After a short holiday break, here’s a quick post to ease back into the blogging :-)

A couple of months back, I chatted about the beta release of the Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide for DirectAccess and gave a brief explanation of the user experience that I have, at Microsoft, using DA.

Fast forward to October, and in the UK, at Wembley Stadium, we held the Microsoft Partner Network Event 2009, and I was on the Windows Server 2008 R2 pod, showing some of the technology, and answering any questions and queries (hello if you were there!).  Now, if I had a pound ($1.64 by today’s exchange rate) for every question I received about DA, I’d have been significantly better off by the end of the day!  The first thing you’ll think is, surely all of those questions were about ‘how does it work?’ – to that I answer, no, most of them were concerned with requirements, and integration, and, ‘are there any resources available?’.

Fast forward again to present day, and the finalised resources are starting to flow:

This IPD guide provides actionable guidance for designing a DirectAccess infrastructure. The guide’s easy-to-follow, four-step process gives a straightforward explanation of the infrastructure required for clients to be connected from the Internet to resources on the corporate network, whether or not the organization has begun deploying IPv6.

The guide covers four key steps in the design process for DirectAccess:

  • Aligning the project scope with the business requirements.
  • Determining whether IPv6, Teredo, 6to4, and IP-HTTPS connectivity will be supported for Internet-based clients.
  • Assessing the need for IPv6/IPv4 network address translation service and ISATAP for internal communication.
  • Determining the number and placement of servers, the certificate services requirements, and location of CRL distribution points.

If you’re a Microsoft Partner, and you want to get on board with (potentially) the most requested ‘better together (7/R2)’ feature in the new wave of technology, then I would strongly recommend downloading the IPD Guide – it’s free, and all it will cost you is a bit of your time.

Get it here.