Setting up a new Windows SBS 2011 machine and notice the startup "Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard Console" which is full of wizards making things simple. Under "Users and Groups" it shows a list of Security Groups.
When I add a Security Group through Active Directory Users and Computers, it will not appear on the "Standard Console" page with Wizards that loads on login.
When I make the Security Group with the "Standard Console", it appears in both the "Standard Console", and under Active Directory Users and Computers.
When loading a Security Group to make changes to it through the "Standard Console", it also hangs for several seconds before loading. Under Active Directory Users and Computers, it's near instant.
My question is, is there any difference between the two? Is there a specific method I should be using? I don't understand why they would appear the way they do depending on what method they are entered in.
Best Answer
The SBS Console is meant to ease administration. It introduces another abstraction level ("roles") to user management. To keep track of roles and the associated data, SBS has schema extensions allowing to track additional information in user and group objects' attributes.
The technical reason a group created in AD Users & Computers is not showing up in the Console is simply that the "create group" action from the ADUC MMC snapin does not populate the necessary attributes the console view is filtered by (namely the msSBSCreationState attribute which needs to be set to "Created").
As long as you are administering an SBS and want it to behave like an SBS in the future, you should use "the SBS way" of doing things. If you do not care about the wizards, you are free to use the common means of AD and Windows administration, but at some point in time you are going to break one or the other wizard's functionality - so do this only if you did not get the SBS because of all the "ease of management" marketing babble.