Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

Implementing Surface Area Configuration Checks

SQL Server 2005 shipped with the SQL Server Surface Area Configuration (SAC) tool. This tool allowed you to enable or disable various components and services on individual SQL 2005 Servers. This feature was deprecated in SQL Server 2008 and later because the Microsoft team felt that the better way to handle these configuration tasks was through Policy-Based Management.

If you want to implement the Surface Area Configuration feature in SQL Server 2012 to configure components and services, import the following policies:

Surface Area Configuration for Database Engine 2005 and 2000 Features.xml

Surface ...