Windows Server 2003: Network Access Protection

For almost every organisation, ensuring that netework clients are 'healthy' is a major problem. How do you ensure that clients have up to date virus signatures, up to date patches, etc? And how do you manage clients that are not in compliance? In very small networks, you can do this by wandering around, and manually checking each system - but this does not scale. Microsoft's Network Access Protection (NAP) is a set of technologies tha will provide a ground up solution. Microsoft has a site Windows Server 2003: Network Access Protection that describes this. At present, the plan seems to be that this technology is to ship with R2, the next minor release of Windows Server 2003 (expected in 2005). NAP is a fundamental re-think in how network protection is performed. I look forward to playing with this!