Windows 7 for IT Pros: Make People Productive Anywhere
Access Information from Anywhere
Access Information from Anywhere
Whether traveling for business, taking work home at night, or simply bringing a portable computer to a meeting in the conference room down the hall, mobility is essential to a worker’s computing experience. As a result, more organizations are helping their people work from anywhere. Windows 7 makes it easy for workers to get connected and stay connected, regardless of location or type of network. Windows 7 not only supports the needs of employees, but it also helps you meet those needs securely, reliably, and
More Secure Access and PC Management with DirectAccess
More people are working from places other than the office and accessing corporate network resources securely and maintaining connectivity using remote access solutions, such as VPN, can add complexity and effort. It’s also harder for you to manage those mobile PCs.
DirectAccess is a new feature that helps solve both these issues. Using DirectAccess, workers can easily navigate to intranet sites or internal file shares and access documents from remote locations, without establishing a VPN connection.
Because it’s based on IPv6 technology, DirectAccess also streamlines the management of remote comput- ers. You no longer need to wait for users to return to the office to or connect to VPNs to update PCs. Instead, you can keep these remote computers
DirectAccess also helps improve security by taking advantage of IPsec for authentication and encryption. As an IT administrator you can configure the DirectAccess server to restrict the servers that workers and individual applications can access remotely, and choose whether they require smart cards for authentica- tion. Furthermore, smart card support does not require Windows 7 Domain Functional Mode because it now focuses only on edge enforcement rather than both edge enforcement and local client enforce- ment. (Please note that the option to enforce smart cards for all interactive logons is not available in the DirectAccess wizard. If a smart card is required, an enhanced user notification will help inform the user.) DirectAccess integrates with Network Access Protection (NAP) to perform compliance checking on client computers before allowing them to connect to internal resources.
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