Some Active Directory Upgrades: GPO Printers / GPO WiFi Profiles

Since we had purchased a 5 pack support package from Microsoft, and we still had some left over calls that we hadn’t used, and the fact that these calls will be expiring on October 13th, I took the liberty to give Microsoft a call to address some non-urgent issues to take advantage of the unused support calls.

Relevant changes to all:

• Probably one of the biggest changes that will affect everyone will be the ability to assign printers to AD OUs from within AD GPOs. Given this has been a bit of a thorn in our side, I’m confident that this will be a big and welcome change.
• Wireless profiles configuration will now be available via GPO as well. This would mean that, if everything works as expected, machines that have a wireless card and are joined to the domain, will automatically get the wireless profile configured on them via GPO.
• Quota management: We will hopefully be able to implement quotas, restrict file types, run usage reports, and file access audits, none of which we were able to do in the past.
• One piece of bad news regarding this, is that we can only implement this kind of quota on a file server actually running Windows 2003 Server R2, as this is a functionality of the Operating System, and not the Schema. Unfortunately, do-fs2 is currently running Windows 2003 Enterprise Server. Most other file servers we’re installing though, do have Windows 2003 Server R2, so we should be able to implement these kinds of quotas on them if needed.

Some Technical Info:

After further discussions with Microsoft, I found out that I will be able to upgrade the Schema to R2 (version 31), before removing all the Windows 2000 domain controllers from the environment. This will still keep us on the Windows 2000 Native Domain Functional Level, but will give us the additional schema attributes required to assign the printers via GPO.

As a matter of fact, I also found out that we are able to even introduce some Windows 2008 R2 servers into the environment, so long as we upgrade the schema to 2008 R2, which is the same process as upgrading to 2003 R2. These would provide quite a bit o added functionality over 2003 R2 even.  the only requirements for this to work are:

- Have one Windows 2003 Server R2 Domain Controller in the environment.

- Have a minimum Domain Functional Level of Windows 2000 Native

both of which, we have.

I am still working full force to remove and/or demote the Domain Controllers running Windows 2000 to facilitate the upgrade of our Active Directory.

Meanwhile, this is just for information purposes. I will be doing some additional reading about the upgrade, and will be performing this in the next couple of days hopefully.