June was our Forums night and it turned out to be a big success! This month we had three speakers and I was actually pretty good this time at keeping them on time so everyone got to present and take questions.
Paul Nijjar gave us an introduction on how to use LDAP to authenticate to AD. Fred Gregory talked about Windows Small Business Server 2011, gave us a comparison of the different versions in 2011 and some strategies around the licenses and how to determine the best options for your clients. Rounding out the night was Cal McLennan who told us all about Windows Multi-point server and how it isn’t for just the education market anymore. Cal gave us some practical examples where it could be used in business call centers and some other applications
Here are some notes that I took from the presentations.
Authenticating against AD:
Authenticating against AD with third party tools
Overview of how to use LDAP to search for things
Thing of AD as a hierarchical folder structure
Need to use a user account that has read access to AD
Some examples of applications that can use ldap are Apache and custom trouble ticket systems using pearl
Small Business Server 2011:
Two new versions: Essentials and Standard.
Premium add-on is separate that can be added on to Essentials or Standard
Gave a breakdown of what is included in each version
Talked about how backup works between the versions (They are different)
Windows Multi-point Server:
Educational market is where it originated from
One host computer with networked peripheral devices
Up to 20 users
Each user is basically a terminal service session
You can use a management interface to manage multiple multi-point server
You can send messages to users or even block their access to a session
A good applications for this is in a call center environment
Terry Edwards
President WWITPRO
terry @ wwitpro.com