What’s New in Windows Server 2012 R2 – End-to-End Scenarios Across Products

Although People-centric IT capabilities are great on Windows devices, these capabilities are not limited to Windows devices. We also put a lot of work into enabling first class support for heterogeneous devices in our People Centric IT capabilities. Putting users at the center of what we do includes enabling a broad set of devices. Active Directory is a core service enabling this and other scenarios.

This week, Microsoft VP Brad Anderson examines a few examples of holistic end-to-end customer scenarios that are a result of our cross-company collaboration in blog post “What’s New in 2012 R2: People Centric IT In Action – End-to-End Scenarios Across Products”.  Specifically, he looks at:

1. Providing users with secure access to their files on their personal devices.
2. Enabling users to provision their iOS devices for work while allowing IT Pros to restrict access to corporate resources.
3. Enabling IT Pros to deliver VPN functionality to corporate and personal devices.  This includes both Microsoft and 3rd party VPNs, clients, and gateways – and it also covers upcoming support for this on Windows RT.

Each of these three examples combine and maximize capabilities from across Windows, Windows Server, System Center and Windows Intune.

This is a relatively long and technical blog post with a lot of example screen shots.  Stick with it, there is a lot of information in the article.  For those of you that haven’t downloaded the R2 Preview wave of products, this will be a good way to get somewhat acclimated to the new techniques and new device support.

And for those of you interested in downloading some of the products and trying them, here are some resources to help you:

• Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview download
• System Center 2012 R2 Preview download
• SQL Server 2014 Community Technology Preview 1 (CTP1) download

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