Essentially an update to the Service Pack 1 release, Release 2’s major enhancement is aimed at managing servers for branch offices.
A Microsoft-commissioned survey revealed that 75% of small-midsize business in the US maintain branch offices. Given that most SMBs lack sophisticated IT expertise, Release 2 improves distributed file sharing and data replication capabilities.
Release 2 also offers simplifies managing storage area networks (SANs), and provides 30 new templates for deploying self-service web applications covering document collaboration, information sharing, and team productivity. Finally, Release 2 adds the latest 2005 version of Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) Workgroup Edition.
Additionally, Microsoft is releasing new services packs covering Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2004 and Storage Server 2003 that support several of the upgrades in the latest Windows Server.
The new ISA Server 2004 SP2 adds more policy-based protection features for branch offices, and includes communications tweaks such as caching, HTTP compression, and traffic prioritization.
In turn, Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 adds new SAN and File Server resource management facilities.
