Logging Off, Restarting, and Shutting Down
The lack of a Start button has made the simple tasks of logging off,
restarting, or shutting down Server 2012 rather unintuitive. You perform
all of these actions differently than you did in Server 2008 R2.
To log off and log in as another user, click the current
user’s name in the upper-right corner of the Start screen. From there,
click “Sign out.” You can also choose to lock the screen. When the screen
is locked, the option to “Switch user” is displayed—which is another way
to log off and on again with a different account.
To shut down or restart, bring up the Charms menu and click Settings. At the bottom of the Start
submenu that appears, there are six icons, one of which is Power. Clicking this icon gives you the choice to either
shut down or restart the server.
Performing Searches
One of the most powerful features within the Server 2012 GUI is search. To
search for an app, from the Start screen, just start typing. The search results screen
will display a list of relevant matches. Figure 1 shows the search results displayed
when you type task.
You can pull up the Search screen by clicking Search from the Charms menu. From there you can search for apps or files and
even do web searches.
Within the desktop, you can perform searches as in Server 2008 R2 by
opening the Windows Explorer icon pinned to the taskbar and typing in
the Search field.
