside, if you are messing about with the standard in-box apps for cloud sync, then stop and get the essentials pack without further delay - it’s a must-have download).
you can treat any tablet as a usable part of your company IT resourceI’m a Windows Network Administrator, though, so it’s the new server-side stuff that really interests me. After all, with the right work put in to the server farm, you can treat any tablet as a usable part of your company IT resource, whether it’s running Windows 8 or some other operating system.
Available link for download
