Business Data Communications and Networking

Appendix F. WINDOWS SERVER

Windows server is one of the most popular operating systems for servers. The server operating system enables you to share resources such as files, applications, and printers with other computers. In this section, we will explain how to set up Windows Server to share files.

MANAGING USER ACCOUNTS

Every user who wants to use the server must have an account that specifies what they can and cannot access. There are two types of accounts. A local account is an account that is managed on just one computer. A domain account is an account that is managed by Active Directory and can provide access rights to many different computers through a single login. For this activity, we will assume you are working with local accounts, although the processes for managing domain accounts is almost identical to the process for managing local accounts.

The administrator account is the account that controls the server. The administrator has the rights to add users, change their rights, and control who can do what on the server. In order to manage user accounts, you must login as the administrator. We will assume that you have already logged in as the administrator for the rest of this activity.

Each user account belongs to a group. For example, we might create groups by function with one group for sales, one group for accounting, one for production, and so on. We might also create groups by region so that we have one group for Los Angeles, one group for Toronto, one group for New ...