How not to do it – the Microsoft way

Does Microsoft (or any technology company for that matter) really understand the concept of being business user-friendly?  Leaving aside the abomination otherwise known as Office 2007, which replaced a perfectly workable toolbar with a ribbon interface that seems to actively hide the most useful components, there’s a lot of stuff going on under the hood of any self-respecting PC and/or network that requires fixing in the default setup of Windows.

The latest example of the annoyances in this regard comes in the form of the default behaviour of Server 2008 with regard to remote sessions.  Who on earth thought it was a good idea to restrict user logins to a single session?  It’s become a joke now when I or my fellow conspirators throw one another off the administrative sessions we have so lovingly crafted just because the system thinks ‘one user, one login’.  Actually, what’s really annoying is that this is controlled by a group policy setting that I can never recall – it’s now firmly entrenched in the ‘IT problems and gotchas’ of our company SharePoint site, and needs to go into a build document.  But I still wonder why we should have to do this, when the old Server 2003 way worked perfectly well out of the box.

Another  default setting that annoys is the prejudice against NAT.  I’m tired of going through the registry edit and reboot required to get PPTP or l2TP working via a standard router to the Internet.  For bonus annoyance points, MS decided to change the required registry values between XP/2003 and Vista/2008.

The final target of ire this evening is the Windows Firewall.  All very nice in theory, but deplorable in practice.  We set up all these nice client PCs, get back to base – and find we can’t access them remotely.  Group policy to the rescue again, and disable that service.

I seem to spend half my time switching off, cancelling or simply bypassing roadblocks put in the way of simple, successful system management.  By all means create a ‘home user’ build for Windows, but please can we have a ‘business edition’ without all the unnecessary hindrances?