Unicode Explained

Overview

Let every hour be in place Firm fixed, nor loosely shift, And well enjoy the vacant space, As though a birthday gift.

--Lewis Carroll Punctuality

In today's competitive business environment, the distributed office model is quickly replacing the traditional model of the corporate network. And, in today's distributed office, all users and co-workers, regardless of where they are working, require a reliable computing environment, which, generally, comprises the following factors:

To meet these rather stringent requirements, system and network administrators must work hard. If you are an administrator, you know only too well what I mean. You're personally responsible for all security incidents, hardware malfunctions, software failures, or cases of data loss that might happen. Therefore, you are the person who stays late to ensure that the backup job has been completed successfully, sometimes you have to work weekends setting up or troubleshooting servers, and you are the earliest to come to work and the last to go home. You're the person who supports and educates end users, maintains software installations running from machine to machine, travels to remote offices (sometimes only to reboot the server), and so on. If something goes wrong, you are the first to blame. Of course, all above-described horrors are mainly seen in weak administrative settings. They mainly are due to poor planning and even worse implementation of change and configuration management features.

With the introduction of the system registry, Microsoft has addressed the administrative need for efficient management of the user's work environment, which includes various desktop settings, such as color scheme, mouse settings, size and position of the windows, network connections and printers, environment variables, registry settings, available applications, etc. Even the earliest versions of Windows NT provided the following conventional methods for managing user work environments:

Starting with Windows 2000, Microsoft has implemented a whole range of new technologies called IntelliMirror (as a part of the Zero Administration Initiative), which in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 was further improved and enhanced. When these new features are properly implemented, many of the administrative nightmares can be significantly reduced. Newer technologies simplify the process of network administration and improve its efficiency. This set of functions allows system administrators and users to create mirror copies of the user profile data stored on the server, thus protecting critically important user data stored in the local system. The main idea of IntelliMirror technologies is that all information on the user profile and the software installed by the user is stored on the server in a personal cache. Using IntelliMirror, the system administrator may install and support application software on the user workstations without interrupting their everyday work. Because the server always has a mirror of the user's working environment, the administrator can quickly replace the user workstation and restore the working environment, including data, installed software, and the administrative policy.

Having spent some time on studying and then carefully planning and implementing these built-in features of Windows Server 2003 will allow you to achieve the following goals:

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