Windows 2008 R2 Impressions

It’s official – I’ve installed a Windows 2008 R2 AD Server in production. I’ve had it running at home for awhile now. I have not had any real data to work with so my experience has been somewhat limited. There are real advantages to having old data/users/groups/email when trying to write some data specific scripts or determine how things “fit”. If anyone knows how to generate this for an AD domain, please let me know.

I’ve posted a few powershell scripts using Quest’s cmdlets – they won’t work with the native R2 cmdlets… I’m going to need to rewrite them and repost, annoying but it will help me getting up to speed and shouldn’t take too long, depending on the amount of uninterrupted time I can spend.

The ‘Active Directory Administrative Center’ is a hit – I haven’t gotten too deep, however I can certainly see some uses and the opportunity to ditch some other tools we are using.

This is one of the screens from the admin center – the Modified date in this case is when I installed the new domain controller, evidently it changed something on all the objects. I can’t show everything but just from this section you can tell there is more data collected in AD than there used to be, which is nice if you need to do a lot of clean up.

The data that I’m looking for is available to me now in the native cmdlets and it’s exposed my only problem is going to be figuring out what I need to do so I can get at it…

Cheers