Steve rattles out another quality write up, this time on Direct Access and ConfigMgr (please stop calling it SCCM folks!)

Do you have internet based clients that you want to manage?  Does the idea of switching to SCCM native mode to manage those client make you nervous?  Do you have Windows 2008 R2 servers in your environment and are the internet systems you want to manage running Windows 7 (Enterprise or Ultimate) or Windows Server 2008 R2?  If you said yes to all of these questions then you might just be interested in taking a look at Direct Access (DA).

Direct Access is NOT a feature of SCCM but is a feature of Windows 2008 R2.  There are several advantages to choosing Direct Access over native mode configuration in SCCM 
1.  There is no requirement to implement SCCM native mode 
2.  The feature is part of Windows 2008 R2 so likely would be supported by other than the SCCM team – yet SCCM can take full advantage of the service. 
3.  The SCCM team does not need to worry with certificate infrastructure support.  Yes, there are certificates required by Direct Access but this is generally not something the SCCM team needs to worry about. 
4.  The SCCM client managed through Direct Access is just like a client installed on the internal LAN.

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Read the complete post at http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/r0b/archive/2010/08/02/steve-rachui-direct-access-sccm-managing-internet-clients.aspx