I've never worked as a System Administrator and maybe I'll never work on this field, but I'm just come back from Microsoft where today we had a meeting (reserved to MS Partners) focused on Windows Server 2003 R2.
The new version of Windows 2003 Server was explored in depth during this day and I've to admit that many features was not well known to me (for example Shadow Copies management, Remote Differential Compression, Active Directory Federation Services).
This new "R2" version is not a platform revolution (it's not a kernel modification but only a mix of features improvements) but it's significantly better that before.
Really an interesting day...
P.S. a question for Microsoft: on Windows Server 2003 R2 there's an interesting component useful for every administratorm called Print Management, an MMC snap-in that allows you to install, view, and manage every printer and Windows 2000/XP/2003 print server in your organization.
Actually, to install the Print Management MMC you need to go to Add/Remove Windows Components on Control Panel and you need the R2 CD, because the component is not installed by default (the component is located under the Management and Monitoring Tools category). Can we have it turned on by default on the final R2 version?