Unless you're seriously into networking (and okay, maybe you are), all the features in the new Secure Remote Connection - not to mention the pieces required to make it work - can be fairly tough to figure out. But the benefits make sense: "With this feature," writes Steven Vaughan-Nichols, "a user on any Windows 7 system can gain access to the corporate intranet's resources. In short, with the right back-end setup you can run office-only programs and get to server-based files from any Windows 7 PC." He explains it all in Accessing Office Resources from Anywhere using Secure Remote Connection.
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When this initially released a while back, I read through the DirectConnect documentation on TechNet thoroughly as we're in the process of transitioning to a new firewall that allows SSL and web client SSL VPN connections in addition to our existing IPsec dynamic clients. In addition, it uses IPv6 and I'm probably the only person in the company that knows anything about IPv6 as I've set up an entire lab infrastructure with an IPv6 tunnel broker and a combination of a router advertisement daemon on the OpenBSD firewall and DHCPv6 on a Win2k8 server. So I was curious to find out how DirectConnect leverages IPv6...
The major drawback I see to DirectConnect, however, is that it's only usable with two products; Windows Server 2008 R2 on the backend and Windows 7 as a client. There is no option for Windows XP, Vista, OS X, Linux, or mobile phone clients. In addition, you have to use a Win2k8 server behind your firewall as the termination point. In a heterogeneous environment like ours where we're developing for both Mac and Windows, it doesn't really make sense to roll out another remote access service that will only cater to a small handful of Windows 7 users (so far only 3 out of 103 employees and that includes two of us sysadmins in IT and one software engineer).
Edited 2009-11-11 20:39 UTC