- It has different Password Policies now to different group of users, which a good thing. MS gives it a fancy name PSO instead of continues using GPO.
- AD now has a new mode called Stop Mode, which can be handy at times
- RODC is fit for less-secure branch offices. Pay attention to what are cached, and how password is replicated
- So called AD Snapshots is probably transformed from Mark Russinovich (former Sysinternals). It sounds exciting but it's actual use might be limited in big corporations. It takes long time to make a snapshot and occupies too much space. You must have a dedicated server/storage to take/host the snapshots to make it useful.
- AD change history logging is finally in place.
- On top of Terminal Service, now we have RemoteApp, which makes an app running on server looks like running locally.
- Hyper-V needs hardware support, which I don't have. It is just MS' free offer to compete with VMware.
- Offline VHD manipulation is possible in Windows 2008. This will be useful in some DR/troubleshooting scenarios.
- In Windows Server 2008, Group Policy is treated as its own component with a new Group Policy Service, a stand-alone service that runs under the Svchost process for the purpose of reading and applying Group Policy. The new service includes changes with event reporting. Group Policy event messages, previously appearing in the application log, now appear in the system log. The event viewer lists these new messages with an event source of Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy. The Group Policy Operational log replaces previous userenv logging. The operational event log provides improved event messages specific to Group Policy processing.