Now that Windows 7 is here, you have some decisions to take. Microsoft has many options to select from and it can get a little tricky trying to shows out which version of Windows 7 you should select. Windows 7, look at new desktops and laptops available from Best Buy or Dell you can see that there are some default selections made for you depending on the class of the system. Consumer systems come with Windows Home Premium, and business systems with Windows 7 Professional. Large businesses comes into a whole different category with both Microsoft and vendors like Dell, and those systems would come with Windows 7 Enterprise by default. So, if you are a small or medium business, Windows 7 Professional is the perfect edition of Windows 7 for you. Windows 7 Professional does have some features that businesses want that you can't find in Windows Home Premium. It support for more system memory and dual physical CPU's, the facility to join a Windows domain, file encryption with EFS, the ability to use Windows XP-mode virtualization, and software policy limitations. However, it is also missing some important facilities that small and medium businesses can take profit from. Windows 7 Professional gives some data encryption with EFS, but it doesn't have the facility to protect the entire hard drive with encryption. Windows 7 Ultimate and Windows 7 Enterprise have BitLocker drive encryption which encrypts all data on the entire drive. Roaming employees often carry gigabytes of important information on their laptops which can be easily lost or stolen. BitLocker provides secure protection to ensure that unauthorized users are not able to use that data. BitLocker-to-Go provides similar data encryption for USB thumb drives and other portable data storage that are also easily stolen. Employees that work from home, or linked with the company network while traveling are used to the concept of the VPN (Virtual Private Network). The VPN serves its goal for building a secure link between the remote computer and the internal company network across the Internet, but it is far from a perfect solution. Users have to go through extra steps to link to the VPN, which is prone to disconnecting. The remote systems and roaming laptops only exist to the internal network when they're linked. That means they only get software and policy updates when they are linked, which makes it difficult for IT administrators to protect and organize them. DirectAccess takes the place of the VPN connection and gives unlimited secure connection between the internal network and the remote systems as long as they have an Internet connection. Users can access resources, and administrators can organize the systems as if they are linked directly to the internal network. There are more features that are present in Windows 7 Ultimate, but not in Window 7 Professional that small and medium businesses may find valuable, but there is a problem with these features. Even if the editions of Windows 7 that you use are having the facility of Bitlocker, Direct Access, or Branch Cache, you can't take advantage of these features without Windows Server 2008 R2 on the server backend.
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