Thumbs-up, thumbs-down: Windows Server 2008 R2 Active Directory
Four new promised features got my special attention. Did they live up to my hopes?
Follow @JPBruzzeseI recently completed a book on Windows Server 2008 where I highlight at the end of each chapter the features coming in Release 2. I was especially curious about four Active Directory features, so after installing the latest release candidate of Windows Server 2008 R2, I focused immediately on the promised Active Directory enhancements. It's one thing to read about a new feature but quite another to see it for yourself and judge the results.
The four R2 features that got me excited were Active Directory Recycle Bin, Best Practices Analyzer, Administrative Center, and Module for PowerShell for Windows. After spending some time with each, here are my thumbs-up/thumbs-down assessments of each.
[ Read J. Peter Bruzzese's blog entry "Why all your PCs should have PowerShell v2 remoting" | Learn more about Windows Server 2008 R2 in his "Win Server 2008 R2 polishes up an already sleek server OS" ]
Active Directory Recycle Bin
Have you ever accidentally deleted an object (like a user or entire OU) and had to restore it? Now you can retrieve those items from a Recycle Bin, back to its state just before deletion, rather than restoring an object from the last system state backup.
My judgment: First off, what a nightmare! You have to enable the feature first in the LDP tool or in PowerShell (the Active Directory module must be imported). Once that is done, you would think that now you would see something in the GUI (such as in Users and Computers, the new Administrative Center) but you don't. So I did a test deletion of a user to figure out how to get stuff out of the Recycle Bin. I had to use the following command to get the user back:
Get-ADObject-Filter {String} -IncludeDeletedObjects | Restore-ADObject
Did it work? Yes. Is that awesome? Yes! Is it simple, graphical, and fun? No! If you have just deleted an organizational unit (OU) filled with very important objects, you are probably going ballistic. You don't want to have to go nuts trying to figure out all the commands.
The verdict: Thumbs sideways. Thumbs-up for the feature, but thumbs-down for its implementation. I'm not against command-line interfaces, but this feature deseves a GUI front end.
