Best Windows OS To-Date

The first server version of Microsoft Windows which I used was NT Server 4, which was great but had some bugs. The we made the move to Windows 2000 Server, same story. We finally made the move to Windows 2003 Enterprise Server. Prior to installing we had worried that we would loose some functionality. This was not the case. The install went through without a hitch. Since we were using this as mainly a web server we went through that install as well, so easy any beginner IT could do it. IIS 6.0 is the best thing Microsoft has put out. Everything that you can think of is configurable. From the amount of concurrent users to bandwidth limiting. Directory security is outstanding. The Certificate Management is a bit of a pain to use. We had some issues with certain external hard drives not working correctly, we later fixed this problem but was a little frustrating. We have yet to try to get load balancing to work, our next step.

Other reviews mention the security is almost too much for someone to deal with. In a way this is a good thing. Why sacrifice security when this is the driving force behind your website or network. If anything you want it to be over secure. This is not meant for your weekend warrior IT guy. This OS was designed to be used by large companies with high demands. It's meant for high security applications.

Other reviews have mentioned that there are things that seem to not be needed, such as the Shutdown Event Tracker. They don't seem to fully understand why it is there: to provide an audit trail for the Administrator. This is to allow them to see who shut the server down, why they did it, and when it occurred. This setting can be turned off very easily.

The one thing that has had a huge influence on the purchase of Windows 2003 Enterprise Server is Terminal Services. Terminal Services allows more than one user to be logged into the server at once via Remote Desktop. In our case, this allows our developers to work off site as if they were actually sitting at the server itself. In previous version we were unable to achieve this save telnet sessions which were cumbersome to say the least.

Overall Windows 2003 Enterprise Server is the best piece of software that Microsoft has put out to-date.