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Now as we get started in the course I want to go over a quick history of Windows Server, now if you've been around the Windows operating system for any length of time, you may want to skip this video. This is for those of you who are totally new to the whole Microsoft Server world and so I kind of want to go through this because it can be a little bit intimidating. As you can see here, there have been quite a few versions of this and you will consistently hear or see in documentations referrals back to previous technologies and when they were introduced and they'll throw back to other server products. So I want to go through this with you in this video. First of all, let's talk about when it started. Around about 1993, which seems an incredibly long time ago now when you look back at it, Microsoft introduced Windows NT Advanced Server, and this was a basic network operating system server. In 1994 they enhanced that and they released Windows NT server 3.5. Now, NT at the time was marked as standing for new technology. Now there were rumors out there that Novel had a patent on NT or I'm sorry, Nortel, and they had a patent on NT and so Microsoft dropped the NT name a little later on, now whether that's true or not I don't know, it might be one of those Internet myths. But anyway, Microsoft left NT around the 2000 release. But NT server 3.5 had enhanced speed and it improved connectivity to Novel Netware, now Novel Netware was probably Microsoft's largest competitor in the network operating system market at this time, so provided improved connectivity to Unix, you had to have those two in the marketplace especially then because it was very highly competitive between those three network operating systems. Microsoft actually was kind of the newcomer into the market. Then in 1995 things really begin to catch speed for Microsoft server operating systems. They released NT server 3.51. This included for the first time a client access license tool so you keep up with your client access licenses. And, notice the year there 1995, this also coincided with the release of the Windows 95 Desktop Operating System which was just pivotal in the computing industry for Microsoft because it introduced the first graphical user interface, the really cool one. Now we had NT 3.1 before that but Windows 95 is when it really kicked off, they had the Rolling Stones providing music for the commercials and so forth. In 1996 we saw NT server 4.0 and this is where it really started to grow up. It had the look and feel of Windows 95 for the administrator and the Desktop on the Windows Server product. It had faster file and print services and this is huge, it introduced the Internet Information Server 2.0 Web Server into the Microsoft Server operating system package, so now you had a free web server and as the Internet was growing and becoming more of a force, this was huge. Now later service packs added PKR, public key infrastructure for encryption technologies. It also added smartcard support and clustering for servers, as we started to see the loads on the servers increase. Then in 97, NT Server 4.0 Enterprise came out and this was an enhanced version for large corporate customers, it introduce transaction server, now transaction server was an outgrowth of the Internet influence because now we needed to take multiple actions, group them as one and have them succeed or fail. Message cue server was another one of these things because now our programs couldn't assume that we had constant access. We might be going across a wide area network link, might be going across an Internet technology and it may or may not be connected all of the time, we weren't quite as dependable on our connections back then. Then, around about 1998, the terminal server edition came out and this gave the ability for non Windows clients to connect to the network, and this is huge, it provided a bridge for corporate environments to get everybody on a 32-bit Desktop environment, we had a lot of 16-bit DOS applications out there, and this allowed them to run. And in the year 2000, Microsoft introduced Windows Server 2000, this was a massive, massive upgrade. It introduced the active directory structure for directory management, it introduced active server pages, or ASP, which really exploded onto the Internet and the whole web development world. And it's the first time we saw XML support in Microsoft server products. Now there were versions, this is the first time that Microsoft released distinct versions for a single server product, we had server, advanced server, and data center server. These were priced and licensed according to the size of the market that would use these products. Then in 2003, we saw the release of Windows Server 2003, this is the first time we saw the .NET Framework functionality on the server, Active Directory got enhanced and improved, we saw improvements in the security dependability and scalability. One of the things Microsoft really went hard after in 2003 was to release or to reduce the number of times you had to restart a Windows server and they drastically reduced them from like 80 different reasons down to less than 10 and this was huge. The versions on this one were standard Enterprise data center and the new web edition because again, web Sites had become huge. And the web edition was kind of a stripped down version that was built and really targeted the web hosting world. This is the first time we saw a 64-bit version introduced and it was introduced a few months after the original introduction of Windows Server 2003. And so there you have a history of Windows 2000 Server, whoops, 2008 now and we're going to concentrate in this video on what's new, what's different, and how can you exploit Windows Server 2008 in your environment.