We found a great post from the Small Business Server team on how to join a Windows 7 machine to a SBS 2008 domain. From that post:
This article details the known issues with using Windows 7 BETA as a member of an SBS 2008 domain. The steps in this article are for test purposes only. If you are using Windows 7 BETA you may encounter the following issues:
- Cannot join Windows 7 client to the domain using http:\\connect.
- IE 8.0 cannot open links on the SBS gadget.
- Cannot connect to Windows 7 client using RWW.
The only problem is that we migrated our SBS 2008 from a SBS 2003 install and in the process we’ve found that several GPOs are missing:
- Windows SBS Client - Windows Vista Policy
- Windows SBS Client - Windows XP Policy
- Windows SBS Client Policy
- Windows SBS User Policy
One of those GPOs “Windows SBS Client Policy” is mentioned in step 3 of the post mentioned above. Well I searched high and low for a way around steps 3-7 – trying to create the missing GPO, tried searching through all of the GP.XML files in \Windows\sysvol\domain\Policies\ to no avail. I spent about three hours trying to figure out how to complete these steps. Finally I just decided to “connect” the Windows 7 computer and viola it worked. *slaps forehead* I could have saved myself a few hours had I just tried it earlier!
In the end success and I’m happy the SBS team is blogging and posting solutions for Windows 7!