I am sitting in the 2nd Day keynote and they are talking about Windows 7. I had a chance to see it in action on Sunday. Here are some of the highlights for System Administrators:
- Bit locker Improvements – USB sticks and portable drives can now be bit locked. There are a lot of Group Policy options around this tool as well.
- App Blocker – A more user friendly, easier to use way to enable/disable certain applications from running.
- Application Compatibility Toolkit – A self healing OS. If a program crashes, it does some analytics, the second time it crashed, it figures out what happens and applies a shim. The third time the program will run successfully. A SysAdmin can send a shim out via the network.
- VHD Images – You can mount and boot Windows 7 VHD files using disk manager and boot manager. So if you are testing something, you can mount the other VHD and boot to it, test it, then reboot clearing the changes.
- Projector Settings – Windows+ P will let you go through and change the monitor options. So if you have a projector or second monitor, you can select how that will display.
Something else I saw, but I can’t remember what the program was called but it allows a user to send to help desk staff a report which will follow a user, record the steps they do and detailed information on the system state.
While not System Administrator specific, but the applications within Windows, like WordPad, calculator and paint got a make over.
Once I get the pre-beta install bits, I am going to try and deploy it using MDT and unattended files and show some of the new group policy options. I’ll pass on the lessons learned to my blog so others can avoid the pain I find while blazing new trail. .