- Remote Management
- Terminal Services
- Performance and Disk and File Management
- Printer Support and Internet Services
- SharePoint Team Services and Multimedia Support
- Application Support and Internationalization Features
Application Support
Using applications that were not natively written for a particular operating system has been a problem for all versions of Windows. The .NET Server family, along with Windows XP, has helped to resolve these issues.
Compatibility Mode
Many applications that are created by programmers are developed for a particular operating system: Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT 4.0, or Windows 2000. Some of those applications work on any platform; others will not. Compatibility Mode was introduced with Windows XP, and is also included in Windows .NET Servers. This allows the user to choose the environment that the application will run in. This allows more applications to work like they were originally created. There is a Program Compatibility Wizard that will detect and test your compatibility settings.
Internationalization Features
The capability for the Windows operating system to work with multiple languages is something that Microsoft has been developing over the years. The .NET Server family improves the support for more languages than Windows has supported in previous versions.
Improved Input Method Editors (IME)
The IMEs have been improved for three different languages. The Japanese IME now has the capability to save user-defined words and conversion rules to a user dictionary. This dictionary was read only in Windows 2000. A user is able to input alphabetical keyboard characters, and the IME will convert them to Japanese characters and then send them to the application. The Korean IME map input keyboard characters to Korean Jamo and then converts them to Korean syllables. It also supports handwriting input for Hangul and Hanja. The Chinese IME now has a larger lexicon of approximately 100,000 words and phrases. The IME has improved rules and a language model that improves accuracy and performance. The traditional Chinese IME also has a newly designed Phonetic IME based on Chinese keyboard input technology.
Summary
Even though the Windows .NET Server family is considered a "point" release of Windows 2000, it is a "must" upgrade for many network administrators. The two articles in this series touched on the major changes that are currently being implemented into the .NET Server family.
Many of the reasons why network administrators have waited to upgrade their Windows NT 4.0 networks have been resolved with the Windows .NET Server family. .NET Server will be classified as a true enterprise network operating system, and the .NET Server family will work for the small stable network up to the ever-changing huge corporations that like to buy and sell parts of their business.