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NEW to 2003

Tech areas unique to 2003 are tested more heavily. Even though 4+ years old and all that is truely supported and that most anybody is using are called "new." This partly due to IT people ungrading their certs and partly marketing (product differenciation, customer driven improvments, compitision driven improvments, we told you the old stuff was great - but actually it sucked and this new stuff is great, etc.)

NOTE: SOME OF THESE FEATURES DEPEND ON DOMAIN AND FOREST FUNCTIONS LEVELS - SEE HERE

2003 DCPROMO adds the install or replication from media option, dcpromo /adv ?

2003 DCs have the new optional Universal Group Caching option available

Application Directory Partitions are a new 2003 AD feature - http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/proddocs/entserver/sag_understanding_apppartitions.asp

Cross forest trust - ???

Software restriction policies - ???

LastLogonTimestamp added - basically this is a replication of the last logon time through AD - this value prior to this was avial only on the single DCs logged onto

inetOrgPerson

• new feature to ease compatibility with other LDAP based directory services
• interOrgPerson conversion to and from user class

NETDOM.EXE DC rename - a non-trivial feature to implement

Replication mechanism improved to replicate only changes to group membership instead of the whole group again when changes are made to group membership

InterSite Topology Generator (ISTG) upgraded - this was done at the request of larger companies where the ISTG calculate would not finish before the next one started, resulting in the topology calculation never completing

Domain renaming

• non-trivial
• Q: Is domain rename possible in a forest with Exchange present?
  A: Yes - with Exchange 2003 SP1+ Also there is a "domain fix-up" tool too...

Upgrades to schema attribute and class mechanisms

new dynamic attribute class link to object feature

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