Mastering Windows Server® 2008 Networking Foundations

Chapter 5. Controlling Windows Server: MMC

How do you get Windows to work the way you want it to work? The answer is to perform configuration tasks — to manage Windows so that it acts the way you expect it to work. Think of management as a kind of training for Windows. Microsoft provides a number of tool types for managing Windows.

The tool that most administrators discover first is the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). MMC is a special kind of application that holds tools, rather than acting as a tool itself. This chapter describes how MMC works and shows you a few examples of working with it to perform useful tasks. You'll find a number of examples of working with MMC throughout the book. In fact, you've already worked with MMC to an extent without even realizing it when you added new users to Windows using the GUI, added or removed roles and features in the previous chapter, and performed other configuration tasks.

Before you start working with MMC, though, you'll want to spend some time configuring your Desktop. The default Desktop is better suited to a user who is using Windows to work with a word processor or to perform other data-specific tasks. Since you're an administrator, you'll want an administrator's Desktop, and this chapter shows you how to create one. An administrator's Desktop is exceptionally efficient, and it shows more information than a Desktop that a user needs. What I'm trying to accomplish in this chapter is to answer these questions:

• How do I make Windows ...