We’re thinking about switching our company from Microsoft Hosted Exchange to Google Apps. This should be an interesting transition!
Background: A few years ago, the company signed up with Bell Hosted Exchange. It was a much more elegant messaging/ collaboration solution. Outlook is a whole different (and more powerful) animal when you hook it up to an Exchange server. However, as our company has grown and cloud-computing has also grown, we’ve become more and more frustrated with our hosted Exchange setup. Here are some of our top frustrations we’re hoping to alleviate migrating to Google Apps:
By default Microsoft Windows system automatically creates hidden “administrative shares” for its logical drives C:, D: … with share names C$, D$ … It also creates the admin$ hidden share for to the \winnt or windows folder. These shares are designed for remote access support by domain administrators. You can manually delete these shares by using our solution 1. If you delete these admin shares, they will be recreated when you reboot. To disable permanently so they will not be recreated on the next reboot, use the following procedure solution 2.
Here is a list of the default administrative shares, accessible only to administrator:
C$: To access to a partition or root directory. Other partitions are also accessible via their letter, followed by the character “$”.
ADMIN$: To access to% systemroot%, to manage a machine on the network.
IPC$: Allowing the communication network between processes.
PRINT $: Remote access to printers.
To view and manage the administrative shares of the computer, simply go to Control Panel / Administrative Tools / Computer Management / Shared Folders / Shares. Another alternative is to right click on the My Computer icon on desktop and select Manage.