Windows 2003 Insights

Insights on Windows 2003 Week one

Donald R. Guillot

POS 427

Mary Travis

Monday, January 30, 2006

Introduction

This Paper will discuss insights that I have gained while reading and examining week one material in POS-427, Windows Networking. This week mainly focused on the contrast between windows 2003 versus windows XP and Windows 2000. There have been a large number of improvements made in the operating system, especially in the area of out of the box security.

Insights

Windows 2003 is as easy to install as windows 2000 and windows XP. Microsoft has kept its same framework for the operating system, making knowledgebase gained a forward progressive cycle. Installing windows 2003 is easy to install based on the GUI installation model that we have all become accustomed to, and so fond (Wright, 2004, p. 1-3).

Two goals the Windows 2003 tries to accomplish is based on making sure files and other attached resources are highly available. High availability is the fact that services are accessible at all times regardless of the situation. Security again as I mentioned above is another focus when looking at windows 2003 (Dinicolo, 2004, p. 1-3). Extended directory service is another feature that I was not aware of, that exist in windows 2003. There is actually the ability to take advantage of other third party directory systems while maintaining the active directory services as primary for the windows network (Dinicolo, 2004, p. 9). There has been the continual push by Microsoft to separate the enterprise platform into functional units for the everyday business need, for example, the Windows 2003 server standard edition do not support the higher class processors such as the Itanium. The reason for this is because most companies that would purchase this version would not need the processing ability of this processor, so no need to include support it if not used. On the other hand the Enterprise and Datacenter editions do support this class of processors (Dinicolo, 2004, p. 10).

Conclusion

It is fairly obvious that Microsoft has positioned its server operating systems to meet a broad range of environments.