hey-hey - I am harry brelsford, ceo of SMB Nation and the
author of Windows Small Business Server 2003 Best Practices. Each
day, I am posting up heaps of my infamous purple book until SBS
2008 ships!
Today we discuss the advanced management console (MMC-based)
in SBS 2003!
cheers….harrybbbb
Harry Brelsford, CEO SMB Nation, www.smbnation.com
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Advanced Management
It is under Advanced Management that
the “native tools” you need to interact with SBS 2003
are exposed. For those of you who worked with SBS in the 4.x era,
you’ll recall that it was more difficult to utilize the
native tools (and some native tools even crippled SBS 4.x!).
That, of course, changed in the last two SBS releases, wherein
native tools are placed front and center for your benefit. The
components of Advanced Management, as listed on the left panel of
Figure 4-2, are described below.
Figure 4-2
The focus in this figure is the Advanced Management
components.
•
Active
Directory Users and Computers. Ah, every MCSE certification
candidate has likely committed to memory this tool that is the
primary interface for managing objects in Active Directory such
as users and groups.
BEST
PRACTICE: A hands-on lab instructor for whom I have the utmost
respect has an interesting take on Active Directory Users and
Computers. He believes that it is the primary approach to
managing the messaging function on a server computer with
Exchange Server 2003 installed. What? I’ll explain this
more in Chapter 6, but take a moment to look at the
Exchange-related tabs that appear when you view a user object in
Active Directory Users and Computers when you’ve selected
Advanced Features under the View menu. You’ll see four
Exchange-related tabs. Then ask yourself where you do most of
your Exchange-related management on a day-to-day basis. I do
believe you’ll agree that you do it here, pardner!
•
; Group Policy Management. Remember that paradigm
d’etre we discussed earlier about support for client
computer configuration? Yep! That is again manifested by the
Group Policy Management page.
•
; Computer Management (Local). Lots of great reasons to get
to know this object, including the ability to manage your hard
disks and start and stop services. I’ll explore this tool
more in Chapter 11.
•
; First Organization (Exchange)/SPRINGERSLTD (Exchange).
This is System Manager in Exchange Server 2003, where I
can’t deny many Exchange-related tasks are performed.
Let’s hold off further discussion until Chapter 6.
•
; POP3 Connector Manager. Hail to Charlie, a senior member
of the SBS development team who owns the POP3 Connector Manager
in SBS 2003. This allows you to download e-mails from POP3
servers (typically located at your ISP). This is discuss more in
Chapter 6.
•
; Terminal Services Configuration. This tool could be used
to modify the default Terminal Services configuration in SBS 2003
(which is in Remote Administration Mode). I’ll discuss
Terminal Services more in Chapter 11.
Visit www.microsoft.com/technet for
the latest updates for any Microsoft product.
•
; Internet Information Services. Yes - Internet Information
Services (IIS) is alive and well in SBS 2003 and the focus in
Chapter 10, so I’ll wait until then to dive into the
details.
•
; Migrate Server Settings. This page brings together all
the cool settings you can migrate between SBS 2003 servers. This
would, of course, benefit an SBM/SBS consultant who has perfect
settings that he wants to easily share with customers. More on
these settings in Chapter 11 and 12.
BEST PRACTICE: For a real good time,
look at the menu shortcuts in the Server Management console.
Click Favorites from the upper toolbar and look at the Standard
Management and Advanced Management menu items. You might be
surprised by what you see, such as the Sessions and Open Files
items.
BEST PRACTICE: Don’t forget that the Server
Management console in SBS 2003 is based on Microsoft Management
Console (MMC)
2.0 and that customization is
possible. How? Simply place the Server Management console in
Author mode and add a snap-in, such as the SQL Server Enterprise
Manager. The location of the Server Manager console on which you
would want to perform your modifications is:
&#xSy;stem Drive%\Program
Files\Microsoft Windows Small Business
Server\Administration\itprosbsconsole.msc
You would right-click the above file
and select Author from the secondary menu to make your edits.
By the way, a little SBS culture here. Really, really
early looks of SBS 2003 had the console being based on SharePoint
technologies (e.g., Windows SharePoint Services). But in the
final product, it’s all MMC 2.0, baby!
