Microsoft loves to name its technologies with the prefixes “direct” and “active.” Remember Direct3D? DirectSound? “Active” comes before “directory” and “server pages” among other terms. And then, on certain rare occasions, we have terms that are both “direct” AND “active,” such as DirectX and ActiveX.
This rumination follows my downloading a hilarious Word document titled “Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 DirectAccess Executive Overview,” in which the title represents 90% of the document’s content. Seriously: page 1 is the title page, page 2 is the copyright-and-legalese page, page 3 is roughly a half-page of text, and page 4 is roughly a half-page graphic. Clearly, to learn about this new buzzword, I need something a bit more meaty than the Executive Overview.
What the overview does suggest, however, is interesting. It seems to go beyond Server 2008’s ability to let remote users bypass the step of making a VPN connection when connecting to a corporate network (a feat accomplished using RDP over HTTPS, implemented in Terminal Services Gateway). DirectAccess claims to permit secure corporate access from the cloud even if the remote user isn’t logged on… and it claims to allow Group Policy-based software distribution to remote users, again without those users being logged on.
So, stay tuned. This feature could be pretty cool. And the name might even make sense!
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