Get Smart, Microsoft!

I’ve been reading, writing, living, and breathing Server 2008 for months now, and if there’s one gargantuan design oversight that has muscled aside all others in my consciousness, it’s the fact that Server Manager doesn’t have the built-in capability to connect to another computer. How Server 2008 was released with this huge omission really baffles me.

Microsoft has taken its trumpet to the hilltop and proudly touted Server Manager as a one-stop shop for administering a Server 2008 environment. And it has many useful characteristics. The distinction between roles (such as DNS) and features (such as BitLocker) makes a lot of sense. The installation wizards that understand role, feature, and role service dependencies are a welcome addition, too, making it less likely that we’ll forget to install some essential piece of our server puzzle.

But the old Computer Management console (compmgmt.msc) always had the handy ability to connect to a different computer by right-clicking the topmost node in the navigation pane. That capability is strikingly absent from Server 2008’s Server Manager console, meaning that you can’t kiss those other, separate MMC consoles goodbye just yet – you’ll still need them to connect to other machines.

As it stands, Server Manager is indeed a one-stop-shop, as long as you only have one server in your organization, or you have one server admin per machine and they never need to manage other servers. For the rest of us, Server Manager may remind us of Maxwell Smart’s famous line from the 1960’s TV series: “Missed it by that much!”.