If you look at new desktops and laptops available from Best Buy Inc. or Dell Inc. you can see that there are some de facto choices made for you depending on the class of the system. Consumer systems come with Windows Home Premium (mostly the 64-bit version), and business systems come with Windows 7 Professional. Large businesses fall into a whole different category with both Microsoft and vendors like Dell, and those systems would come with Windows 7 Enterprise by default.
So, if you are a small or medium business, Windows 7 Professional is ostensibly the version of Windows 7 for you.
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BitLocker (and BitLocker-to-Go)
Roaming employees often carry gigabytes of sensitive or confidential information on their laptops which can be easily lost or stolen. BitLocker provides secure protection to ensure that unauthorized users are not able to access that data. BitLocker-to-Go provides similar data encryption for USB thumb drives and other portable data storage that are also easily misplaced.
DirectAccess
Employees that work from home, or connect with the company network while traveling, are used to the concept of the VPN (Virtual Private Network). The VPN serves its purpose for creating a secure connection between the remote computer and the internal company network across the Internet, but it is far from a perfect solution.
Users have to go through extra steps to connect to the VPN, which is prone to disconnecting. The remote systems and roaming laptops only exist to the internal network when they’re connected. That means they only get software and policy updates when they connect, which makes it difficult for IT administrators to protect and maintain them.
BranchCache
Even some small and medium businesses have multiple locations. Local or regional banking, insurance, or real estate businesses, for example, often have a central location accompanied by a number of branch offices.
Depending on network connection between the remote sites and the central data centre, and the volume and type of data being carried over it, accessing data and applications can be quite slow for the branch locations. It is frustrating to employees and hinders productivity.
Windows Server 2008 R2
There are more features that can be found in Windows 7 Ultimate, but not in Window 7 Professional, that small and medium businesses may find valuable, but there is a caveat to these features. Even if the version of Windows 7 that you use is capable of Bitlocker, DirectAccess, or BranchCache, you can’t take advantage of these features without Windows Server 2008 R2 on the server back end.
— PC World (U.S.)
